Music at All Saints Parish Sunday, April 1, 2007
Palm Sunday
From All Saints Music Director Donald Teeters
As is true every year, the solemnity and beauty of this year's Palm Sunday service will be underscored with extraordinarily fine music. If you come a few minutes early, you will hear Keith Glavash play the massive Fantasy in G Minor, as the opening voluntary.
Choral works to be performed include a moving Passiontide motet by the great German composer Heinrich Schütz who was born in 1585, exactly one hundred years before Bach. This motet offers "Praise to you, O Christ, you who suffered hardship upon the cross, a bitter death for us, and now reigns in heaven with the Father."
At the Offertory the choir will sing a rather newer work, a setting of Psalm 139, by Boston composer and friend of many of us, James Woodman. This beautiful work scored for chorus a cappella and solo soprano, composed in 2005, makes use of a translation of this psalm by a wonderful 16th female English poet who became a muse for a number of others, both contemporary and successor. Here is a little more information about this remarkably gifted and advanced artist:
"Mary Sidney was born at Ticknall Place, Bewdley, Worcestershire in England on October 27, 1561, daughter of Sir Henry Sidney, thrice Lord Deputy of Ireland and sister of the poets Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Robert Sidney. She was educated at home in French, Italian, Latin and Greek, and music. After her marriage, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, gathered around her a group of notable poets, musicians, and artists. Among those who praised her patronage of the arts was Edmund Spenser, whose Ruines of Time was dedicated to her. After her brother Philip's death she completed the verse translation of the psalms he had begun, contributing 107 of the 150 psalms. The manuscript was widely circulated and admired, and it influenced many of the great poets of the 17th century, most notably George Herbert and John Donne."
The choir and I think that Mr. Woodman's setting is every bit the equal of this moving psalm and Mary Herbert's inspired version.
As usual, the service will begin with a Solemn Palm Procession to which all are invited to join in. This year the Gospel Passion account is from Luke and again will be read in dialogue by various readers and the congregation.
Hymns will include the famous Passion Chorale, "O sacred Head, sore wounded," #168, and, as the exit hymn, the very moving Spiritual, "Were you there?" #172 .