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Home / Worship and Music / Choir

Music Notes for February 28

February 25, 2021 by Megan Sharp

This week the choir will participate in worship, virtually, singing Psalm 23: The Lord Is My Shepherd.  This setting of Psalm 23 is an African-American spiritual arranged by Larry J. Long, the Organist and Choirmaster at the Church of the Epiphany in New York City.  The combined choirs of Adults and Singers studied and recorded their portions of this song at home.  Our skilled technician, Matt Lyons, brought all of these recordings together and aligned parts to combine our individual voices into a virtual choir.  This week’s prelude is an organ setting of another African-American spiritual, Fix Me, Jesus, arranged by J. Roland Braithwaite (b. 1927), an African-American organist composer who taught at Talladega College in Alabama.

Filed Under: Choir, Music Notes, Worship and Music

Music Notes for February 21

February 18, 2021 by Megan Sharp

This week’s anthem is an arrangement of the well-known spiritual, “I want Jesus to walk with me.”  Like many African-American spirituals, “I want Jesus to walk with me” has no known author and is essentially a folk song, part of a shared response to the experience of hardship and oppression.  Many variants in the text and tune exist and additional verses might be improvised.  One of the first records of the spiritual is in Dorothy Bolton and Harry Burleigh’s Old Songs Hymnal (1929), where its title is “I want Jesus to talk with me.”  The spiritual was frequently performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a group of singers formed in 1871 as a fundraising effort for Fisk University, a historically black college in Tennessee.  According to the historian Calvin Earl, on one of their early tours singing this spiritual saved the group from a hostile mob. 

Filed Under: Choir, Music Notes, Worship and Music

Music Notes for February 14

February 18, 2021 by Megan Sharp

This week in worship you will see and hear some of the Choristers using body percussion and singing Sing Alleluia! by Sue Ellen Page.  Despite the snow last Sunday, we all managed to meet in the courtyard and record this anthem together.  Sue Ellen Page was a prolific American composer of children’s anthems.  The anthem offered in worship today was first written in 1968 for the Chorister’s Guild when Ms. Page was only 18.  The Choristers Guild is an organization that, since the 1950s, supports church musicians to promote musical and spiritual growth of people of all ages through publications and educational opportunities.  In 1986 the Choristers Guild publications committee asked Ms. Page to look again at her composition because they were interested in re-printing it.  She changed the accompaniment to organ instead of guitar and updated the text while keeping the original form and fun rhythmic refrain.

Filed Under: Choir, Choristers Children's Choir, Music Notes, Worship and Music

Music Notes for February 7

February 4, 2021 by Megan Sharp

This week’s hymn, “Heal me, hands of Jesus,” was written by Michael Perry, an English clergyman and hymn writer whose most famous work is the “Calypso Carol” (“See him lying on a bed of straw”), which he wrote (words and music) for a carol concert at Oak Hill Theological College while he was a student there.  Perry’s hymn text intertwines themes of healing, forgiveness and peace.  It is set to music by Carl Haywood, an African-American organist, choral conductor, and composer who was born in Portsmouth, Virginia.  He teaches at Norfolk State University, a public, historically black university in Norfolk, Virginia.

Filed Under: Choir, Music Notes, Worship and Music

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Welcome

Bach for Lent: Mid-Week Musical Devotion

February 23, 2021 By Ashley Dunn-Jalenak 

Each Wednesday during Lent you are invited to spend some reflective time with organ music by J. S. Bach. Each week a video will be added here on the church website with a chorale prelude played on Westminster’s organ by our organist Jonathan Schakel.  March 3, 2021 Devotion This week’s chorale text takes us back to […]

Recent Posts

  • Music Notes for February 28
  • Bach for Lent: Mid-Week Musical Devotion
  • [New!] UKirk@UVA Website Has Launched!
  • Music Notes for February 21
  • Music Notes for February 14
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−1 Corinthians 13:13

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Westminster follows the Presbyterian Book of Confession and is a confessional church. You can view/read the Book of Confession at the PC(USA) website by clicking on the following link: http://www.pcusa.org/book-confessions.

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