Music at All Saints Parish Sunday, November 4, 2007
All Saints Festival Sunday
From All Saints Music Director Donald Teeters
All Saints Day is one of the Major Feast Days of the church year and here At All Saints it is an especially important day, being our Patronal Feast Day. It is always a joyous, festive, formal service, embellished with splendid ceremony, fine preaching, and great music. The Rite of Holy Baptism is a joyful addition, and this year we will welcome five youngsters to the community of the faithful. There is much great music to choose from for this special day, and all of our parish's musical resources, including the congregation, will be called upon to do their part. As a special treat, we will be joined by trumpets and trombones performing festive music before and after the service. The Choir of All Saints, the Schola, and the Cherubs will sing special selections and, of course, great Saints day hymns will be sung beginning, as always here, with Ralph Vaughan Williams' stirring setting of "For all the saints." Vaughan Williams gave his tune the name Sine nomine, which means "without a name," likely intended by him as a reference to the many saints known only to God. Everyone looks forward to the always energetic performance by the Cherubs of the first verses of "I sing a song of the saints of God." Additional All Saints Day hymns include No. 547, Awake, O sleeper, rise from death, No. 253, Give us the wings of faith, and No. 625, Ye holy angels bright.
Choral music, as always on this special Feast day in this parish, will derive from diverse sources and periods, tied together by the common thread of excellence and liturgical appropriateness.
We have been singing a plainchant Kyrie all Fall in place of the Gloria, and will continue with that hymn of supplication this Sunday. This time, however, in a more elaborate choral setting from Franz Schubert's early Mass in G major. This is sublime music made even more sublime by the inclusion of a section for soprano solo, sung by our own Jessica Cooper.
The Gradual motet is by William Byrd, an eloquent polyphonic work specific to the Eucharist on All Saints Day, Justorum animae in manu Dei sunt (The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God).
At the offertory, Sir Edward Elgar's beautiful setting of John Henry Cardinal Newman's words will be sung. There is a haunting quietness here, a message of reassurance that is picked up in Elgar's sensitive interpretation of Newman's meditation on the hereafter:
They are at rest;
We may not stir the heav'n of their repose
By rude invoking voice, or prayer addrest in waywardness to those
Who in the mountain grots of Eden lie,
And the four-fold river as it murmurs by.
And soothing sounds
Blend with the neighb'ring waters as they glide;
Posted along the haunted garden's bounds,
Angelic forms abide,
Echoing, as words of watch, o'er lawn and grove
The verses of that hymn which Seraphs chant above.
They are at rest.
Finally, at the Communion, a four voice motet by the 16th century composer Thomas Morley will expand upon the Agnus Dei text.