Music Ministry Musings with Mary
Music Ministry Musings from Mary
Greetings, everyone on this lovely May morning. Today we are highlighting some of our music for this coming Sunday’s worship service. This Sunday, the Sixth Sunday of Easter, is also known as ‘Rogation Sunday’. Rogation Sunday occurs on the Sunday before Ascension Day, which falls on the Thursday between the Sixth and Seventh Sundays of the Easter season. It has historically been celebrated by processions and ‘beating the bounds’ of fields, asking for blessings on the land to produce bountiful harvests, which developed later into processions walking the bounds of the parish. Like many old church traditions, rogation days had their roots in pagan Roman festivals, in this case relating to protection of crops. Our first hymn, sung by Anisha Cornish, ‘All things bright and beautiful’, celebrates God’s creation of our world. The text is by the Anglo-Irish poet Mrs. Cecil Frances Alexander, who also gave us the text for ‘Once in Royal David’s city’. Our hymn first appeared in 1848 in Hymns for Little Children. For all you James Herriot fans out there (including myself here!), each of his four books were titled with one of the lines from the first verse, although not in their original order:
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
These are wonderful books, by the way, (if you’re running out of books to read), about a country vet in the 1930s through the 1950s in Yorkshire, England, and are based upon the author’s life.
The tune (Royal Oak) was adapted by composer Martin Shaw in 1914 for Song Time in 1915.
Our second hymn for Sunday is the Easter Hymn ‘Now the green blade riseth’ sung by the Andrews family. This Easter text by John Macleod Campbell Crum (1872-1958) is set to a popular French Christmas carol Noël nouvelet, and was first introduced in Hymns III, a precursor trial-use hymnal before the publication of The Hymnal 1982. The author uses Easter imagery from John 12:24: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” and from 1 Corinthians 15:37: “And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.”
Please watch the video to hear Anisha and the Andrews family share the first verses of each of these hymns for Sunday!
Finally, a small note about my organ prelude and postlude coming up this Sunday, both taken from a suite of miniature pieces ‘The Musical Clocks’ by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). These charming pieces were written for a mechanical clock which was combined with a miniature pipe organ, popular during the 18th century. You can see and listen to one by following the link below. At around three minutes in to this short 5 minute video the music will begin and the figures of the clock will start to move. Enjoy!
These pieces work particularly well on our organ at St. Thomas-Epiphany, built by the English organ-builder, Richard Howell, who based its design on a typical 18th century English church organ.
