Music at All Saints Sunday service - October 29, 2006
From All Saints Music Director Donald Teeters
At the Offertory on Gift Sunday (Pentecost 21) the choir anthem will pick up on the theme of Mark's Gospel for the day (10:46-52), which relates the story of the healing of the blind beggar Bartimaeus. However, the musical setting we will sing will use Luke's account (18:41-43) of essentially the same incident by the late 16th/early 17th century composer Melchior Vulpius. Perhaps you will want to compare the two texts before coming to church on Sunday. At the communion a richly scored setting of the familiar Ave Maria text by the 19th century Russian composer Alexander Gretchaninov will be sung.
Three well-loved hymns will grace our 10:30 liturgy this week. The opening hymn has a general "Sunday" theme, and is found at #48 in the Hymnal. "O day of radiant gladness," with a text by the Englishman Christopher Wordsworth, dates from an 1862 London publication. The tune is based on an early 17th secular German folk song entitled "Es flog ein kleins Waldvögelein," which translates as "There flew a little woodbird."
At the offertory we will all join heartily I'm sure in what may well may be the best known tune in our hymnal, Old 100th, containing as one of its verses, what is universally known as the "Doxology." This text sung to this tune has accompanied the offerings of our gifts to God in many churches every Sunday for centuries. The words of the entire hymn will be printed in the service leaflet so that all can sing out as we come forward to present our Gift Commitment Cards for the coming year.
The service concludes with one of Charles Wesley's best known hymn texts, "O for a thousand tongues to sing," dating from 1780, sung to a tune by the German composer Carl Gotthilf Gläser. This tune was first brought to America by the Boston hymnodist and music educator Lowell Mason, who edited it into the familiar version by which it is best known today. We can perhaps be grateful to the editors of The Hymnal 1982 (and many of their predecessors in our denomination and others as well) that the original eighteen(!) verses have been reduced here to six, making it possible for all of us to get home to lunch while the food is still hot!