Music Notes from Denise, May 3, 2025

Next Sunday, May 11 will be our children’s mini musical:

The Lost Sheep

All Children are welcome to participate, please come to our 10:30 service!

This Sunday, our Processional hymn is another triumphant Easter hymn, Good Christians all, rejoice and sing!  It was written by Cyril Alington, while Headmaster of Eton College for Melchior Vulpius’s tune Gelobt sei Gott. Alington was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1901 and had a vast teaching career. Many of his hymns appeared in 20 century editions of the British hymnal, Hymns Ancient and Modern. A strong text for Easter, Good Christians All rings in the victory of Christ’s resurrection so that “all the world” will know the news. Each stanza encourages us to tell the good news and praise the “Lord of life,” and ends with an exciting 3-fold Alleluia. (Psalter Hymnal Handbook, 1988)

Our Sequence hymn will be a song by Natalie Sleeth, Joy in the Morning. It takes the text from this week’s Psalm 30. Written first as an anthem in 1977, “Joy in the Morning” was first adapted as a hymn for the Covenant Hymnal (1996), the hymnal for the Evangelical Covenant Church. Though she did not realize it when she composed the anthem, the title was from Psalm 30:5, “For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may stay for the night but rejoicing comes in the morning” (NIV*). It describes the coming day and the new heaven and new earth we can expect, “daylight will dawn when the darkness is gone” (stanza 1), with “peace and contentment evermore” (stanza 2), and “love and forgiveness everywhere” (stanza 3). Sleeth recalls: “As I worked with the idea and with developing the text into a full statement it began to generate more excitement for me, particularly when it “allied itself” to a strong, minor melody with a sequential section in the middle. I remember working on it all weekend—until very late at night and beginning again early in  the morning—and enjoying the challenge of working with four parts rather than just the two I often stop with.” (Adventures for the Soul by Natalie Sleeth 1987 Hope Publishing Co.; Shawn Gingrich, umcdiscipleship.org)

Our guest musician this Sunday will be Chance McCline, who is a senior at Parkway Central High School. Chance plans to attend Mizzou this fall and study musical theatre. Chance has held many featured roles in the Parkway Central theater program as well as receiving Gold ratings on his vocal solos. He has a close relationship with God, and feels that sharing his musical talents is a way to strengthen that bond. Today he will sing an awesome arrangement of the spiritual, Deep River, by Moses Hogan.

We will end our worship with the Tanzanian hymn Mfurahini, haleluya. According to Jeff Held in his book, Listening to the Sacred Seasons, the song was written in 1966 by Bernard Kyamanywa, a young theologian in Makumira, Tanzania at the behest of his mentor, German missionary Gerhard Jasper. It was joined to a tune in the Tanzanian musical tradition called kwaya which is an “Africanized European” musical style that involved harmonic singing. It has become famous throughout the world. Held states, “Howard Olson, one of the most significant progenitors of African hymnody, translated the hymn in 1970 and set the common English translation used today in his publication , Set Free: A Collection of African Hymns in 1993, titled “Christ Has Arisen, Alleluia!” In the great African tradition, this hymn is often accompanied by drumming and provides a most joyful musical context that is evocative of the Paschal greeting—“Christ is risen!” “He is risen indeed, Alleluia!” (Listening to the Sacred Seasons Copyright 2024 by Jeff Held, Tustin, California)