This year’s Good Friday service will follow the traditional liturgy of Tenebrae for Holy Week, with readings from the Psalms and Thomas Tallis’s setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah.  In the contemplative service of Tenebrae (Latin for “darkness”), music serves as a reflection on the texts being read, and a candle is extinguished after each reading, until only one is left.  Five singers, four drawn from the choir — Megan Sharp, Steve Patek, Jonathan Schakel, and Winston Barham — along with guest Emily Stubbs, will sing music from the Renaissance by Tallis, William Byrd, Giovanni Croce, and Lodovico Viadana.

This week the choir sings an anthem based on the freedom song, “We Shall Overcome,” arranged by Tom Trenney.  “We Shall Overcome” was a popular rallying song during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but its roots extend deeper into the past.  Lyrically, the song is thought to be a descendant of the gospel hymn, “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” written by the Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley of Philadelphia in 1900.  Musically, the first half of “We Shall Overcome” resembles the African-American spiritual, “No More Auction Block,” while the second half is more or less identical to the 19th-century hymn, “I’ll Be All Right.”  Some version of the song was used in a miner’s strike in 1908 and again in the mid-1940s during a strike by tobacco workers in South Carolina.  Several participants of that strike brought the song to the union stronghold Highlander Folk School, where Zilphia Horton made it a regular part of each meeting.  Pete Seeger learned the song from Horton, changed the first line to “We shall overcome” (instead of “We will overcome”), added several more verses, and spread the song to other folk singers and activists.  The song’s popularity exploded during the 1960s, and its first line was quoted in speeches by Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This week the choir sings the anthem, “A New Magnificat,” by Carolyn Jennings.  The anthem combines the text of Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) with the Song of Hannah (1 Sam. 2:1-10).  The similarity between these two biblical texts is brought into sharp focus:  the two mothers, one from each testament, sing to each other about the graciousness of God’s salvation.  Jennings is professor emeritus at St. Olaf’s College, Northfield, Minnesota, where she taught for many years.

This week the choir sings an anthem based on William Billings’ “fuging tune” (or round), “When Jesus Wept.”  Billings was self-taught in music (having dropped out of school when his father died at age 14), but is considered the first significant American composer.  Blind in one eye, with one short leg and a withered arm, Billings was trained as a tanner, had an addiction to snuff and an “uncommon negligence of person.”  His collection, The New England Psalm-Singer (1770), was the first printed book of American music.  The frontispiece was engraved by Paul Revere, and Billings delayed publication a year until he could get American-made paper.  Billings composed both music and words (based on John 11:35) for “When Jesus Wept.”  The arrangement sung by the choir is by the American composer Fred Bock.