Category: Worship Music

Hello, everyone. The fourth Sunday of Easter is often known as ‘Good Shepherd Sunday’, so all our music in today’s sequence is related to this theme. We begin with an arrangement for piano solo of Bach’s ‘Sheep may safely graze’. In its original form this is a soprano aria from the composer’s 1713 ‘Hunting Cantata’ (Was...

Hello, everyone. You may remember the inspiring Amazing Grace Pilgrimage back in September 2019, when people walked from Christ the Cornerstone to Olney, ‘home’ of Amazing Grace. The walk concluded with a lovely service in the Church of SS Peter and Paul, Olney, in which our musicians took part. In our morning service today we heard...

Hello, everyone. Our music this evening continues to celebrate the joy of the Resurrection! We begin with a short improvisation that I created at home just before Easter on the ancient French carol melody ‘Noel Nouvelet’. In France the tune is well-known as a popular Christmas carol, but in England we more often associate it with...

Hello, everyone, and Happy Easter! The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!! We begin this sequence with Bach’s great choral prelude ‘Christ lag in Todesbanden’ based on one of the finest resurrection hymns of the Lutheran Church. The chorale melody is underpinned with a driving contrapuntal motif, passed between alto, tenor and pedal. In...

Warm greetings, all. I have crafted this offering of music around the key of F (major and minor), which I hope will lend unity and integrity to the sequence as a whole. We begin with one of the beautiful chorale preludes from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein, written for the Church in Weimer around 1716.  The chorale melody, gently elaborated,...

Greetings, all. On Mothering Sunday our thoughts turn to Mary, Mother of Jesus. The first item in our sequence of music for this day is Healey Willan’s Chorale Prelude based on the fourteenth-century German tune ‘Quem Pastores’. Many of us will associate the tune with Percy Dearmer’s beautiful text Jesus, good above all other gentle Child...

Warm greetings, Friends. In the Lutheran Church, the singing of a hymn is introduced not by a simple ‘play over’ of the tune, but more often by a complex elaboration of the melody, either composed or improvised.  Bach wrote several hundred such chorale preludes, covering the complete spectrum of the liturgical year.  ‘Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen sein’...

In St Mark’s Gospel chapter 8, set for the second Sunday of Lent, Jesus declares: ‘Anyone who wants to be a follower of mine must renounce self; he must take up his cross and follow me. Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the...

Good evening, friends. The six suites for unaccompanied cello by J.S. Bach are among the most ingenious and inspired of all his compositions. Written exactly 300 years ago, when Bach was Kappellmeister in Köthen, the single instrumental lines weave a miraculous pattern of implied harmonies and varied colours. The music historian Wilfred Mellers described the suites...

Before the penitential season of Lent begins, we are reminded today of the revelation of God’s glory in Christ on the Feast of Transfiguration – Jesus appears in dazzling white on the mountain with Elijah and Moses (Mark 9, 2–9). The disciples misunderstand, thinking that this is their final destination (Let us make three tabernacles, one...

Dear Friends, As you will know, we are currently in the season of Candlemas, which began last Tuesday with the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. St Luke (Chapter 2) recounts how Jesus was brought by his parents to the temple in Jerusalem, and greeted by the aged Simeon who declared the young child ‘a light...