Father, We Praise Thee

A hymn for the 10th Sunday after Trinity



(CW:581, ELH:76, LSB:875)

"Father, We Praise Thee"
by Greg­o­ry I, 540-604
Translated by Per­cy Dearm­er, 1867-1936
from The Eng­lish Hymn­al (Lon­don: Ox­ford Un­i­ver­si­ty Press, 1906), num­ber 165.

1. Father, we praise Thee, now the night is over;
Active and watchful, stand we all before Thee;
Singing, we offer, prayer and meditation;
Thus we adore Thee.

2. Monarch of all things, fit us for Thy mansions;
Banish our weakness, health and wholeness sending;
Bring us to Heaven, where Thy saints united
Joy without ending.

3. All holy Father, Son and equal Spirit,
Trinity blessèd, send us Thy salvation;
Thine is the glory, gleaming and resounding
Through all creation.


Evangelical Lutheran Hymnary
Hymn #76
Author: Greg­o­ry I, 540-604
Translated by: Per­cy Dearm­er, 1906
Titled: "Noc­te sur­gen­es vi­gil­e­mus om­nes"
Composer: French church mel­o­dy (Par­is: 1681)
Tune: "Christe Sanc­tor­um"

 

Psalmen Davids ...und dem Te Deum Laudamus

As many of you may be aware, my family enjoys and seeks out the uplifting influence of the Fine Arts for their highly cultivated ability to carry and effectively communicate weighty themes. Musically, this means that we favor what is referred to as “Classical Music.”

Four weeks ago, I featured a collection from our favorite choir: Dresdner Keuzchor: Legendary recordings. Most of the recordings in that collection are Sacred choral works from the Late Renaissance and Early Baroque periods, by Lutheran composers like Heinrich Schütz, Johann Schein, Samuel Scheidt, Johann Sebastian Bach and even Martin Luther. More importantly, seven of the ten disks in this collection were filled with recordings of music that was composed for use in the context of Lutheran Worship, and were recorded by a choir that regularly sings them in the context of worship. I also posted definitions of the various periods in Classical Music. If you are unfamiliar with these periods, a review may be helpful. Last week, I featured a collection from one of those composers, the Psalmen Davids, by Heinrich Schütz.

This week, I am again returning to one of the composers featured in that initial collection: Johann Hermann Schein.

The second of "the three great S'es" of the German Baroque that I have introduced in past weeks, Schein, like his contemporary, Heinrich Schütz, was a prolific and influential composer of liturgical music for the Lutheran Church. Schein is considered to be the more polished composer of the three. His published sacred works number on the order of 400, including an entire hymnal in 1627, titled Cantional. This hymnal was unique in that it arranged its approximately 200 hymns in four-part harmony, with the soprano part carrying the melody -- following what had apparently become standard Lutheran worship practice. This is the way most hymnbooks are arranged today, even though congregations don't sing in parts anymore.

Like Johann Sebastion Bach who followed him almost a century later, Schein was Cantor at St. Thomas in Leipzig. Also like Bach -- yet, unlike Schütz -- Schein did not write exclusively for the Church in Germany. He also wrote secular music for social gatherings. Unlike modern composers, who seem to prefer minimizing or eliminating any distinction between secular and sacred composition, the distinction between Schein's sacred and secular compositions has been described as stark. Composed to carry the meaning of Biblical texts and the Church's theology, his sacred compositions were nuanced and refined. In contrast, the comparatively banal nature of secularity required compositions reflective only of tedious simplicity. It was only entertainment, after all, not Divine Worship -- and like most entertainment, it generally only functioned as background for other activities which were the true object of the gathering (like dancing). Though Schein's secular compositions varied in their degrees of "simplicity" (from simple drinking songs to revolutionary orchestral pieces for high-society), the contrast generally found between his secular and sacred compositions are reflective of a very potent fact: as such compositions are written to carry meaning of an entirely and profoundly different nature, one should expect them to sound much different.

In my opinion, today's composers of Church music would do well to observe the distinctions generally found in Schein's body of work, as well. Church music that merely duplicates the pervasive background noise that accompanies us everywhere we go (like the car, the airplane, the subway station, the home, the workplace, the department store, the grocery store, the restaurant, the elevator ...everywhere), is simply not distinguished enough to meaningfully carry the weight of Scripture teaching and the distinctiveness of our Lutheran Confession (although, for aconfessional churches of weak theology, it may be just fine...).

The collection pictured above, entitled Psalmen Davids, is a short collection of some of Johann Schein's settings of the Psalms (Pss. 150, 39, 128, 103, 33, 13, 98, 20, 116, and 23), various motets, and a setting of the Te Deum, all composed for occasions, such as weddings, funerals, and the like. It is conducted by Roland Wilson, an expert in early Baroque music, and is performed by La Capella Ducale and Musica Fiata Köln, which specialize in the techniques and instrumentation of the early Baroque repertoire. This is very clear recording of some of Schein's highly polished Lutheran compositions.