Mood: Joyful
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STLT#220, Bring Out the Festal Bread
I am such a geek. After singing this hymn (and loving it), I looked to see who wrote the lyrics, and I wondered to myself, in the pattern of our Universalist forebear Hosea Ballou: Do I love this lyric because Mark Belletini wrote it, or did Mark Belletini happen to be the person who wrote a… Continue reading
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STLT#208, Every Time I Feel the Spirit
This is one of those hymns that make you go “huh!” (And that isn’t a bad thing.) First “huh” – it’s a Pentecost song, most definitely, stuck in the Worship section. And I go “huh, is that so we’ll use it, because some music directors and ministers will flip right by that liturgical season?” Second… Continue reading
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STLT#203, All Creatures of the Earth and Sky
Sometimes all you really have to say is YES! I love this Hymn. I love that we sing this joyful alleluia to the earth and all its inhabitants, and that we use an Easter Hymn to sing this joy. (Edit 4/24/17: In my sleep-deprived state, I called this an Easter hymn, but research by my… Continue reading
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STLT#202, Come Sunday
I wonder how many denominations have Duke Ellington in their hymnals? A hat tip to our hymnal commission for finding a place for this piece. And, as I’ve talked about before, this fits in the ‘not every song in the hymnal is meant for the congregation to sing’ category – although I would love to… Continue reading
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STLT#201, Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!
I have stared at the screen for probably twenty minutes, unsure how to start today’s post. Do I talk about how joyful this song is, in the midst of crisis? And how joy comes out of pains, sorrows, and troubles? Do I talk about how the notes on this are so sketchy we really can… Continue reading
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STLT#198, God of Many Names
Artists of all stripes have a signature style, a turn of phrase or brush or pen or finger that marks them as distinctive, a common theme or mood that repeats throughout a body of work. If we are seeing a representative sampling of Brian Wren’s hymns, then his signature is a propensity for expanding the… Continue reading
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STLT#180, Alhamdulillah (Alleluia)
I wish… I wish I lived with someone, because I would have made them sing this round with me so I could revel in the fullness of this beautiful piece. Although there’s a good chance I would have gotten the pre-coffee stink eye, so maybe it’s just as well. I wish the hymnal indicated that… Continue reading
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STLT#177, Sakura
I had the opportunity to sing this once, as a solo, to commemorate Hiroshima Day. While set on a pentatonic scale, it is in what musicologists call Phrygian Dominant Minor Mode – which is another term for “very unfamiliar but striking intervals that are at once difficult and haunting.” It was not easy for me to… Continue reading
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STLT#158, Praise the Source of Faith and Learning
I’m a little more in love with this hymn today than I was yesterday. I’ve used it several times – often with services about the arts or knowledge and reason. But even then, I don’t know that I actually meditated on the lyrics, written by Thomas Troeger, now a professor of preaching at Yale (officially… Continue reading
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STLT#153, Oh, I Woke Up This Morning
Oh the things you learn when you challenge your assumptions… In late January, I co-led an interfaith service focused on resistance, which featured the support of the local AME Zion choir; thus, while music came from several sources, we did lean heavily on the gospel genre, and we chose this song as our sending call.… Continue reading
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