Music for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost — September 17, 2023

Prayer to Jesus – Text: Richard Rolle (1300-1349) / Music: George Oldroyd (1886-1951)

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Heralded as one of the great English mystics of the Middle Ages, Richard Rolle’s religious adventures have been venerated since the 14th century. In the Fire of Love, Rolle describes his divine encounters by dividing the nature of the experience into three unique stages. Rolle describes the first stage as the sensation of spiritual fire, a glowing presence accompanied by a feeling of physical warmth in his chest. Rolle says that the second stage is marked by an overwhelming sense of peace and joy, a taste of sweetness in his soul. Finally, Rolle explains how in the third stage the glorious song of angels resounds, signifying his union with God’s divine love. Rolle’s artistic re-telling of his encounters enlightens us to the powerful religious experiences of Christian mystics during the medieval period.

George Oldroyd was an English organist, teacher, and composer, primarily of Anglican church music. From 1919 to 1920 he was organist at St Alban’s Church, Holborn and from 1920 at St Michael’s Church, Croydon; both are churches firmly rooted in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. For this morning’s communion motet, Oldroyd borrows a text from Richard Rolle, whose poetry infuses the piece with passion and humility.

Jhesu, since Thou me made and bought, be thou my love all my thought, and help that I may to thee be brought, withouten thee I may do nought.

Jhesu, since thou must to thy will, and naething is that thee may let, with thy grace my heart fulfil, my love and my liking in thee is set.

Jhesu at thy will I pray that I might be, all my heart fulfil, with perfect love to thee. That I have done ill Jhesu forgive thou me, and suffer me never to spill. Jhesu, for pity. Amen.

Gerald Harder

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Music for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost — September 10, 2023

Toccata on ‘Old 100th’ – Robert Hebble (1934-2020)

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The Old Hundredth, the earliest of the English psalm paraphrases, has won a place in every English hymnal since it was written. A triumph of simplicity, it has exerted unfailing appeal wherever it is sung. Shakespeare refers to it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Longfellow introduces Priscilla in The Courtship of Miles Standish, “singing the Hundredth Psalm, that grand old Puritan anthem.” At the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 it became the first congregational hymn to be used at an English coronation. William Kethe is widely accepted as the author of this English psalm paraphrase. Born in Scotland c. 1530, Kethe was an exile in Frankfurt and Geneva during the Marian regime in England, 1553-58. From 1561 until his death in 1594 he was rector of Childe Okeford in Dorset.

Old 100th, composed or adapted by Louis Bourgeois, first appeared in the 1551 edition of the French Genevan Psalter, set to Psalm 134. Its first association with Psalm 100 occurred in the Anglo-Genevan Psalter 1561. This pairing, as found in this morning’s final hymn, has become familiar to English-speaking congregations the world over. The tune was also used by Robert Hebble, the composer of the toccata that is this Sunday’s organ postlude in church. A graduate of Yale University and the Juilliard School, Hebble also spent a year in Paris in private study with Nadia Boulanger. Hebble distinguished himself as a colourist—a musician whose conception of beauty finds variety in harmony the way an artist mixes colour. The harmonic shifts and surprises in this Sunday’s ‘Toccata on Old 100th’ certainly bear this out.

Gerald Harder

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