Please turn to Number 62 and join with the clarinets in, “O Christ, Our King”.
Number: 62 (Second Tune)
First Line: O Christ, Our King
Name: GRACE CHURCH
Meter: L.M.
Music: Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, 1757-1831
Text: St. Gregory, 540-604
Tr. Ray Palmer, 1808-87
I did continue my experiments with velocity in the above version, not to mentions a bit of a crazy saxhouse coda. Despite how it sounds, I did not speed it up with editing effects, but there are about 8 soprano sax parts screaming together at the very top of their range, along with 4 clarinet parts. In any case, you may have better luck singing along with this version:
Clarinet arrangement: 062b-ochristourking
I found a whole article just about this hymn, “O Christ, Our King, Creator, Lord”
In his Table Talk Luther called the Latin hymn on which ours is based “the best hymn of all.” For theological and poetic richness Ray Palmer’s translation may be unequaled among Good Friday hymns. But the very multiformity of its riches makes it hard to set to music. Since every stanza of a hymn is sung to a single repeated melody, good hymn-poets, anticipating the limitations of this strophic approach, try to structure their stanzas similarly so that one size will fit all. We then can select a tune to make the most of any parallels, such as when climactic words occur in the same place from stanza to stanza. If Palmer consciously sought such parallels, he settled for parallels of the paradoxical sort. How can anybody compose a musical gesture to fit both “yield up thy breath” and “by thy mighty power defend” (line 3 in the last two stanzas)? Or “the world grew dark as shades of death” and “reign through ages without end” (line 4 in the last two stanzas)? The best tune, in addition to realizing the usual ideals of singability and distinctiveness, must employ gestures capable of bearing opposite meanings.
Which commentary, I suppose, requires me to include the text, originally by St. Gregory, aka “Gregory the Great”.
O Christ, our King, Creator, Lord,
Savior of all who trust thy word,
to them who seek thee ever near,
now to our praises bend thine ear.In thy dear cross a grace is found
(it flows from every streaming wound)
whose pow’r our inbred sin controls,
breaks the firm bond, and frees our souls.Thou didst create the stars of night;
yet thou hast veiled in flesh thy light,
hast deigned a mortal form to wear,
a mortal’s painful lot to bear.When thou didst hang upon the tree,
the quaking earth acknowledged thee;
when thou didst there yield up thy breath,
the world grew dark as shades of death.Now in the Father’s glory high,
great Conqu’ror, nevermore to die,
us by thy mighty pow’r defend,
and reign through ages without end.
Oh, uh, yeah, Gregory the Great, as in “Gregorian Chant”!
Pope Saint Gregory I (Latin: Gregorius I; c. 540 – 12 March 604), commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great,[1] was pope of the Catholic Church from 3 September 590 to his death in 604. Gregory is famous for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to convert a pagan people to Christianity.[2] Gregory is also well known for his writings, which were more prolific than those of any of his predecessors as pope.[3] He is also known as the Great Visionary of Modern Educational System, for his writings and contribution to the school system of education instead of apprenticeships based learning. The epithet Saint Gregory the Dialogist has been attached to him in Eastern Christianity because of his Dialogues. For this reason, English translations of Eastern texts will sometimes list him as Gregory “Dialogos” or the Latinized equivalent “Dialogus”.
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The mainstream form of Western plainchant, standardized in the late 9th century,[44] was attributed to Pope Gregory I and so took the name of Gregorian chant. The earliest such attribution is in John the Deacon’s 873 biography of Gregory, almost three centuries after the pope’s death, and the chant that bears his name “is the result of the fusion of Roman and Frankish elements which took place in the Franco-German empire under Pepin, Charlemagne and their successors”.[45]
