The Great Litany and The Holy Eucharist: Rite II on Lent 1, March 9, at Calvary Episcopal Church

The Great Litany and The Holy Eucharist: Rite II on The First Sunday in Lent, March 9, 2025 at 11 a.m., at Calvary Episcopal Church, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Rev. Deanna J. Briody, Curate, was the preacher. Assisting: The Rev. Jonathon W. Jensen, Rector, The Rev. Cameron J. Soulis, Senior Associate Rector, The Rev. Bonnie-Marie Yager-Wiggan, Associate Rector, The Rev. Geoffrey S. Royce, Deacon, Alan Lewis, Organist. Musical Notes: The Preludes are based on a sixteenth-century Lutheran chorale, Von Gott will ich nicht lassen. Buxtehude’s setting presents the melody in the topmost voice, somewhat ornamented, and accompanied by figuration derived from the successive melodic phrases. Bach’s setting probably originated during his years as the Organist to the ducal court of Weimar, in the 1710s; he included the piece in the large, retrospective compilation of his own chorale-based organ music that he collected in the late 1740s. Here, the two hands present a mildly decorative three-voice imitative texture, through which the successive strains of the chorale melody appear, heard on a contrasting sound, played by the feet. The text of the first stanza of the chorale embodies the quiet reliance upon God that Bach’s prose writings suggest was part of his constant outlook: From God I’ll not be parted, for he will not leave me, he leads me on the pathway, whence I would elsewise stray. He reaches out his hand to me. By morning or by evening he takes good care of all my needs, wherever I may be. William Byrd’s Emendemus in melius is a setting for five voice-parts of a text drawn from the medieval Lenten liturgy. Unlike much of Byrd’s vocal music, which proceeds as a series of brief sections structured around the imitation of a brief theme or motif, heard successively in the various voice parts, the texture here is much more continuous and hymn-like. The expressive power comes in his careful deployment of harmony, and especially the occasional dissonances that arise by the movement of individual voices, and by his strategic “ruffling” of the texture through moments when one voice or another leads or follows the pack. Henry Purcell’s Hear My Prayer is a tantalizingly incomplete work. It is thought to date from the beginning of the composer’s tenure as the Organist of Westminster Abbey, in the early 1680s. (Purcell was born in 1659, and died in 1695, so although he assumed that appointment at a very young age, he was already well past the midpoint of his ultimate lifespan.) In its autograph manuscript, the piece is followed by several blank leaves, suggesting that much more music could have been planned; its scoring, for eight voice-parts, points to the kind of monumental scale that Purcell might have had in mind for such a work. Bach’s Fantasie in C minor is another musical torso. (The Fantasie itself is complete, but only the beginning of a fugal companion-piece survives, in too fragmentary a state for performance.) Even without an accompanying Fugue, the Fantasie projects an imposing grandeur, its imitative texture constantly propelled forward by expressively dissonant harmony, sometimes over long pedal-points. Visit our website at http://www.calvarypgh.org Download the bulletin for this service at https://www.calvarypgh.org/bulletins-... Visit our YouTube page where you will find an archive of our services, sermons, and classes at    / @calvaryepiscopalchurchpitt207