Hymn of the Day: “This Is the Spirit’s Entry Now” ELW 448
Text: Thomas E. Herbranson (1933-2009)
Tune: LAND OF REST, North American traditional
In 1970 Thomas E. Herbranson wrote a master's thesis at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, titled "Christ and the Sacraments in the Hymnal Authorized by the Lutheran Churches Cooperating in the Commission on the Liturgy and Hymnal." From ten years' experience as a parish pastor he had become convinced of the importance of the hymnal for parishioners. He proposed to study "only the words" in the Service Book and Hymnal (1958). He divided his study into three parts- baptism, communion, and the person and work of Christ. At the end of the part on baptism he appended this hymn. His attempt was to “bring together in a hymn the biblical themes of baptism: The Spirit, the physical element and the Word of institution in stanza one; new birth and the Redemption theme in stanza two; the life-long growth theme in stanza three; and praise to God for the Spirit's washing throughout our lives as well as the specific event at which the hymn is sung.”
The hymn was published in Contemporary Worship 4: Hymns for Baptism and Communion (1972) and then in Lutheran Book of Worship (1978), #195, with alterations Herbranson approved. Evangelical Lutheran Worship made other modifications, but left it essentially as Lutheran Book of Worship had it.
This "originally pentatonic tune” was paired with "O land of rest, for thee I sigh!" in the 1836 Appendix of Samuel Wakefield's shape-note tune book called The Christian Harp (Pittsburgh, 1832). As we have it, the tune is hexatonic but only slightly so: the fourth degree of the scale is used twice, once as a passing tone at measure 5 and once in a more accented fashion four notes from the end. The seventh degree is not present (E in this key that is otherwise F major), which gives the tune an open, rustic flavor. Herbranson linked his hymn with John Dahle's tune LUTHER SEMINARY. In Lutheran Book of Worship (1978) it was paired with a more pensive tune by Leo Sowerby called PERRY. In Evangelical Lutheran Worship it gets a third tune. More than the first two, LAND OF REST highlights the motion and physicality of the text. If one finds such things significant, it also has a compound background beat whose three can be seen as reflecting or underscoring the trinitarian Three in whose name the church baptizes.
Offertory Anthem: "You God Are My Light" Scott Perkins
Connecticut native Scott Perkins enjoys a multifaceted career as an international prize-winning composer of vocal music, an award-winning scholar, and a dynamic educator. His “beautifully crafted” (American Record Guide) and “tightly composed” (Choral Journal) compositions have been called “dramatic” and “colorful” (The Washington Post), and “perfectly orchestrated” and “haunting” (The Washington Times). He has been commissioned by organizations ranging from the Washington National Opera to the American Guild of Organists, and his work has been performed throughout North America and Europe. He has been an invited guest lecturer on his music and research at Harvard University, The Hartt School, Boston University, and the University of the Pacific. Scott’s recent and current projects have been extended works that support and illuminate the words of living authors on themes of social justice, environmentalism, and mental health.
You, God, are my light and my salvation; who shall I fear?
You are the strength of my life: of whom shall I be afraid?
One thing I ask of you, O God: that I may dwell in your house all the days of my life to behold your beauty, and to seek you in your temple.
Teach me your way, O God. Hear me when I cry unto you: have mercy upon me and answer me.
For in the time of trouble you will hide m in your dwelling; you will lift me high upon a rock.
Opening Voluntary: “At the Rivers of Babylon” (from Sixty-Six Chorale Improvisations) Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877-1933)
The German composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert's real name was Karg, the 'Elert' having been added early in his career at the suggestion of his concert-agent. He studied at Leipzig Conservatoire, served for a time as professor at Magdeburg Conservatoire, and was appointed in 1919 to Leipzig Conservatoire, where he taught piano, theory and composition. Though his earliest ambitions lay in the direction of composition, his chief distinction during his student days, and for some years after, was as a pianist of unusual brilliance. Some meetings with Grieg turned his ambitions once more towards composition, and the result has been a very large output in a great variety of forms - over 100 songs, sonatas for violin, pianoforte, etc., many sets of pieces for pianoforte, a symphony, string quartet, and much music for organ, etc. He was one of the principal German composers for organ of his generation.
His early works reflect the influence of composers such as Claude Debussy, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Arnold Schoenberg, but he later developed an original style that melded chromaticism and expanded harmonies with Renaissance and Baroque polyphony. Among his best-known works are the 33 stylistic studies for harmonium, based on works of composers ranging from Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina to Schoenberg; for the organ he wrote the Sixty-Six Chorale Improvisations (1908–10) and 20 Chorale Preludes and Postludes (1912). A virtuoso organist, Karg-Elert also performed on the Kunstharmonium (a type of harmonium—larger than the standard size—that was popular in Germany in the early 20th century).
Closing Voluntary: “Allegro molto from Sonata #6 in D Minor,” Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
The organ music of Felix Mendelssohn represents an approach gesturing not towards the future but towards the glorious past of German composition and the work of J.S. Bach in particular. (Liszt once called him “Bach reborn.”) The stark dissimilarity in compositional approach between Mendelssohn and Liszt was heralded by the coolness of their personal relationship, manifested for instance at a soirée when Mendelssohn drew a picture of Liszt playing the former’s music with five hammers, rather than fingers, on each hand. (This somewhat childish action is perhaps understandable given Liszt’s description of preceding events: “The truth of the matter is that I only played his Concerto in G minor from the manuscript, and as I found several of the passages rather simple and not broad enough…I changed them to suit my own ideas.”) Inherently conservative in character, Mendelssohn formed a profound aversion to the iconoclastic work of Liszt and kindred spirits such as Berlioz, of whose work Mendelssohn remarked: “one ought to wash one’s hands after handling one of his scores.” Mendelssohn was undoubtedly a Romantic composer, but his Romanticism was often of the Biedermeier kind; he was capable of composing dramatic and inventive works such as the Hebrides Overture, yet his individual musical poetry emerged perhaps most strongly in miniatures such as the Songs without Words for piano and in those works (e.g. the Quartet in F minor) wherein he recaptured the youthful genius that had burst forth so forcefully in the Octet and Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture.
Mendelssohn’s posthumous reputation in the country of his birth suffered from Wagner’s pen (this time through the faintest of praise rather than vitriol) and, in due course, the Nazi regime’s efforts to expunge his name from musical history. In England, where Mendelssohn had made a strong impression on musical life over the course of ten visits, his stock remained considerably higher. Mendelssohn enjoyed particular success with his organ recitals in the late 1830s and early 1840s, leading the publishers Coventry and Hollier to commission a set of six “voluntaries” from him in 1844. The planned voluntaries soon became Mendelssohn’s six Organ Sonatas Op 65, with the term sonata here implying the Bachian sense of the term—i.e. suites of varied pieces which are played instrumentally, as opposed to sung cantatas—rather than works exhibiting classical sonata form. The Organ Sonata No 6 in D minor (1845) demonstrates Mendelssohn’s consummate craftsmanship and mastery of organ texture in a set of variations upon the Lutheran Bach chorale Vater unser im Himmelreich (BWV416). Following a five-part harmonisation of the Chorale, which pervades the sonata as a whole, Mendelssohn presents four variations of increasing brilliance before a restatement of the Chorale. Today’s Closing Voluntary is the final variation. The sonata concludes with a substantial fugue and the finale in D major, whose quiet religiosity symbolises the completion of a journey from stern Lutheranism to an essentially English brand of sentiment. In this work and its companion sonatas, Mendelssohn revitalised the then-moribund European organ tradition, spurred English organ-builders to new heights, and, through his particular blend of chorale, counterpoint and domestic spirituality, substantially augmented the organ repertoire for the first time since Bach. Musing on his passion for structural innovation, Liszt once remarked that “new wine demands new bottles”; Mendelssohn here demonstrates the continued potency of an older brew.