This morning’s anthem and hymn texts are reprinted under onelicense.net #A-717945. We Are Not Alone – words by Pepper Choplin, © 2005 Harold Flammer Music. O God Beyond All Praising – words by Michael Perry, © 1982 Hope Publishing Company. Go to the World – words by Sylvia Dunstan, © 1991 G.I.A. Publications. All rights reserved.

♪ Music Notes ♪

ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741) was an Italian Baroque composer, virtuoso violinist, teacher, and Roman Catholic priest. Born in Venice, the capital of the Venetian Republic, he is regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe. Vivaldi’s main teacher was probably his father, Giovanni Battista, who in 1685 was admitted as a violinist to the orchestra of the San Marco Basilica in Venice. Vivaldi composed many instrumental concertos for the violin and a variety of other musical instruments, as well as numerous sacred choral works and more than forty operas. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons. Many of his compositions were written for the all-female music ensemble of the Ospedale del la Pietà, a home for abandoned children. He worked there as a Catholic priest and teacher from 1703 to 1715 and from 1723 to 1740. Vivaldi (who earned the nickname “The Red Priest”, due to his distinctive reddish hair) also had some success with expensive stagings of his operas in Venice, Mantua and Vienna. After meeting the Emperor Charles VI, he moved to Vienna, hoping for royal support. However, the Emperor died soon after Vivaldi’s arrival, and Vivaldi himself died in poverty less than a year later.

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI (ca. 1181-1226), born Giovanni di Petro di Bernardone, was an Italian Catholic friar, deacon, philosopher, mystic and preacher. He abandoned a life of luxury for a life devoted to Christianity after reportedly hearing the voice of God, who commanded him to rebuild the Christian church and live in poverty. He is the patron saint of animals and the environment.

WILLIAM HENRY DRAPER (1855-1933) was an English hymnodist and clergyman who wrote the texts for approximately sixty hymns. He is most famous for All Creatures of Our God and King, his translation of “Canticle of the Sun” by Francis of Assisi.

PEPPER CHOPLIN (b. 1957) is a full-time composer, conductor and humorist. He has gained a reputation as one of the most creative writers in church music today. With a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, he went on to earn a Master of Music degree in composition from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Much of Pepper’s creative energy goes into planning creative and vibrant worship for Greystone Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC where he is Minister of Music. Many of his anthems are born out of a need at his own church. Pepper’s chief desire is “to create music that will lead people to worship in a dramatic way.”

GUSTAV HOLST (1874-1934) was an English composer, arranger and teacher. Best known for his orchestral suite The Planets, he composed many other works across a range of genres, although none achieved comparable success. There were professional musicians in the previous three generations of Holst’s family and it was clear from an early age that he would follow the same calling. He had hoped to become a pianist but was prevented by neuritis in his right arm. Despite his father’s reservations, he pursued a career as a composer, studying at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford. Unable to support himself by his compositions, he played the trombone professionally and later became a teacher—a great one, according to his colleague Ralph Vaughan Williams. Among other teaching activities, he built up a strong tradition of performance at Morley College, where he served as musical director from 1907 until 1924 and pioneered music education for women at St Paul’s Girls’ School, where he taught from 1905 until his death. Holst’s works were played frequently in the early years of the 20th century, but it was not until the international success of The Planets in the years immediately after the First World War that he became a well-known figure. A shy man, he did not welcome this fame and preferred to be left in peace to compose and teach. In his later years, his uncompromising, personal style of composition struck many music lovers as too austere, and his brief popularity declined. Nevertheless, he was a considerable influence on a number of younger English composers, including Benjamin Britten.

RICHARD PROULX (1937-2010) was an American musician who possessed of a rare combination of talents as a composer, conductor, music editor and organist. These talents, together with wide experience across denominational lines, gave him a unique perspective of both the opportunities and the challenges found in liturgical music making. His compositional output included congregational music in every form, sacred and secular choral works, song cycles, two operas, as well as instrumental and organ music. He served as a consultant for numerous hymnals, and conducted choral festivals in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand.

MICHAEL PERRY (1942-1996) was a Church of England clergyman, and one of the leading British hymnodists of the 20th century. He was educated at Dulwich College and went on to study at University College London; Oak Hill Theological College, London; Ridley Hall, Cambridge; and the University of Southampton. In the course of his short life, Perry wrote over 300 hymn texts – the most well known being O God Beyond All Praising, set to the tune “Thaxted” (a hymn tune by the English composer Gustav Holst, based on the stately theme from the middle section of the Jupiter movement of his orchestral suite The Planets, and named after Thaxted, the English village where Holst lived much of his life.) Perry was increasingly disabled by an inoperable brain tumour that was diagnosed in early 1996, and tragically died at the age of 54 in December of 1996.

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958) was an English composer and some-time organist and choir director. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century. Vaughan Williams was born to a well-to-do family with strong moral views and a progressive social outlook. Throughout his life he sought to be of service to his fellow citizens, and believing in making music as available as possible to everybody, he wrote many works for amateur and student performance. Vaughan Williams is among the best-known British symphonists, noted for his very wide range of moods, from stormy and impassioned to tranquil, from mysterious to exuberant. Among the most familiar of his other concert works are Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and The Lark Ascending (1914). His vocal works include hymns, folk-song arrangements and both small and large-scale choral pieces. Two episodes made notably deep impressions in Vaughan Williams’ personal life. The First World War, in which he served in the army, had a lasting emotional effect. Twenty years later, though in his sixties and devotedly married, he was reinvigorated by a love affair with a much younger woman (Ursula Wood), who, by all accounts, seems to have been adopted by his wife Adeline in the most amicable way, to be her successor, and who did indeed become his second wife when Adeline passed away at the age of eighty. Vaughan Williams composed his last symphony just months before his death at the age of eighty-five.

Canadian clergywoman SYLVIA DUNSTAN (1955-1993) became one of the leading hymn writers in North America during her brief life. She was raised by her grandparents, who had Methodist and Salvation Army backgrounds, and received her formal musical education from Sister St. Gregory at St. Joseph’s convent. Growing up on the “evangelical side of the United Church of Canada,” Dunstan found her musical education at a Catholic convent expanded her spiritual as well as musical horizons. A graduate of York University with degrees in theology and divinity from Emmanuel College in Toronto led to her ordination in the United Church of Canada in 1980. She served as a prison chaplain for 10 years at a maximum-security jail in Whitby, and entered into a Masters of Theology programme at Emmanuel College, graduating with honours in 1986. She was appointed to Malvern Emmanuel United Church in Scarborough, just a few years before she was diagnosed with the cancer that tragically took her life at the young age of 38.