Sunday, February 16, 2025

This morning, we dip into the vast well of sacred music by Henry Purcell, the English Baroque composer whose work is an inexhaustible treasure of imaginative, expressive sacred music. “Thy Word is a Lantern,” probably composed in 1687, takes its text from Psalm 119, lovely, lesser-known Psalm with wonderful textual imagery ripe for musical setting. Set for three solo voices, SATB choir, and continuo, it is full of elegance, chromaticism and harmonic text painting. The full choir is used sparsely; once to provide a re-iteration of the “Quicken me” refrain, and finally in the concluding “Hallelujah,” which we will reprise today for the Postlude.

It is interesting to note that at this point in his career, Purcell was embarking on a theatrical career of providing plays with songs, catches, or incidental music. These theatrical tendencies reveal themselves in the recitative-like sections where Purcell draws our ear to the personal and thorny nature of the text – as in the grinding, chromatically ascending lines on “I am troubled above measure.” But there are also other, less serious delights, as in the bouncing dotted figures on “Quicken me, O Lord,” and the sudden questioning interjection of “but why?” in the lower voices, both of which simply and beautifully paint the text. As always, Purcell’s music is a joy to sing because it understands the music of the English language so well and because it brings quasi-operatic drama, illuminating the ancient sacred texts it sets.

-Justin Smith

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Choral composer, teacher, and organist William Billings is recognized by many as the first professional American composer, publishing today’s Anthem, “Creation,” six years before the Declaration of Independence. Since he entered an apprenticeship as a tanner after attending primary school and spent much of his life working in the leather industry, he was largely self-taught in composition, studying the tune books and choral works of English psalmists. In 1769, he began teaching in singing schools and, starting in 1778, held musical leadership roles in some of the larger churches in the Boston area. Billings wrote over three hundred compositions and published the majority in six collections of his own music: many follow the form of today’s anthem, with a homophonic opening followed by a contrapuntal “fuging tune.” This is decidedly unpretentious music: rough around the edges yet appealing in its naive sincerity; it is the music of a nation not yet come of age yet full of optimism and vigor.

Billings had a particular gift for writing compelling melodies which were popular during his lifetime. In the early nineteenth century in the United States, a movement towards a more European style of sacred music shifted attention away from the music of Billings and his American contemporaries. However, shape-note singers in the American South continued singing his music, and in the second half of the 21st century, a revival of his music occurred and is perpetuated by shape-note singing societies across the country.

-Justin Smith

Sunday, January 26, 2025

This morning, to compliment Psalm 19’s themes of a new creation, music from one of the greatest biblical oratorios of all – The Creation by the Viennese master Franz Joseph Haydn. Written as an homage to the great oratorios of Handel, The Creation is an utter delight, composed when Haydn was eighty-two years old! Despite his advanced age, his musical telling of the story of Genesis is eternally youthful and almost child-like in its delightful naivete, moving through the stages of Creation with a sincere wonderment and awe that’s endearing and moving.

The introit today, fittingly, is Haydn’s depiction of the opening creation of heavenly Light. The baritone, as one of the archangels, intones the famous first words of Genesis all alone, only sporadically punctuated by the organ. As “the spirit of God move(s) upon the water,” the chorus enters in a quiet, radiant E-flat major – before launching into one of the most famous passages in choral music, which I won’t spoil here except to say you will know the first triumphant blaze of God’s light when you hear it! The Anthem today is a flamboyant fantasia on one of hymnody’s sturdiest tunes, O God Our Help in Ages Past. John Rutter made the arrangement of William Croft’s old tune; it here finds the former composer in an unusually extroverted and bombastic mood.

-Justin Smith