Music at All Saints Parish Sunday, April 29, 2007
Fourth Sunday after Easter - Good Shepherd Sunday
From All Saints Music Director Donald Teeters
Choral music this Sunday - Good Shepherd Sunday - will explore that best loved of all pastoral psalms, the twenty-third, written by two interesting and excellent 20th century composers of different background and style, both almost exact contemporaries of each other.
Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989), an English composer of internationalist style, was a life-long friend of Benjamin Britten and a prominent teacher of some of the leading composers active today in the UK. Probably the best known of all his music for choirs is the anthem setting of the 23rd Psalm, written in 1975. Scored for soprano solo, chorus and organ, this hauntingly beautiful anthem, while making full use of a harmonic style that is clearly 20th century in origin, has an overall aura of tranquility and blessed calm that should be (and is!) irresistible to an attentive worshiper's ear.
At the Communion another gentle setting of the same psalm will be sung, this one the work of a German Jewish composer who fled Nazi Germany barely in the nick of time, in 1937. He happened to settle in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he rose to a position of considerable national prominence as a composer of both secular works and music for the Temple. Herbert Fromm (1905-1995) was director of music at Temple Israel in Boston for many years. Many of the large number of works he wrote for use there have become a central part of the repertoire for Jewish worship throughout this country, especially in Temples in the Reform tradition. Our choir will sing his setting of the 23rd Psalm, from1949, a chant-like work with a plaintive obbligato part for flute (or flute stop on the organ). Very beautiful music of universal appeal.
Also, at the communion, in honor of the Rector's 40th ordination anniversary, Jessica Cooper will sing Leonard Bernstein's "A Simple Song," from the score of his Mass. This song has been sung at each of the significant anniversaries in David's career as a priest.
The hymns are all familiar and satisfying to sing:
#377 - All people that on earth do dwell. This popular hymn, a paraphrase of Psalm 100, the appointed psalm for the day, is sung to what is likely the most popular hymn tune in our Hymnal. Most people call it the Doxology, but the actual tune name is Old Hundredth, and its origins date from the mid-16th century.
#633 - The Lord my God my shepherd is. You can probably guess from the title what psalm this hymn is based on. The words, by the 20th century American hymnist F. Bland Tucker, are a conflation of original phraseology and those of earlier writers, and the tune, Crimond, is Scottish both as to composer and name (there is some controversy as to who the actual composer was, but the two leading contenders are both certifiably Scots.)
#208 - Alleluia! The Strife is o'er. This familiar hymn, one of the great songs of Easter affirmation, is so familiar and so essential to Christian Easter worship that it needs to be sung several times during the Paschal season - as is the case at All Saints this year.