Music Notes 11-10-24

This week we welcome back our wonderful accompanist/organist Paul, who has been overseas – Mallorca and Barcelona (and didn’t even invite us to come along!).  Our deepest thanks to my talented wife, Eileen, for filling in for him so admirably and keeping our music on an even keel.

Rosephanye Powell has become one of the better-known forces in choral music in the U.S.  She is currently Professor of Voice at Auburn University, having obtained a Doctor of Music degree in vocal performance at Florida State.  She is especially known for the African-American influences in her music, and has a large and diverse library of vocal works.  Come Unto Me, All Ye That Labor was written in 2006 and has a soothing feel and message to the listener. 

Here In This Place is a song that follows in the great footsteps of other songs that have an alias – it’s also known as Gather Us In.  When Bart Howard sat down in 1954 and wrote a song about being so in love that you feel like you’re floating through the air, he called it In Other Words, a phrase that repeats over and over.  But when he played it in lounges, people would come over to him and say “play me that song about flying me to the moon…”  He decided that you can’t fight City Hall, so he changed the name to Fly Me To The Moon.  Marty Haugen had the same experience when he wrote a song that had a repeating phrase – gather us in.  However, the first line is “Here in this place the new light is streaming….”  Hence, in our hymnal, it can be found under the title Here In This Place, rather than in the name the composer chose.  Marty Haugen was born in Eagen, Minnesota in 1950 and although he did a degree in psychology at Luther University in Iowa, he pursued a career in music, penning dozens of well-known pieces.  He himself is affiliated with the United Church of Christ, but his music is most widely used by Catholics and Lutherans, and he maintains a busy touring schedule all over thr world, offering conferences to musicians interested in musical renewal.  He describes his inspiration for this hymn in an e-mail: “Gather Us In was written after I first heard the wonderful [former Jesuit Dutch theologian and poet Huub] Oosterhuis (b. 1933) text ‘What Is This Place?’ I wanted to craft something that might say a similar message to North American ears. I deliberately wrote it in second person to avoid gender issues and to more directly sing ‘to’ God rather than ‘about’ God. Ironically, that has been at times a problem for some, who would like God more carefully circumscribed and named.”

Hailing from the small coastal town of Bangor in Northern Ireland, the Rend Collective is a group of “twenty-somethings” that gathered at Rend, what the band describes as “a ministry for spiritually hungry young adults, desperately seeking an authentic, raw and real expression of church, which was informally pastored by bandleader, Gareth Gilkeson.”  Their first album – Homemade Worship by Handmade People – was released in 2012, and was followed by a string of hits in the contemporary Christian music world.  Their music is based around older instruments - their native Irish folk instruments, old rock and roll guitars and assorted other whimsical musical toys - and has a raw, uninhibited style that gets the toes tapping and the feet stomping.  They don’t call themselves a folk band, but insist rather “We are not actually an indie-folk band - despite all the beards and bow-ties and banjos. We are a celebration band. It’s just a coincidence that folk music and celebration make a great pairing!”  Their song Rescuer (Good News) is the title song from the album Rescuer, which was released in 2017.  It’s an interesting tune in that the musical form is slightly irregular, and features a shouted “Hey!” in various places during the song, which I’m told is a popular device in that part of Ireland.