SOUNDS OF HOLY WEEK: PALM SUNDAY
EDITOR’S NOTE: As someone who continues to be fed by the richness of the Anglican Choral Tradition, one of the biggest losses for me through this whole Coronavirus situation is that of singing some of my favorite hymns and anthems during Holy Week. As such, we here at Earth & Altar are pleased to offer Sounds of Holy Week, a set of articles that will come out five times (including today) over the next week, with thoughts from us and some of our friends about our favorite hymns and anthems of this time, alongside a YouTube playlist you can listen and sing to as you read.
“All Glory, Laud, and Honor” (St. Theodulph)
Growing up, one of my favorite moments of Palm Sunday was the children’s procession with palms to the hymn “All Glory, Laud, and Honour”. Yet, in spite of this hymn’s celebratory tone, neither its text nor its melody were composed under joyful circumstances.
The hymn tune "St. Theodulph" was composed by Melchior Teschner to the text Valet will ich dir geben, written by Valerius Herberger in 1613 as a response to a plague which killed 2,000 inhabitants of the city of Fraustadt. A century later, Johann Sebastian Bach incorporated the hymn’s third verse into his St. John Passion, sung by the choir after Pilate’s proclamation at Golgotha “What I have written, I have written.” Now known to Anglicans everywhere by John Mason Neale’s mid-nineteenth-century English translation, the Latin Gloria, laus et honor was penned by Bishop Theodulph of Orléans in 820 while wrongly jailed for suspected treason against Louis the Pious in the aftermath of Charlemagne’s death. Though we might find ourselves relating to circumstances of pestilence and solitude now more than any Holy Week before, I find comfort in the knowledge that a song of such joy in Our Lord’s kingship could spring from such times of trial.
- Phoebe Robertson
“Ride on in Majesty” (The King’s Majesty)
Palm Sunday gives me whiplash. The move from the Triumphal Entry to the narrative of the Crucifixion happens so quickly that it can be hard to understand what they’re doing in the same service. For me, “Ride On, Ride On, In Majesty” is the hymn that helps me see the connection between the palms and the Passion. I first encountered it as the hymn for a Gospel procession, and singing it as we prepared to listen to the Passion Gospel helped me understand.Holy Week is not a series of disconnected, accidental events, but a single story. It’s a story of puzzling contradictions - the “lowly pomp” with which Jesus enters Jerusalem, the ways hosannas turn to “the last and fiercest strife” of Jesus’s death - but it is still one story. The tune in the 1982 hymnal somehow captures all the moods of the week for me - the solemnity and strangeness that the church remembers - and finally, the joy of the Resurrection. So when I prepare to contemplate Christ’s mighty acts, when I remember that the Cross is the site of God’s victory, this is the hymn I turn to.
- Martin Geiger
Solus ad Victimam by Kenneth Leighton
As a singer and listener, one of my favorite tricks is where the choir moves between unison singing and dissonant harmonies. That was one of the first things that drew me into Leighton’s setting of this text by Abelard. But Leighton’s keen sense for when to pair the right harmonies and the right dynamics offers a text and tune combination that no one can match, and seems emblematic of a season like no other piece of sacred music.
Lent is contradictory. It starts quiet and reflective, can become big and loud, maybe repeat those motions a few more times, before pivoting back towards the quiet of Holy Week and then the grandiose, yet quiet, celebration that Easter is. Abelard’s text and Leighton’s music match this perfectly - we are invited to look inward through both smaller and reflective moments like “for us thy wretched folk” and larger communal moments like “why dost thou suffer torture for our sin?” Similarly, we get to suffer alongside Christ, both in the spectacle of Crucifixion (“let our hearts suffer in thy Passion, Lord) and the quiet solitude of his temptation and the inward event of a death caused by torture (“this is the night of tears”), before celebrating alongside Christ, replicating his quiet resurrection (“until the daybreak with the risen Christ”) and then the joyful “laughter of thine Easter Day”, paired with the E-major chord that knows that everything will be alright in the end. As we begin to move towards the Triduum, I continually find myself comforted by the promise of Easter waiting for us, as I think anyone does when faced with a challenging or scary situation, and this setting is continually a balm and reminder of that fact.
- Richard Pryor, III
Ride On, King Jesus by Moses Hogan
Moses Hogan’s stirring arrangement of the old negro spiritual Ride On, King Jesus has moved my spirit ever since I first heard it sung eighteen years ago on Palm Sunday, by the Peachtree Presbyterian Church Chancel Choir in Atlanta, Ga. The Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ has always featured strongly in my spirituality, as have negro spirituals. This song is a perfect anthem for Palm Sunday, as we sing hosannas to our Savior and acclaim him as universal sovereign. Yet, it only gets to half of the Palm Sunday story.
With its acclamation “King Jesus rides a milk-white horse!” and “No man cannot hinder thee!”, my heart swells with adoration and praise of our mighty Lord. Yet we know along with the hosannas came shouts of “crucify him!” Jesus Christ reigns “from the awful tree,” as another moving hymn puts it. His throne is on Calvary. This King came to die. As we enter the solemn observances of Holy Week, let us not only shout hosannas to the Lord of Hosts, but also “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness” that separate us from communion with our King, repent, and believe in the Holy Gospel. Ride On, King Jesus. Ride On.
- Rushad Thomas
“A Stable Lamp is Lighted” (Andujar)
During communion on Palm Sunday in 2014, I opened my hymnal to the number in the leaflet and found myself in the Christmas section. This can’t be right, I thought. Confusion gave way to clarity as the hymn unfolded and I found myself stopped in my metaphorical tracks, captivated by the way the text (set to a disarmingly soothing tune by David Hurd) draws the quiet, innocent scene of the Nativity alongside the raucous, violent images of Holy Week. As a newcomer to the congregation, I would later learn it was a longstanding custom to sing this hymn at communion both on Palm Sunday and Christmas Eve.
Every Holy Week and Christmas, this hymn reminds me that while the incarnation is very good news, it is not the full proclamation of how God redeems creation. The scandal of the incarnation has the refusal of God’s love in the crucifixion as its end, and by the same token, the crucifixion of Jesus gains its significance because the crucified man is God incarnate. The incarnation and the atonement are intimately linked; neither is a complete statement without the other and the possibility of the resurrection depends on them both. As we consider how to proclaim what Jesus means for the world, Richard Wilbur’s hymn deftly and poignantly keeps these two truths in view of each other lest the stars and stones proclaim what we have forgotten.
- Noah Stansbury
Today’s Authors
Phoebe Robertson is a Canadian flutist who is a DMA candidate at the Manhattan School of Music.
Martin Geiger is the Assistant Rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Winchester, Virginia.
Richard Pryor, III is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of the South and the Creative Editor for Earth & Altar.
Rushad Thomas is a Policy Advisor for The Episcopal Church, where he specializes in immigration, refugee, and human trafficking issues.
Noah Stansbury is a candidate for ordination in the Diocese of Pennsylvania and a senior in the School of Theology of the University of the South.
