Music Notes 2-9-25

Mark Hayes is a composer/arranger/pianist based in Kansas City whose music is renowned

around the world. He got his degree in piano performance at Baylor University, moved to

Kansas City to work as a music editor for Tempo Publishing, and now spends his time writing

music for the church and traveling around the world as a clinician and guest conductor. When I

met Mark in the late 80’s, I was struck by his pianistic skills – more specifically, the way he

manhandled the piano into submission to produce the most wondrous sounds. Mark’s writing is

superbly crafted, with influences of black gospel and jazz. He’s one of my favorite

contemporary writers, and our wonderful accompanist Paul plays a lot of his music for our

postludes and preludes. If you play piano and want some music that will both challenge you and

satisfy your appetite for delicious piano music, pick up a book of Mark Hayes piano

improvisations. You’ll love it. This week’s anthem, Grace, is a setting of the old American

melody The Water Is Wide, using the words of Amazing Grace by John Newton. I first came

across this piece on YouTube, a recording by a Texas church choir with a big orchestra. I was so

impressed with the piece that I contacted the music director of the Texas church and asked him

who wrote the orchestration. He wrote back that Mark Hayes himself had written it, and it was

commercially available. Someday…

When The Saints Go Marching In is an American gospel hymn. It originated as a Christian

hymn, but is most usually played by Dixieland jazz bands. The origins are unclear, although it

appears to have evolved from several similarly titled pieces, including When the Saints Are

Marching In (1896) and When the Saints March In for Crowning (1908). The first known

recording of the tune was in 1923 by the Paramount Jubilee Singers. Although the record title

was listed as When The Saints Come Marching In, the group sings the modern lyrics of When

The Saints Go Marching In. Most early renditions were slow and stately, but began to pick up

the tempo as time went on. Louis Armstrong was the first to record the tune as a secular dance

number in 1938. He wrote that his sister informed him that she felt the “secular performance

style of the traditional church tune was inappropriate and irreligious”.

For All the Saints was written as a processional hymn by the Anglican Bishop of

Wakefield, William Walsham How. The hymn was first printed in Hymns for Saints' Days, and

Other Hymns, by Earl Nelson, 1864. The hymn was sung to the melody Sarum, by the Victorian

composer Joseph Barnby, until the publication of the English Hymnal in 1906. This hymnal used

a new setting by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, during his stint as editor of the

English Hymnal, which he called Sine Nomine (literally, "without name") in reference to its use

on the Feast of All Saints, November 1st (or the first Sunday in November, All Saints Sunday in

the Lutheran Church). It has been described as "one of the finest hymn tunes of the 20th

century." Although most English hymn tunes of its era are written for singing in SATB four-part

harmony, Sine Nomine is primarily unison (verses 1,2,3,7 and 8) with organ accompaniment;

three verses (4, 5 and 6) are set in sung harmony. The tune appears in this forms in most English

hymnbooks (for example English Hymnal (641), New English Hymnal (197), Common

Praise (232) and American hymnals (our hymnal, for example, The Hymnal 1982 and

the Lutheran Service Book (677).

Chris Tomlin was born in Texas in 1972 and learned to play guitar by playing along with Willy

Nelson recordings. He has become one of the dominant forces in contemporary Christian music,

and in 2012 CCLI announced that his songs were played 3 million times in churches that year.

His 2013 album Burning Lights debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, only the fourth Christian

album ever to open at No. 1, and he was pronounced the most sung songwriter in the world that

year. In 2018, he was the 1 st Christian artist to receive the “Billionaire” award from Pandora for

reaching one billion Pandora streams. His song Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone was part

of the album See The Morning, his 4 th studio album that was released in 2006 and arguably was

the album that established him as one of the bright lights of the contemporary Christian music

world. In this song, he takes the beloved classic and adds a “chorus” to it, treating the words of

Amazing Grace as if they were the verses. His song Your Grace In Enough was released on the

album Arriving in 2004.