- Organ Prelude: Ich ruf zu dir (I call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ) – J.S. Bach
- Opening Hymn 629 - Jesus, thy blood and righteousness (Walton)
- Service Music: A New Plainsong – David Hurd
- Psalm 19: 1-4 (Tone III.4) - The heavens declare the glory of God...
- Lenten Gospel Acclamation: I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me will never die, says the Lord.
- Offertory Hymn 603 - Holy Spirit, storm of love (Arfon Minor)
- Hymn during Communion 479 - O Christ, the master carpenter (Albano)
- Communion Motet: Expectans, expectavi – Charles Wood
- Hymn 306 O for a thousand tongues (Richmond)
- Organ: Ich ruf zu dir (I call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ) – Herbert Collum
- View/download music list including anthem and psalm texts - see here »
Music Notes
There is an intriguing back-story to the text of today’s communion motet, “Expectans expectavi” (“I waited patiently for the Lord”). Although this Latin title alludes to Psalm 40, it is also the title of one of the last poems of Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915), a young Scottish poet and scholar who was killed in the second year of World War I by enemy fire at the Battle of Loos. Like his contemporary and fellow poet, Wilfred Owen (also felled, three years later, on the Western Front), Sorley wrote brilliant, bitter verse about the savagery and futility of war (“When you see millions of the mouthless dead/Across your dreams in pale battalions go . . .”). In 1919, composer Charles Wood (1866-1926) set to music the final two stanzas of Sorley’s “Expectans expectavi,” creating a moving anthem that, in part, memorialized the lost generation of British youth slaughtered in The Great War. And while the first three stanzas of Sorley’s poem are a sardonic assessment of years wasted in frivolity, these final verses, interpreted through Wood’s uplifting music, manifest the poet’s inextinguishable belief that fathoms deep, beneath the superficial banality of his life, dwells the God-found chamber of his soul that “Unwitting, I keep white and whole.”
Next Sunday (March 15) three of our lead singers (alto, tenor, bass) will sing a special setting of the communion service – William Byrd’s “Mass for 3 Voices”. Byrd (1543-1623) has been called “the greatest English composer, an arbiter of the sublime and master of his craft”. We sincerely hope that this beautiful music will enhance your worship during this Lenten season.
Visit St. Barnabas on the Danforth (at Chester Station)
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