Music Notes for Sunday, May 25, 2025

Music for Sixth Sunday of Easter

Father, We Thank Thee Who Hast Planted – Text: Didache (1st or 2nd century); tr. Francis Bland Tucker (1895-1984) / Music: Melody Genevan Psalter 1549; composed or adapted by Louis Bourgeois (c. 1510-61)

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The text of this Sunday’s communion hymn in church, Father, We Thank Thee Who Hast Planted, is rooted in the early Christian church, all the way back to the Greek-language Didache (the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), a Christian manual from the Church of Antioch, Syria, which some scholars date as early as 110 C.E. To produce this text, Francis Bland Tucker (1895-1984) translated selected prayers from chapters 9 and 10 of the Didache. Some scholars are of the opinion that part of it, notably the prayers from which this hymn is derived, may be much older than the main work and come from the same source as the Gospel canticles.

Les Commandemens, the tune to which this hymn is most frequently sung, is one of the most widely known tunes adapted or composed by Louis Bourgeois (c. 1510-61). It derives its name from the fact that it was used in several hymnals and psalters as a musical setting for the Ten Commandments. After 1556 the tune came into the English and Scottish psalters with versions of the Commandments and Psalm 125. In the 19th century the tune appeared in England, altered to notes of equal length. Vaughan Williams restored the original rhythm in The English Hymnal 1906. The tune appears in this restored form in both our Common Praise and New English Hymnal collections, with slight variations.

Father, we thank Thee who hast planted
Thy holy name within our hearts.
Knowledge and faith and life immortal
Jesus thy Son to us imparts.

Thou, Lord, didst make all for thy pleasure,
didst give us food for all our days,
giving in Christ the bread eternal;
Thine is the pow’r, be Thine the praise.

Watch o’er Thy church, O Lord, in mercy,
save it from evil, guard it still.
Perfect it in Thy love, unite it,
cleansed and conformed unto Thy will.

As grain, once scattered on the hillsides,
was in this broken bread made one,
so from all lands thy church be gathered
into thy kingdom by thy Son.

Gerald Harder

 

 

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Music Notes for Sunday, May 18, 2025

Music for Fifth Sunday of Easter

Ubi caritas – Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986)

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For Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) composition was a slow, laborious process involving constant revision and impeccable craftsmanship. After sixty years only ten works had been published—one fewer than his teacher Paul Dukas, a similarly fastidious perfectionist. Unlike his friend and fellow student Olivier Messiaen, Duruflé eschewed the avant-garde experimentation that might have resulted in a fashionable new language, choosing instead a retrospective stance, looking to plainsong for his inspiration, and great French composers—Debussy, Ravel, Fauré and Dukas—for his models.

In 1960 Duruflé wrote four short motets which he dedicated to Auguste Le Guennant, the director of the Gregorian Institute in Paris. All four of them are based on melodies from the Benedictine monastery of Solesmes, which issued the official, most widely recognized edition of Gregorian chant. This Sunday’s communion motet in church, Ubi caritas, is one of these four. Its text and foundational melody are an antiphon taken from the Mass for Maundy Thursday. It is fitting that it is sung this Sunday, when the Gospel reading is the same passage from St John that was read on Maundy Thursday, an exhortation to Christian love.

Duruflé’s setting begins and ends with only the darker choral sound of the altos, tenors and basses. Each phrase of the text is repeated and the altos alternate singing them in two separate choirs. The tenors are subdivided into two voice parts in order to maintain four-part chordal harmony. After the sopranos enter for the exultant central section, the harmonic structure increases to five parts.

Where charity and love are, God is there.
Christ’s love has gathered us into one.
Let us rejoice and be pleased in Him.
Let us fear, and let us love the living God.
And may we love each other with a sincere heart.

Gerald Harder

 

 

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