Day of Pentecost

May 19^th, 2024

10am

 

 

Prelude: I’ll Fly Away, arr. Tammy Waldrop

 

Tammy Waldrop

This week’s prelude I’ll Fly Away,  will be offered by the Trinity Ringers. In this arrangement by local composer Tammy Waldrop, you will hear a fun malleted bass line, reminiscent of an upright bass. Tammy prefaced this piece with these words, “In my other life I am a 5-string banjo picker”. You can almost hear a banjo playing along!

 Tammy is a graduate of Baylor University with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Music Theory with an emphasis in Composition. Tammy has been writing and arranging for handbells and vocal choirs since 1980, placing over 375 publications with 19 publishers. She has held music editor positions at Word music, Ring Out! Press, and Alfred Music Publishing and has served as a church musician in numerous churches in various denominations. She is a frequent clinician/director for workshops, music weeks and festivals across the country. She is past Musical Director for the Community Handbell Ensemble, Strikepoint of Texas in Kingwood. Trinity Ringers have worked several times with Tammy, and she is always great fun.

 

Offertory: Still I Sing Alleluia, Kyle Pederson

The offertory anthem will be sung by the Trinity Choir. Based on the traditional Scottish tune LOCH LOMOND,  the text by Kyle Pederson reminds us "With spirit before me, with spirit behind, with spirit below and beside me; with spirit all around, even where affliction’s found, I will sing, I will sound, “Alleluia”. With the Easter season drawing to a close, we remember that we will always sing “Alleluia”.

A program note from Kyle Pederson:

                  “I’ve always loved the Scottish melody, Loch Lomond; it’s just achingly beautiful.  The tune rarely (ever?) is performed in a worship setting, though, since the original lyrics are all about a body of water and a soldier’s plight.  So I set to work crafting lyrics that I hope speak into the turbulence and challenges we face as individuals—and as a community.”

“When questions I spin echo answerless within, even then, still I sing 'Alleluia.'" 

 

 

Postlude: VI_ Carillon De Westminster, Vierne

How Louis Vierne was inspired by the chimes of Big Ben to write his Carillon De Westminster:

Big Ben 

Big Ben Bells

 

By the time the French musician Louis Vierne arrived in England for a short recital tour in January 1924, he was already a well-known figure. Titular organist at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris since 1900, Vierne was also a celebrated composer, with four organ symphonies and a clutch of other pieces to his credit.

One of the recitals Vierne played in England was at Westminster Cathedral in London, where a new organ was being built in stages. Its designer, Henry Willis III, was at the concert and at one point he apparently hummed a tune to Vierne – who, severely sight-impaired since birth, would have been unable to read it on paper – and waited for the master organist to weave an imposing improvisation on it.

The tune Willis provided was that of the so-called ‘Westminster Quarters’, a four-note sequence struck in various permutations to mark the quarter hours on Big Ben, the clock in the Elizabeth Tower at the Houses of Parliament. The Quarters had actually originated not in London, but as a peal written in 1793 for St Mary the Great, the university church in Cambridge.

Exactly who composed the chime is uncertain, though it’s often attributed to William Crotch, an undergraduate at the time. Some hear in the initial four-note motif an echo of the aria ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’ from Handel’s Messiah, but the link is not conclusive.

We have no record of how Vierne expanded on the Quarters theme at his Westminster Cathedral concert. But its potential clearly interested him, as eight years earlier he had asked the owner of a clock shop in Switzerland where he heard the chime to write it down for him. And three years after the 1924 recital, Vierne returned to the Quarters again, in a swirlingly flamboyant work entitled Carillon de Westminster.