Music at All Saints Parish Sunday, March 18, 2007
Fourth Sunday in Lent
From All Saints Music Director Donald Teeters
The offertory anthem today is interesting in that its parentage dates from both the 20th century and the 16th. Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) was a prolific composer in a number of different media - keyboard works and works for viols, as well as a great deal of church music in the form of anthems and canticle settings. His Song 46 has been connected with the beautiful text "Drop, drop slow tears" only since the beginning of the last century, which is surprising since the words are the work of an almost exact contemporary, Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650). The Hymnal 1982 breaks that connection, which is a shame, as tune and words seem such natural companions. In today's anthem English composer Ernest Bullock (1890-1979) keeps that connection intact by using both the text and Gibbons's tune as the basis for an original composition in a style that is called a hymn-anthem. Bullock was, among other things, organist at Westminster Abbey for the coronation of both George VI and his daughter, the current queen, Elizabeth II.
At the communion, a lovely short anthem by Ralph Vaughan Williams that was written for Elizabeth's coronation will be sung. It is a setting of one verse of the appointed psalm for today (Ps. 34, v.8), "O taste and see how gracious the Lord is, blest is the man that trusteth in him."
Today's hymns are:
Opening Hymn #686 - Come, thou fount of every blessing
Closing Hymn #471 - We sing the praise of him who died
At the offertory we will sing Hymn 328 - Draw nigh and take the Body of the Lord, a communion hymn that uses for its music the same Gibbons tune which the choir will just have sung.