Music at All Saints Parish Sunday, December 9, 2007
Advent II
From All Saints Music Director Donald Teeters
The adult choir will be absent this Sunday. It is customary at All Saints for there to be one service in Advent, usually on the second Sunday, where the music is provided in its entirety by the Schola. This is always a great treat, and indeed the whole service promises to be an interesting variant on the norm.
Hymns for Advent II
#67 - Comfort, comfort ye my people
Words: The German original of this 17th century hymn was written as a meditation on a passage from Isaiah, the epistle appointed for the feast of St. John the Baptist.
Music: The melody was first published in a Genevan collection of psalms in 1551. The probable composer was Louis Bourgeois. The tune was immediately picked up by other Protestant hymn editors, and has been a fixture in services of many different denominations for centuries. Interestingly, we Episcopalians didn't discover it until it appeared in The Hymnal 1982. For me, the full glory of this hymn tune wasn't revealed until a heard a Dutch congregation sing it (more properly bellow it) with an enthusiasm rarely heard outside congregations of the Gospel tradition in this country. A great Advent hymn!
#75 - There is a voice in the wilderness crying.
Another hymn based on Isaiah (40:3-11), here we have a hymn in which both words and music date from recent times. Both are the creations of prominent Canadian churchmen: words by James Lewis Milligan (1925) and music by Hugh Bancroft (1938), tune name Ascension. This has quickly become one of the most popular of the new hymns in our 1982 Hymnal.
We end the service with Hymn #76 - On Jordan's bank the Baptist's cry has for many years been a staple of the Advent hymnody in the Episcopalian tradition. One reason for that, aside from the fact that it is truly a great hymn, is that in the Hymnal 1940, and in earlier editions, it was virtually the only hymn that dealt with the ministry of John the Baptist. By comparison with its companion hymns in this service, and by a quick search of our '82 hymnal for other hymns dealing with the same theme, you will note that the neglect has now been corrected.