Music notes: III. Sunday in Lent

2025.03.23

This Sunday several musical traditions and trends are found side by side in the parish I serve in a way that is emblematic of the state of modern Anglican church music.

Our choral anthems at the earlier celebration continue a Lenten series (though one not deliberately planned as such) of more English, and what many might consider more typically Anglican, works than is ordinarily our diet. This week we hear from Felix Mendelssohn, who, though of course a German, spent a good deal of time in England and was enormously popular and influential there as a composer, an organist, and a promoter of Bach’s music. ‘[T]he[y] that shall endure to the end’ comes from perhaps his most popular oratorio, Elijah. Percy Whitlock was an organist and composer of church and light-orchestral music active in the first half of the twentieth century; the exquisite ‘Jesu, grant me this, I pray’ sets an eighteenth-century Latin devotional hymn, ‘Dignare me, O Jesu, rogo te’, in the English translation by Henry Williams Baker.

The music to which our hymns are set, on the other hand, is all German. ‘Aus der Tiefe rufe ich’ was first published in Nürnberg in 1676 and was paired with the Lenten hymn ‘Forty days and forty nights’ in the seminal Hymns Ancient and Modern of 1861 (promoted and edited by the aforementioned Baker), which can be credited with introducing German and other Continental streams of congregational music, as well as Latin hymns in translation and many new items, to the main stream of English, and by its influence on other hymnals, other English-speaking, worshippers. The classic tune ‘Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort’, derived from existing chant melodies, dates from the beginning of the German Reformation, setting a text by Luther. Its original form is found more than once in the Hymnal and was used two weeks ago to sing ‘The sinless one to Jordan came’ [120]. At Hymn 143, ‘The glory of these forty days’, it appears in Bach’s version, in which the original melodic skips are filled in with passing tones, the long notes in the original are shortened so that all note values are equal, and the harmony is conformed to more modern major-minor tonality. The text is a Latin Office hymn, ‘Clarus decus jejunii’, assigned to the Third Sunday of Lent in medieval English liturgical books. ‘Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten’ (translated as ‘If thou but trust in God to guide thee’ [635]) is a fine example of the hymnody that grew out of the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War in the early seventeenth century. Both words and music were written by Georg Neumark, a poet and civil servant.

The service music at the earlier celebration, following a trend common in the contemporary Western Church, looks to other traditions. The Kyrie was taken by Betty Carr Pulkingham from the South African song ‘Thuma mina’ (a source credit rather egregiously missing from the Hymnal supplement Wonder, Love, and Praise) and forms part of her Freedom Mass. It uses a call-and-response form familiar in various vernacular musics, the responses being sung in four-part harmony. The flowingly melodic Agnus Dei (Cordero de Dios / Lamb of God) comes from the Spanish/English-language Missa Guadalupe, written by living composer Joel Martinson.