Even though our service this morning has a great deal of musical variety, I’d like to comment specifically on the organ voluntaries. The prelude, Benedictus of Max Reger, and the postlude, the Fugue in G Minor by J.S. Bach, are two of my favorite pieces. Reger was profoundly influenced by Bach, and was once quoted as saying, “In music, […]

Our two anthems this morning seem so vastly different from each other, yet they are both historical, and so palpably relevant to modern times. The offertory anthem, composed by Felix Mendelssohn, uses a text by Martin Luther, who lived some 300 years before Mendelssohn’s time. Now look at the vast difference in history between the […]

The composer of our communion anthem, Sir Henry Walford Davies (1869–1941) began as a chorister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He was a student at the Royal College of Music, and his peers were C.H.H. Parry (the composer of today’s Psalm chant and postlude) and Stanford. Davies held various church appointments before becoming organist and choirmaster […]

Today’s postlude is a jaunty little number by the English composer, John Rutter, who has gifted the church with so much music. To my knowledge, this is one of only a handful of organ pieces that he’s written. As you can see in the bulletin, it’s called Toccata in 7. The word toccata is a term we […]

The piece that we’re singing after communion this Sunday comes from a larger work of Felix Mendelssohn’s called, Christus. It was an unfinished oratorio (an unstaged, opera performed in church).  Mendelssohn died a year after he started working on it, but it was later titled and published by his brother. It makes me very curious about what the […]

Paul Manz was a prolific church music composer who left us with a large repertoire of organ and choral music. I have several of his organ collections. He mainly wrote hymn-based settings for the organ, and his collections are must-haves for many organists. E’en So Lord Jesus is undoubtedly his most well-known and most-performed anthem. Just about […]