Music Notes 4-7-24
The week after Easter is always a well-deserved rest for our faithful choir. The drive up to Easter morning is always intense and heavy with additional music, so by the end of the Easter morning service, they are all ready to kick back on a beach in the South Pacific somewhere and watch the sunset, and deservedly so. They also show up every Thursday night at 7:30 to spend the evening rehearsing music that will help to uplift the worship. They even show up an hour early Sunday morning, at 9 a.m., to refresh the memories before the service. That’s over 120 hours a year that they give to the church, over and above whatever else they might contribute, whatever other groups and committees they might serve on, to make our Sunday worship more meaningful and inspirational. We owe our choir a big debt of thanks for their contributions that make our worship so much better. Anybody have a jet we could borrow to take them all to Maui….?
Great Is Thy Faithfulness is a hymn written by American composer William M. Runyan and author Thomas O. Chisholm. William Runyan composed the tune in 1923 to an original poem by his good friend and fellow Methodist minister Thomas Chisholm. The hymn has been included in more than 95 hymnals, and his family endowed the "The Rev. William M. Runyan Endowed Memorial Scholarship" at Baker University, in Baldwin City, Kansas (where he is buried), with the royalties from his song Great is Thy Faithfulness.
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 1st Christian artist to receive the “Billionaire” award from Pandora for reaching one billion Pandora streams. His song Your Grace Is Enough was released on the album Arriving in 2004.
Break Forth, Oh Beauteous Heavenly Light is a classic hymn that began its life in the German language. The author, Johann von Rist, was born in 1607 and dedicated his life to the church, eventually becoming a pastor in Ottensen, a small town just outside Hamburg, Germany. Although the text was written in 1641, it wasn’t until 1873 that it was translated into the English text we know by John Troutbeck, who became Chaplain and Priest in Ordinary to the Queen (Victoria) and was known for having compiled the Westminster Abbey Hymn Book in 1883. The melody was written in 1641 by Johann Schop, who was a Lutheran composer and violinist known for his virtuosity, and harmonized by J.S Bach in 1734.