The Office Hymn (or Anthem) is an important part of Daily Prayer. Even though I should know better, I often skip it, if I am pressed for time.
There are a lot of hymnals in my office.
Over the past few months, I have put these two facts together. When I am home, I no longer use the Hymnal 1982, the official hymnal of our denomination. Instead, I am dipping my toe into some of the more interesting volumes from my shelves. Currently, I am singing from a German-language Lutheran hymnal published in the nineteenth century. It is a little pocket-sized book of the sort that hymnals used to be, with small print covering every inch of the page. It was a joy to work my way through Advent and Christmas with the great chorales and church songs of the season: Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, Wachet auf, Es ist ein Ros', Vom Himmel hoch.
I will stay with this a bit longer, but there are two more that are standing in line: a little book called “Hymns of Eternal Truth,” lovingly produced in the 1970's by an English Methodist congregation. It is a collection of 120 hymns by Charles and John Wesley, with all of the stanzas. The preface says: “Throughout the land hearts cry out for the realities herein set forth. . . wherever souls long for language of the Spirit these hymns will be sung by all so blessed to know them.” I have a notion to sing from this book during Lent and perhaps on into Easter.
And then there is a little songbook that I picked up some years ago: “Golden Years of Gospel Singing.” It is a good selection of the old-time Southern Gospel songs that I encountered this summer in Tennessee, mixed with old photographs and engravings, short biographies of key figures in the movement, some pages of photos of the old-time Gospel Quartets from the early twentieth century, and even a few pages of back-country recipes from the all-day singings and camp meetings.
There are more hymns, more good and precious hymns, than anyone can sing in a lifetime. This is a good thing.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Jan. 25: The Conversion of St. Paul
The Church would not be what it is without St. Paul's tireless evangelism and his epistles. We could not live on the Gospels alone.
There is one lesson that I take from St. Paul this day, from the Second Lesson at Matins (Philippians 3): we do not have to get it right. We can be “an Hebrew of the Hebrews” and “touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless,” and that is not enough.
I work hard at making music, and at doing what I perceive to be my duties as a Christian. I get it wrong more often than I get it right. But even when (perhaps especially when) I sometimes get it right, I need St. Paul's reminder that all this is as dung (3:8) “for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.”
This is no excuse to slack off; we must, with St. Paul, “press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (3:14). But our standing with God does not depend on how that turns out. It rests entirely on grace.
There is one lesson that I take from St. Paul this day, from the Second Lesson at Matins (Philippians 3): we do not have to get it right. We can be “an Hebrew of the Hebrews” and “touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless,” and that is not enough.
I work hard at making music, and at doing what I perceive to be my duties as a Christian. I get it wrong more often than I get it right. But even when (perhaps especially when) I sometimes get it right, I need St. Paul's reminder that all this is as dung (3:8) “for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.”
This is no excuse to slack off; we must, with St. Paul, “press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (3:14). But our standing with God does not depend on how that turns out. It rests entirely on grace.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Laudate Dominum
Laudate Dominum, omnis gentes:
Laudate eum omnes populi:
Quoniam confirmata est super nos misericordia ejus:
Et veritas Domini manet in aeternum.
Tuesday is a busy day, and most Tuesdays I do not make it to the bench for practice. Today was an exception; staff meeting was short, allowing me to work out the fingering of the Mozart “Laudate Dominum” (from K. 339, the Vesperae solenne de confessore), for soprano solo and choir.
Link
Interacting with Mozart is one of the chief joys of being a classical musician. As soon as one plays so much as a measure of this little choral piece, one is lifted up into heaven. It is almost too beautiful for mortal ears. How could anyone write something like this?
When one works out fingerings and makes other preparations for rehearsal on a piece, it is what some musicians call “putting it under the microscope.” The musician is privileged to look very closely at the piece. With something as good as this, the closer one looks, the more beautiful it is. Subtle details come to the fore, details that would never be consciously heard in performance. But there they are, each of them contributing to the beauty of the whole.
Any good composition of music creates its own little universe, its “subcreation” in Tolkien's terms. A masterwork is fine-grained, as it were – it is, ideally, a perfect little world at every scale, from largest to smallest. It is in this manner, among others, that our creative work is in the image of the One who made a universe such as the one we inhabit, beautiful beyond imagining at every scale from galactic clusters to quarks and neutrinos. For those with eyes to see, the closer one looks, the more beautiful it is.
Mozart is better at this work of subcreation than most of us, one of the best that has ever lived. One sees this in the “microscopic” details. There is a ten-bar introduction. Much of this material recurs as the piece progresses – but never quite in the same form. A note might differ here, or there; now the soprano is singing it, now the choir. It is analogous, perhaps, to nature's dislike for exact repetition; a snowflake is a snowflake, but never exactly the same.
And there is what I call a “Mozart moment” at the end of measure 62, a moment that no one else could have conceived. He has completed the re-statement of the main musical material, the “A” section. The choir has sung the “Amen.” He could stop here, finishing with a cadence to the tonic chord, the choir holding the chord for a couple of measures of figuration in the accompaniment. The piece would be perfectly balanced, and a masterpiece we would still be singing and playing. But he does more: in the sixth and final beat of measure 62, the bass line (in the choral bass part and the accompaniment) goes C# - D instead of the expected C – F. It is a “deceptive cadence,” to use the term from music theory.
Mind you, this is not something abstruse; it is a simple device known to ten-year-old choristers and piano students, and frequently encountered in music of Mozart's time, including his own. But what a cadence! The soloist, who has been silent for twenty bars, comes in at precisely this moment on a sustained high F, the tonic note, as the choir drops out for a measure's rest. It is as if she is floating through the air like an angel. The harmonies circle around one last time through a ten-bar coda as she sings a gentle little cadenza, as if she does not wish to leave this place of beauty, the choir sings a simple V-I cadence as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and it is done.
No one but Mozart could have written these ten measures. It is one of his gifts to use the simplest of materials in obvious ways (well, obvious after he has done it) that are graceful, fitting, and perfect.
I love Bach. I spent much of December living with the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch, and it is every bit the equal of this Laudate Dominum as a masterpiece of artistic creation. Is Mozart better than Bach? Or what about Beethoven – there are transitions from recapitulation to coda in his works that are as magical as this one.
They are all miracles, all of these composers. We have not just one manner of subcreation, but many – as many, perhaps, as there are people, if everyone were granted opportunity to develop their creative potential. And all of them, and their subcreations, part of the larger Creation, this world full of beauty.
Soli Deo gloria.
Laudate eum omnes populi:
Quoniam confirmata est super nos misericordia ejus:
Et veritas Domini manet in aeternum.
Tuesday is a busy day, and most Tuesdays I do not make it to the bench for practice. Today was an exception; staff meeting was short, allowing me to work out the fingering of the Mozart “Laudate Dominum” (from K. 339, the Vesperae solenne de confessore), for soprano solo and choir.
Link
Interacting with Mozart is one of the chief joys of being a classical musician. As soon as one plays so much as a measure of this little choral piece, one is lifted up into heaven. It is almost too beautiful for mortal ears. How could anyone write something like this?
When one works out fingerings and makes other preparations for rehearsal on a piece, it is what some musicians call “putting it under the microscope.” The musician is privileged to look very closely at the piece. With something as good as this, the closer one looks, the more beautiful it is. Subtle details come to the fore, details that would never be consciously heard in performance. But there they are, each of them contributing to the beauty of the whole.
Any good composition of music creates its own little universe, its “subcreation” in Tolkien's terms. A masterwork is fine-grained, as it were – it is, ideally, a perfect little world at every scale, from largest to smallest. It is in this manner, among others, that our creative work is in the image of the One who made a universe such as the one we inhabit, beautiful beyond imagining at every scale from galactic clusters to quarks and neutrinos. For those with eyes to see, the closer one looks, the more beautiful it is.
Mozart is better at this work of subcreation than most of us, one of the best that has ever lived. One sees this in the “microscopic” details. There is a ten-bar introduction. Much of this material recurs as the piece progresses – but never quite in the same form. A note might differ here, or there; now the soprano is singing it, now the choir. It is analogous, perhaps, to nature's dislike for exact repetition; a snowflake is a snowflake, but never exactly the same.
And there is what I call a “Mozart moment” at the end of measure 62, a moment that no one else could have conceived. He has completed the re-statement of the main musical material, the “A” section. The choir has sung the “Amen.” He could stop here, finishing with a cadence to the tonic chord, the choir holding the chord for a couple of measures of figuration in the accompaniment. The piece would be perfectly balanced, and a masterpiece we would still be singing and playing. But he does more: in the sixth and final beat of measure 62, the bass line (in the choral bass part and the accompaniment) goes C# - D instead of the expected C – F. It is a “deceptive cadence,” to use the term from music theory.
Mind you, this is not something abstruse; it is a simple device known to ten-year-old choristers and piano students, and frequently encountered in music of Mozart's time, including his own. But what a cadence! The soloist, who has been silent for twenty bars, comes in at precisely this moment on a sustained high F, the tonic note, as the choir drops out for a measure's rest. It is as if she is floating through the air like an angel. The harmonies circle around one last time through a ten-bar coda as she sings a gentle little cadenza, as if she does not wish to leave this place of beauty, the choir sings a simple V-I cadence as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and it is done.
No one but Mozart could have written these ten measures. It is one of his gifts to use the simplest of materials in obvious ways (well, obvious after he has done it) that are graceful, fitting, and perfect.
I love Bach. I spent much of December living with the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch, and it is every bit the equal of this Laudate Dominum as a masterpiece of artistic creation. Is Mozart better than Bach? Or what about Beethoven – there are transitions from recapitulation to coda in his works that are as magical as this one.
They are all miracles, all of these composers. We have not just one manner of subcreation, but many – as many, perhaps, as there are people, if everyone were granted opportunity to develop their creative potential. And all of them, and their subcreations, part of the larger Creation, this world full of beauty.
Soli Deo gloria.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
The KJV: its legacy
“If everything else in the English language should perish, the English [KJV] Bible would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.” (Thomas B. Macaulay)
With thanks to Judith –
BBC: The Story of the King James Bible
link (three programmes lasting 45 minutes each. The third was the one I found the most interesting.)
The link is to the first of three programmes on BBC Radio 4, exploring the genesis and legacy of the KJV – if you are interested, listen soon, because it is only online for a few more days.
In the third part, the narrator and his guests explore the legacy of the King James Version and its place at the center of the English language down almost to the present day – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's “I have a dream” speech is excerpted as an example, with many of its most powerful phrases straight from the KJV.
“Almost,” that is. Nowadays, the KJV is but one among many, “serving a consumerist society.” The programme discusses the revisions from the RSV onward. By now, few people attend church or encounter the Bible in any form, so none of the revisions has had much influence on the wider culture. What remains is the poetry of the KJV: “It lives on in the ear like a music that can never be forgotten.” Phrases of the KJV “tumble out in the most unexpected places” in popular culture to this day.
One of the guests spoke of his work with teenagers encountering the KJV as literature. He said that their response is most often that the language “is difficult, but it is beautiful.” A Jamaican poet and novelist, guest on the programme, finds it to be full of “fabulous, fresh imagery and rhythms” to inspire one's own work.
“The very best of literature is written to be spoken.” No book embodies this more than the KJV.
With thanks to Judith –
BBC: The Story of the King James Bible
link (three programmes lasting 45 minutes each. The third was the one I found the most interesting.)
The link is to the first of three programmes on BBC Radio 4, exploring the genesis and legacy of the KJV – if you are interested, listen soon, because it is only online for a few more days.
In the third part, the narrator and his guests explore the legacy of the King James Version and its place at the center of the English language down almost to the present day – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's “I have a dream” speech is excerpted as an example, with many of its most powerful phrases straight from the KJV.
“Almost,” that is. Nowadays, the KJV is but one among many, “serving a consumerist society.” The programme discusses the revisions from the RSV onward. By now, few people attend church or encounter the Bible in any form, so none of the revisions has had much influence on the wider culture. What remains is the poetry of the KJV: “It lives on in the ear like a music that can never be forgotten.” Phrases of the KJV “tumble out in the most unexpected places” in popular culture to this day.
One of the guests spoke of his work with teenagers encountering the KJV as literature. He said that their response is most often that the language “is difficult, but it is beautiful.” A Jamaican poet and novelist, guest on the programme, finds it to be full of “fabulous, fresh imagery and rhythms” to inspire one's own work.
“The very best of literature is written to be spoken.” No book embodies this more than the KJV.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Isaiah 'twas foretold it
Isaiah 'twas foretold it,
the Rose I have in mind,
with Mary we behold it,
the Virgin Mother kind.
To show God's love aright,
she bore to us a Savior,
when half-spent was the night.
By long tradition, Holy Mother Church has read from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah during Advent and Christmas. St. Thomas Cranmer refers to this in the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer (1549), noting that in the pre-reformation liturgy “the book of Isaiah was begun in Advent,” but “never read through.” Neither do we still read it through, though we do a better job of it with the three-year Eucharistic Lectionary and the Daily Office Lectionary than we used to. In this last, we have encountered passages from the first part of Isaiah during Advent and the days following Christmas Day, and will go straight through from Chapter 40 to the end over a six-week period after the Epiphany.
It is well that we read from Isaiah when we want to learn about the Incarnation. Of all the prophets, he (along with the Psalmist) foresaw most clearly the coming of the Messiah, as “God-with-us” and as the Suffering Servant.
The Book of Isaiah is long and complex. Scholars have suspected for a long time that not all of it was written by Isaiah, son of Amoz, writing from slightly before “the year that King Uzziah died” (6:1) on through the reign of Hezekiah. There is a tradition, perhaps alluded to in Hebrews 11:37, that he was sawn asunder by order of Manasseh.
For once, I agree with the scholars: there is a definite stylistic shift at Chapter 40, to say nothing of the shift in focus from Assyria to Babylon. But Jewish and Christian tradition before the nineteenth century assert that the whole book is the work of Isaiah son of Amoz, and it could well be so.
“First Isaiah,” so to speak, is brought to a fitting conclusion by Chapter 35: “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them: and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. . . .” There follows an account of the siege of Jerusalem by the army of Sennacherib king of Assyria, Isaiah's role in this, and subsequent events concerning Hezekiah (Chapters 36-39). The link to “Second Isaiah” comes with the visit of emissaries from Babylon in Chapter 39, and Isaiah's prophecy that all that the King had shown them would be carried away to Babylon (39:5-8). I believe that all of this through the end of Chapter 39 was from the hand of the son of Amoz, and there the book ended for several generations.
It seems logical to me that a later writer during the Exile would note Isaiah's prophecy and consider it appropriate to append what we now have as Chapters 40 through 66 as a fleshing-out of what Isaiah foretold. Many (though not all) scholars further divide the book, calling 56-66 “Third Isaiah” and placing it after the Exile.
More than any of the other Prophets, Isaiah offers passages of astounding beauty that can be taken out of their context – as we do in liturgy and song. Many of these passages have been fruitful ground for composers, and some are so thoroughly wedded to their musical settings that we can hardly read them without inwardly singing them -- “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people” (40:1), “And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed” (40:5), “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd” (40:11) -- to name but three from a single chapter.
One more hymn text, this one from the modern writer Jaroslav J. Vajda, a stanza from a magnificent Christmas hymn, “Where shepherds lately knelt”:
How should I not have known
Isaiah would be there,
his prophecies fulfilled?
With pounding heart, I stare:
a Child, a Son,
the Prince of Peace --
for me.
(copyright 1986 by Jaroslav J. Vajda)
In spirit, we stand at the manger alongside shepherds and magi, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, and all that will ever call upon the name of the LORD – indeed, all of creation, for the oxen and asses were there at his side from the beginning and the angels sang in the sky. “Then shall all the trees of the wood shout for joy before the LORD when he comes. . . .”
But more than most, Isaiah has given us words to sing to and about this Child.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)
the Rose I have in mind,
with Mary we behold it,
the Virgin Mother kind.
To show God's love aright,
she bore to us a Savior,
when half-spent was the night.
By long tradition, Holy Mother Church has read from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah during Advent and Christmas. St. Thomas Cranmer refers to this in the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer (1549), noting that in the pre-reformation liturgy “the book of Isaiah was begun in Advent,” but “never read through.” Neither do we still read it through, though we do a better job of it with the three-year Eucharistic Lectionary and the Daily Office Lectionary than we used to. In this last, we have encountered passages from the first part of Isaiah during Advent and the days following Christmas Day, and will go straight through from Chapter 40 to the end over a six-week period after the Epiphany.
It is well that we read from Isaiah when we want to learn about the Incarnation. Of all the prophets, he (along with the Psalmist) foresaw most clearly the coming of the Messiah, as “God-with-us” and as the Suffering Servant.
The Book of Isaiah is long and complex. Scholars have suspected for a long time that not all of it was written by Isaiah, son of Amoz, writing from slightly before “the year that King Uzziah died” (6:1) on through the reign of Hezekiah. There is a tradition, perhaps alluded to in Hebrews 11:37, that he was sawn asunder by order of Manasseh.
For once, I agree with the scholars: there is a definite stylistic shift at Chapter 40, to say nothing of the shift in focus from Assyria to Babylon. But Jewish and Christian tradition before the nineteenth century assert that the whole book is the work of Isaiah son of Amoz, and it could well be so.
“First Isaiah,” so to speak, is brought to a fitting conclusion by Chapter 35: “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them: and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. . . .” There follows an account of the siege of Jerusalem by the army of Sennacherib king of Assyria, Isaiah's role in this, and subsequent events concerning Hezekiah (Chapters 36-39). The link to “Second Isaiah” comes with the visit of emissaries from Babylon in Chapter 39, and Isaiah's prophecy that all that the King had shown them would be carried away to Babylon (39:5-8). I believe that all of this through the end of Chapter 39 was from the hand of the son of Amoz, and there the book ended for several generations.
It seems logical to me that a later writer during the Exile would note Isaiah's prophecy and consider it appropriate to append what we now have as Chapters 40 through 66 as a fleshing-out of what Isaiah foretold. Many (though not all) scholars further divide the book, calling 56-66 “Third Isaiah” and placing it after the Exile.
More than any of the other Prophets, Isaiah offers passages of astounding beauty that can be taken out of their context – as we do in liturgy and song. Many of these passages have been fruitful ground for composers, and some are so thoroughly wedded to their musical settings that we can hardly read them without inwardly singing them -- “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people” (40:1), “And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed” (40:5), “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd” (40:11) -- to name but three from a single chapter.
One more hymn text, this one from the modern writer Jaroslav J. Vajda, a stanza from a magnificent Christmas hymn, “Where shepherds lately knelt”:
How should I not have known
Isaiah would be there,
his prophecies fulfilled?
With pounding heart, I stare:
a Child, a Son,
the Prince of Peace --
for me.
(copyright 1986 by Jaroslav J. Vajda)
In spirit, we stand at the manger alongside shepherds and magi, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, and all that will ever call upon the name of the LORD – indeed, all of creation, for the oxen and asses were there at his side from the beginning and the angels sang in the sky. “Then shall all the trees of the wood shout for joy before the LORD when he comes. . . .”
But more than most, Isaiah has given us words to sing to and about this Child.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)
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