Over at Cyberbrethren, Paul McCain is featuring a fascinating article by Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto on Bach’s music as a servant of the Gospel in Japan. It’s a great read worthy of your consideration.
Monthly Archives: January 2010
LSB Resources: Additional Indexes
For a number of years I’ve had lofty goals to catalog my music library — not just the books, but also the individual pieces within the book, associated hymn tunes, composers, when I used a piece, etc. While I haven’t made much progress on the cataloging, awhile back I did create the underlying structure that would link everything back to Lutheran Service Book and the associated hymn tunes. Through that project I had the data to create several indexes that had more detail than those provided in the back of the LSB editions — primarily around the hymn tunes used in LSB.
On Texts and Tunes
One of my Sunday afternoon rituals is to listen to Sing for Joy produced by St. Olaf College. It is a half hour weekly program of sacred music based on the three-year Revised Common Lectionary which usually, though not always, meshes with the Lutheran Service Book 3-year lectionary.
I was caught off guard when “Hail to the Lord’s Anointed” was introduced on the program. At church this morning we sang this hymn (LSB 398) with the usual tune (FREUT EUCH, IHR LIEBEN) that has been used in at least 4 generations of LCMS hymnals. The setting on Sing for Joy was set to ES FLOG EIN KLEINS WALDVOGELEING (the tune used for the Gloria in Excelsis, LSB Setting 4). And it was the Gloria that came to my mind when the hymn began.
Hymn texts and tunes are often intimately connected in a worshiping community. The tune helps to carry and reinforce the text and make the text more memorable. Moreover, singing helps us to inwardly digest the hymn text.
Interview Between An Atheist & Unitarian
While I’m taking a slight detour from the standard fare of worship and music with this post, I think you’ll be intrigued by it.
This last week, noted atheist Christopher Hitchens lectured in Portland, OR. In preparation for the event, local magazine Portland Monthly had a feature interview between Hitchens and Marilyn Sewell, a retired Unitarian minister. You might think a discussion between an atheist and Unitarian wouldn’t be too interesting. Guess again. Hitchens, in certain respects, appears to have a stronger grasp of Christianity than Sewell. The intent of the article was to focus on Hitchen’s views, but I finished it thinking more about Sewell’s beliefs.
Here are a few highlights from that interview.
Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is a generally fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?
Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.
A Blessed Epiphany
Blessings to you on this feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord when we commemorate “God in man made manifest.” Lutherans usually associate Phillip Nicolai’s “O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright” (LSB 395) — the queen of the chorales — with this day.
It is a hymn full of comfort and devotional thought. Jesus the bright Morning Star. God’s blessings in the midst of life’s difficulties. Those blessings being the gifts God gives us in His means of grace that sustain us. Then strengthened and nourished, we go forth and proclaim the story as we wait for the feast to come.
O Morning Star, how fair and bright!You shine with God’s own truth and light, (st. 1)