Make your prayer and music one

Make your prayer and music one!
Lift your songs of faith as signs
That this world has not undone
Heaven’s wonderful designs.
Alleluia.
(Thomas H. Troeger, copyright Oxford Univ. Press)

Here are two recordings from today; both are from our 9:00 “middle” service, which today included the Youth Choir.

Improvisation for the Sunday after the Ascension.
This is based on “Hail the day that sees him rise” (Llanfair) and “Make your prayer and music one” (tune: “Faithful Songs” by Carol Doran), two of the songs from the service.

I had a hard time getting to “know” the Doran tune; it took several days before I had any ideas as to how to work with it, other than a straight play-through as the middle part of an A-B-A form. It was only this morning in my early practice that I found a way forward by using fragments of the tune, especially the head motive. This is a good approach for improvising on a complex tune, rather than quoting the entire thing, and it led me to likewise base the A section on the head motive of Llanfair rather than the full tune. I do give it a proper play-through in the return section.

Hymn: Make your prayer and music one
This is a text on Acts 16:25, the central portion of this morning’s First Lesson at the Eucharist – Paul and Silas at Philippi, where they find themselves beaten, bleeding, and locked up in the innermost cell of the prison. And at midnight, they pray and sing hymns.

I love this text, and this tune. With due respect to the copyright on it, here is the final stanza:

Sing as Paul and Silas sang:
Let no circling dark or wall
Muffle what their praises rang:
Jesus Christ is Lord of all.
Alleluia.

We sang it at both the 9:00 and 11:00 services. The version at 11:00 was stronger, but upon consideration, I posted the 9:00 version. It is more tentative at first, but grows in strength as the people learn it.

One of the teen boys made fun of this text when we began work on it, and I was not sure he was on board with it until the singing of it in the liturgy – his tenor voice can be heard, stronger and stronger as the hymn goes by. This pleases me very much.

There is one other recording of this hymn on YouTube, taken from a professional CD released by the choir of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, TX, one of the finest music programs in the country.

It is of course far more polished than our parish youth choir and a congregation learning the tune as they go, and there is some very good organ playing on it (and they have quite an instrument, a Casavant of 191 ranks, the largest pipe organ in Texas and the largest that Casavant has built anywhere).

But I like our version better. It is more organic, more real.

I have mentioned the composer of this tune, Carol Doran, in another Music Box essay. I met her quite a few years ago - in fact, she played this very hymn on our little Pilcher at Trinity when she was here giving a workshop at the university. And I spoke with her again at the Hymn Society conference in Richmond, three years ago:

Carol Doran collaborated as a musician with the author Thomas Troeger on several volumes of hymns in the 1980's and 90's; she was the organist for the first night's hymn festival. I learned in conversing with her over lunch that her path moved on from seminary teaching to now, in her old age, teaching music in a ghetto middle school. It is a task of little account to the powerful, this teaching of children whom they have already written off as losers, part of Mitt Romney's 47 percent. It is a thing no larger than a mustard seed.