June 25, 2023

Music Box

June 25, 2023

Jubal Joslyn, tenor

Cathryn Wilkinson, piano and organ

Let Music Awake!

Prelude

Simple Gifts……Shaker song, arr. Aaron Copland

Songs of Travel……R. V. Williams

6. The Infinite Shining Heaven

2. Let Beauty Awake

All My Trials……Traditional

Deep River……Arr. Harry T. Burleigh

Offertory

A Shropshire Lad……George Butterworth

II. “Loveliest of Trees

Postlude

Toccata on “Amazing Grace”……Denis Bédard

 

Today’s music includes a preview of American popular traditions that will be featured in concert here at Church in the Forest, Sunday, July 2 at 3 p.m.  In addition, we also hear poetry of renowned poets.  John Milton, who is better known for his epic poem, Paradise Lost, set 19 Psalms to verse and published them in Poems in English and Latin, (London, 1673). Today we sing his paraphrase of Psalm 136, “Let us with a gladsome mind.”   For tenor solo, we hear “Simple Gifts,” written by a Shaker elder from a village in Maine, and “All My Trials,” a Bahamian lullaby popular among American folk artists in the 1960s.  Both “All My Trials” and “Deep River” overlapped with the African American music tradition.  From the British Isles comes classic poetry by A. E. Housman (A Shropshire Lad), whose career was spent at Cambridge, and Robert Louis Stevenson (Songs of Travel), the native Scotsman and world traveler.  Housman pulls it all together with this quote:

“And malt does more than Milton can

To justify God’s ways to man.”