Aug 11, 2021 | #118 Piping Up! Organ Concerts at Temple Square
Piping Up! Organ Concerts at Temple Square is streamed online every Wednesday at 12:00 noon MDT. Piping Up! can be viewed on TheTabernacleChoir.org, the Choir’s YouTube channel, the Choir’s Facebook page, and Broadcasts.ChurchofJesusChrist.org. When concerts are concluded, they are available for on-demand viewing on the Choir’s website, YouTube and Facebook.
These programs continue the tradition of noon organ recitals at Temple Square—a tradition that has lasted for more than a century. The concerts are produced without an audience and comply with all COVID-19 guidelines. Each concert will feature a different Tabernacle or Temple Square organist and is hosted by Luke Howard.
Repertoire
Organist: Andrew Unsworth
1. In Christ There Is No East or West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gilbert M. Martin
2. a. Trumpet Voluntary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Thomas Dupuis
b. Master Tallis's Testament . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Herbert Howells
3. a. Come, Come, Ye Saints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . arr. by organist
b. Prospect of Heaven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .arr. by organist
4. Allegro, from Symphony no. 2†. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Louis Vierne
† LISTENER REQUESTED SELECTION Go to the Piping Up! web page to make your request!
Focus Piece
An on-going feature of Piping Up! Organ Concerts at Temple Square is a focus piece with additional inspirational background on a specific repertoire selection. Written by host Luke Howard, a professor of music at Brigham Young University, the focus piece connects the music in a unique way to lift and inspire listeners.
“In Christ There Is No East or West” (arr. Unsworth)
This story begins with an Irish melody that was brought to the United States, where it was adapted into an African-American spiritual, “The Angels Changed My Name.” Later, the mixed-race English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor came across this tune on one of his tours of North America, and arranged it for piano, publishing it in 1905.
Coleridge-Taylor’s father was a Krio from Sierra Leone, a descendent of freedmen who had been released from slavery in America at the end of the Revolutionary War, and had returned to live in Africa. Coleridge-Taylor’s musical training in London was thoroughly classical, European-style, but he began developing an interest in his father’s ancestry, prompting this growing fascination with the music of enslaved African-Americans. He started to incorporate spirituals into his own compositions, and advocate powerfully for the culture of historically oppressed peoples.
A few years later, in 1908, the English novelist and poet William Arthur Dunkerley published a hymn text, “In Christ There Is No East or West.” His words celebrate the global fellowship of all believers, transcending nationality, race, and culture. The third verse in Dunkerley’s hymn proclaims boldly:
Join hands then, brothers of the faith,
Whate'er your race may be:
Who serves my Father as a son
Is surely kin to me.1
In recent hymnals that verse is updated to be even more inclusive.
In 1939, the great Black singer and arranger Harry T. Burleigh adapted the melody of that same old spiritual that had inspired Coleridge-Taylor, and fitted it to Dunkerley’s text. In that form, the hymn “In Christ There Is No East or West” was published in “The Hymnal” of the American Episcopal Church in 1940.
How fitting to bring together this text, which decries racism and draws all believers into a fellowship of love, with a tune that began in Ireland, and was adapted into an African-American spiritual. How remarkable that this tune was popularized by an English-born composer of African descent, whose ancestors had been enslaved in the United States. And how proper that it was Harry Burleigh, also descended from enslaved ancestors, who brought this text and music together, further confirming the international and intercultural history of this hymn. This is a mighty demonstration of St. Paul’s directive to the Ephesians to collaborate and cooperate in faith, in spite of political borders and cultural differences: “Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.”2