ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 72.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> JOSHUA: Let me ask a very practical question. How should I go about choosing hymns for a special occasion, say, Ascension Day. >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: That's a good question because it gives us a chance to think about these principles and these pieces of advice that I've given up to this point. Not every congregation does Ascension Day, and that's a good spot to look at because in a short discussion of it, there aren't that many hymns to look at so we can kind of cover them all. So in Lutheran Worship starting with number 148 through 153, we have our hymn choices. Maybe the best thing to do is to start to characterize each one a little bit so we have a sense of text, of a kind of music it has. Then we'll come back and figure out a sorting process and then maybe actually make some choices about how they would be placed in the service. And we have more than we need. Typically, a congregation will sing three to maybe six hymns during a service. Half of those, maybe, during the communion distribution. One near the sermon, one at the beginning, one at the end. So we have here in number 148, "Hail Thee Festival Day." This is a general purpose hymn that has specific Easter, Ascension, Pentecost texts with a refrain. "Hail thee, festival day! Blest day to be hallowed for ever, day when our risen Lord rose in the heavens to rein." Special text for that particular line that fits Ascension. So it's wonderfully connected to the day. It makes application of that ascension of Christ as ruler of all. But it has this difficulty in that there are three parts to the tune, a refrain part, then at the bottom of that page going to the top of the next, three lines in G minor move, then the second page and the bottom three lines has a different part of a tune to be used as stanzas 2, 4, and 6, where as the other part was 1, 3, and 5. And this one starts out in B flat and then brings us back to the dominant of our original key, back to the refrain. And the other part, the second part of the melody, stanzas 1, 3, and 5, does it in a different way staying in kind of a minor mode. So this is a complicated piece in that it has a section in minor, a section in major, it has a refrain and people will have to kind of figure out how to get through all of these stanzas. So while it has all the variety and has a march-like quality for the refrain, it's going to be difficult to do if you've never done it before. 149 is a different story. Here we have a piece that takes five lines of music, but is somewhat easy. For example, if you look at the end of the second line, alleluia, alleluia, and you look at the top of the next page, you'll see you get to sing that same music more than once. Indeed, you could look at it this way: each part of the poetry is labeled A, then the next part B, and so forth, you get a design like this: A, B, C, D, E, plus alleluias. But if you look at the music and you make the repetitions of the music the first one is A, A repeats. Then you get new music, B, and it's somewhat repeated or has a similar B1 quality. Then you get that music repeated almost again, a B2 quality, then the alleluias at the bottom of the page have this descending pattern, and that turns out to be very much like our alleluias above but at a different place in the scale. Then you get to do like the original one. So you can see I'm talking about a lot of repetition in the design. So we focus there a little bit on the music. The advantage is it's a kind of exuberant piece and fits beautifully with the text which is a song of praise. "A hymn of glory let us sing." And then the alleluias burst forth and it tells about the risen Christ among the angels. So it has this imagining of being there with Christ in his ruling with the rest of creation praising him. Now to 150. "On Christ's ascension I now build." Now, you can notice that this comes from the 1500's and the text from the 1600's. So the tune is older than the text. And again, it takes a page plus a line for the music. But what is the design in the music? Let's look for the repetition. "On Christ's ascension I now build," That's A. The second phrase in the text, B, C, D, E, F, G. I mean, there's that many different lines. The music, though, is A, B, then A repeats, and B repeats. Now we get some new music finally at the bottom of the page, "for where the head is," that's C, and a new phrase, D, and then finally, the last phrase reminds us in the last three notes of how the first phrase ended. Interesting, but that was part of how they designed this, and it's a* stolen design called the bar form that they're imitating. So it's those internal references to repetition. This is a harder design, obviously, and it's one for Germans. So if you have a lot of British people, they're not going to like this. They don't like that complicated design. They like a simple one like 151 that we'll look at and a moment. What is the text of 152? It talks about what hope this ascension brings; namely, what Christ did, and he's there, in a sense, and will return to take us to be with him. He is the ruler now, and he will come to bring us to be with him into eternity. So as people who wait for this happened, it's imagining this waiting process. 151, "Oh Christ our hope our heart's desire creations mighty Lord redeemer of the fallen world by holy love outpoured." Then you look through the stanzas and you see that it's recalling God's mercy, that in stanza 3, the bonds of death were broken because of Christ who now ascends to the throne. "Let the love exhibited by God now purify us," and in stanza 5, "That Christ is our joy our only glory,� and so we praise God and give glory to him and we have a doxological stanza at the end. Now, here the design is called common meter. There are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 syllables in line 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in line 2, likewise the next line is 8, 6. That's common meter. It's only four lines of poetry, four lines of music, there's no exact repetitions in the music so it is not required in short design. But it would be somewhat easy to sing. We've had three hymns in a row now that are in major--we talked about the keys in the original 148. So all of these are in the major mode and would be considered happy tunes. 152 now introduces a different kind of scale. It's not really minor. I'm looking through this and saying, is it minor, or is it not. Yes, we could call it minor. It kind of evokes an ancient scale, but it's by a modern composer, one of my colleagues here the tune is, and it has this opening leap, �Up through endless,� so you have to cover a whole octave within the first three notes. But that device is repeated in line 3, at the third phrase. It's repeated also in the final phrase so people would quickly catch on to this. And when it outlines a chord, it's not a particularly difficult thing to do. And the rhythm isn't especially hard. There's a dotted note there but it occurs always kind of at the beginning of the phrase so it's a very doable kind of tune, a very sturdy kind of tune, kind of evokes an ancient quality. And the text by* (inaudible) is modern and the advantages here would be that it's a well-crafted text and uses words that are easy to understand. "Up through endless ranks of angels cries of triumph in his ears, to his heavenly throne ascending having vanquished all their fears." Now comes the subject of the sentence, "Christ looks down upon his faithful leaving them in happy tears." So the image here is of Christ ascending, he's already among angels looking back down toward us. And, obviously, the last stanza then brings us to point of praise and recalls in stanzas 2 and 3 what he did while he was on earth. 153 is a prayer-like text. "Draw us to you and we will do what you have taught forever." "And hasten on where you have gone to be with you dear savior." Now, this was, I'm going to assume it was originally in German. Notice that the poetry in English, "And hasten on where you have gone," isn't actually a rhyme in our ears. It's kind of a visual rhyme so this is kind of at the edge of what people might consider really fine poetry but that is how the translator solved his problem. So this is a different kind of text that is a prayer out of the Ascension Day event. "Prayer to be true to God and to walk in his paths." The tune itself is interesting in how it uses rhythm, short, short, short, long, short, short, short, long, short, short, short, short, short, long, long, short, short, short, long, short, short, short, long, short, short, short, short, short, short, long, long. So the design of the first half is repeated exactly rhythmically in the second half and has these little phrases and stopping points, but the accompaniment style there is actually going to fill in as people take a new breath. So it is kind of a choppy quality when you sing it, and if the musician handles it right, it smoothes that over. So it's a quieter kind of musical event. Well, those are the hymns for Ascension provided in this particular anthology. We've kind of walked through now and seen what features they have. How would we approach using this? I would suggest that you think now in terms of what's easy, what's hard, what would be medium difficulty. The hardest one might be either 150 or 152, �On Christ's ascension I now build.� because it's a longer design and, �Up through endless ranks of angels,� because it has this leap and calls for a lot of energy in a short time. So until you�re acquainted with that it's hard to do it. The most difficult would be 148 for the reasons we gave when we first looked at it. It's in three parts. It's a huge design. People could get lost in it. What's the easiest probably, �A hymn of glory lead us sing,� because of that repetition and the jubilant quality. Then next to that in terms of easy, would probably be, �Oh Christ our hope,� because it doesn't have any difficult rhythms or much of breadth in the use of scale. It's kind of limited. And maybe, �Draw us to you,� could be considered somewhat easy as well because it has short little phrases. So it's a judgment you make against what you would observe your people doing. So the easy, medium, hard is how is it for them. Don't think just yourself. And if you're in doubt about how it is for them, you could actually dialog with the musician who leads them and say, when you lead this hymn, would they find it easy or hard and you can get coached on how to put tunes into those categories. Then we also did some things, whether it's a big design or a small design, and you can take into consideration is it well-known. Had they used it like every Ascension for the last twenty-five years? Then you can count on it working. And we could look at what centuries it comes from. These are all aspects that we would call artistic questions. Now we come to considerations that would be for the text. What does it say? Most of them were an act of praise. We pointed out that one is actually a prayer, 153. So that distinguishes them a little bit and then how poetic is the move that�s made. That could make it more difficult or more interesting to use and what is the pictures that�s being employed in the text? What kind of doctrine is being laid out? So you make an analysis of that, and now we have to choose. Say we're going to choose just three hymns. If I were to choose 3, I would kind of think I'm going to choose by what the text move is, but I need to keep in mind also placing it for how the people are able to do that tune. Because the first hymn should not be one that says, okay. This is a hard service. I quit. And the last one should probably be one that leaves you with a sense of joy and delight that you were there. And whatever is difficult or kind of challenging you could put in the middle. So I would probably approach it this way. Really safe is 149. You have to decide whether you're going to do all seven stanzas at once. But there, they could be solved if, say, the choir takes No. 3 and No. 5, and then we kind of--if you have a choir to do this--or even a solo voice to kind of take the burden off the congregation singing for seven minutes directly. That's a very good way to start the service. It has this element of joy. Then for the closing one, maybe we could do 152, �Up through endless ranks.� However, if I had a congregation that didn't know it, I wouldn't put it at the end. I would maybe choose, �Oh Christ our hope.� Then, for around the sermon, I would use, �On Christ's ascension I now build,� or, �Up through endless ranks of angels� because that is--goes to kind of the central mood of the day, and its kind of a harder tune for people to operate. Now, I hope that way of kind of walking through all of the choices that a single pastor does for one occasion with just a limited number of hymns gives you an idea of the complicated things you're handling when you do this.