2021.02.21
It is the custom today in many parishes to begin the Eucharist on the First Sunday in Lent with the Great Litany. This Litany is a slightly revised version of the first official English-language liturgical text (1544), which predated the first Book of Common Prayer by some five years. Thomas Cranmer, then Archbishop of Canterbury, the senior cleric in the English Church, based it upon various earlier litanies (ultimately deriving from ancient prayers sung in procession during times of war, plague, or disaster), and it was appointed to be prayed every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday before the Eucharist (or after Morning Prayer). It formed a regular part of Anglican Sunday worship for centuries.
This very thorough form of prayer comprises four sections: an Invocation to the Trinity; the Deprecations, or prayers for deliverance; the Obsecrations, or prayers upon the person, life, and merits of Jesus Christ; and the Intercessions. It is set in our Hymnal to a very simple chant formula, and may be used as a service in its own right.
The anthem, ‘Call to remembrance, O Lord’, a setting of verses from Psalm 25 (appointed for the day), comes from the same period as the Great Litany. Its composer, Richard Farrant, was involved both in royal choral institutions and in the development of English theater. The short work is typical of the English-language anthem developing at that time, making use of simple imitative entries (one voice entering at a time, using similar music), pairwise writing, and finally more declamatory statements in which all voices move mostly together, with the last main phrase of music repeated before the final cadence. It is written in four voices or musical lines, but some ‘voices’ could easily be played on instruments, as they will be on the organ this week.
Our one hymn, ‘Forty days and forty nights’, is a heavily revised version of a text first published in the mid-nineteenth century. It connects the forty-day Lenten fast with Christ’s own time of fasting and (resistance to) temptation in the wilderness, an account of which is always read on this First Sunday in Lent. By following Our Lord in the practices of fasting and prayer, and by sharing in his own victories by his grace, the hymn suggests that we too will overcome temptation and ultimately death, and ‘appear at the eternal Eastertide’ (compare the ending of Hymn 122, upon which last week’s postlude was based).
The late-seventeenth-century tune paired with this text forms the basis of this week’s postlude by twentieth-century composer Alec Wyton. The tune is played in relatively long notes in the pedal part – a very old technique in organ music, and before that, in vocal polyphony – while a more quickly moving line is played by the two hands in canon at a distance of one beat. This music uses a number of motives derived from the tune; the rather chromatic language (the use of many notes outside the basic scale of the melody) and dissonant intervals, as well as the low range of the left-hand part, creates a somewhat brooding atmosphere.