THE COURAGE IN LIFE FOR OTHERS

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Douglas Guest (1916-1996) was an English organist, conductor, teacher and composer. During the Second World War he served as a Major in the Royal Artillery and was involved in the battle for the liberation of Caen, Normandy. He was twice severely wounded, sustaining a leg injury which left him with a permanent, though eventually slight limp. His first major appointment came in 1945 as Director of Music at Uppingham School. From there he became Organist of Salisbury Cathedral, a post which he held from 1950 until 1957, before moving to become Organist and Master of the Choristers at Worcester Cathedral. His final post was as Organist and Master of the Choristers at Westminster Abbey from 1963 until 1981. He was also a professor at the Royal College of Music and an examiner for the Royal College of Organists. His most well-known composition is a setting of Laurence Binyon’s poem, “For the Fallen”, composed in 1971 for the Choir of Westminster Abbey.

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) was an English poet, dramatist, and art scholar. He wrote the poem “For the Fallen” in mid-September 1914, a few weeks after the outbreak of World War I, while sitting on the cliff-top looking out to sea towards the north Cornish coastline. He was too old to enlist in the military forces, and so, went to work for the Red Cross as a medical orderly in 1916. He lost several close friends and his brother-in-law in the war. In 1939, Binyon said that the lines of the fourth stanza of his poem (“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them.”) came to him first. These words have become familiar and famous, and are often quoted or sung at Remembrance Day services.

William Croft (1678-1727) was an English organist and composer. He was a chorister at the Chapel Royal under John Blow, who exerted a very strong influence over all composers of this period from Purcell forwards; most of them passed through his hands at the Chapel Royal. At the age of twenty-two, Croft became Organist of St. Anne’s, Soho, and in the same year became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. A year later he became joint Organist of the Chapel Royal with Jeremiah Clarke, and then assuming sole responsibility in 1707 on the death of Clarke. In 1708 he succeeded his master, John Blow, as Organist of Westminster Abbey and Master of the Children and Composer to the Chapel Royal, retaining these positions until his death in 1727. He was buried in Westminster Abbey in the north aisle, where his monument can still be seen. Croft is best remembered today for his church music; several of his hymn tunes are still in use today, as are some of his anthems, but he is remembered almost exclusively as a composer of church music. One of Croft’s most enduring pieces is the hymn tune “St. Anne”, written to the poem “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” by Isaac Watts.

John Rutter (b. 1945) is an English composer, conductor, editor, arranger, and record producer, mainly of choral music. He studied music at Clare College, England, and later became the College’s first full-time Director of Music in 1975, leading the Choir to international prominence. In 1981 he founded his own professional choir, the Cambridge Singers, with which he has made many recordings of the sacred choral repertoire. Rutter’s music is very well known and much beloved in choral circles, and is performed worldwide. His larger-scale works – particularly his Gloria (1974), Requiem (1985), and Magnificat (1990) are also well established in the choral repertoire, and the late Sir David Willcocks considered him to be the most gifted composer of his generation.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) was an English Christian minister, hymn writer, theologian, and logician. He was a prolific and popular hymn writer and is credited with some 750 hymns. He is recognized as the “Godfather of English Hymnody”. Many of his hymns remain in use to this day and have been translated into numerous languages.

In Flanders Fields was written for Fairlawn Avenue Senior Choir and first sung on Remembrance Day Sunday, 1986. With the exception of one year, it has been a part of Fairlawn’s Remembrance Day services ever since.

John McCrae (1872-1918) was born in Guelph, Ontario, and was a poet, doctor, and soldier who fought in WWI. It is believed that he began the draft for “In Flanders Fields” on the evening of May 2, 1915, during the second week of fighting the second battle of Ypres, and that the death of his friend Alexis Helmer was the inspiration. The exact details of when the first draft was written may never be known because there are varying accounts by those who were with McCrae at that time. In June of 1915, he was moved to the medical corps and stationed in Boulogne, France, where he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel, and placed in charge of medicine at the Number 3 Canadian General Hospital. He was promoted to the acting rank of Colonel on January 13, 1918, and named Consulting Physician to the British Armies in France. However, the years of war had worn McCrae down. He contracted pneumonia that same day, and later came down with cerebral meningitis. On January 28, 1918, he died at the military hospital in Wimereux and was buried there with full military honours. His poem “In Flanders Fields” has attained iconic status in Canada, and is a staple of Remembrance Day ceremonies throughout Canada and abroad.

Calixa Lavallée (1842-1891) was a French Canadian composer, pianist, conductor, teacher, and administrator. A pioneer in music in both Canada and the USA, he is best known for composing the music for O Canada. Referred to at the time as “Canada’s national musician”, Lavallée was asked to compose the music for a poem written by Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The song was to be performed in honour of the Congrès national des Canadiens-Français (National Congress of French Canadians), on June 24, 1880, at the same time as the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebrations. Government officials had first thought of holding a competition for a national hymn, but by January of 1980, the committee in charge decided there was not enough time. So the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec, the Honourable Théodore Robitaille, commissioned Judge Adolphe-Basilie Routhier to write a hymn and Lavallée to compose the music. English Canada probably first heard O Canada when schoolchildren sang it for the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall (later King George V and Queen Mary) when they toured Canada in 1901. It officially became the national anthem of Canada in 1980, after a vote in the Senate and the House of Commons. The same 1980 Act of Parliament also changed some of the English lyrics. A slight alteration to the English lyrics was made again in 2018, but the original French lyrics and melody have remained unchanged since 1880.

Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848-1918) was an English composer, teacher, and historian of music. As a composer, he is best known for the choral song Jerusalem, (hear this morning to a text by Carl P. Daw, Jr) and his 1902 setting for the coronation anthem I Was Glad. He also composed the music for Ode to Newfoundland, the provincial anthem for Newfoundland and Labrador. Among those who studied under Parry at the Royal College of Music were Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and John Ireland. Some of his contemporaries rated him as the finest English composer since Purcell, and his influence on later composers is widely recognized.

Jantz A. Black was for many years the Organist and Director of Music at First United Methodist Church in Midland, Michigan. In July 2019, he became Director of Music Ministries at Orchard United Methodist Church in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Reverend Fred Kaan (1929-2009) was the foremost of a new generation of post-second world war hymn writers expressing the dreams of an emerging new humanity. His theology reflected a God committed to, and immersed in a world crying out to be set free from every form of injustice. Kaan was born in Haarlem in the Netherlands, and his teenage experience of Nazi occupation never left him. His parents were deeply involved in the resistance movement, with weapons hidden under their floor. At one point, a deputy German commandant who was a secret anti-Nazi, helped to protect them as they successfully hid a young Jewish woman and a political prisoner who had escaped from Belsen. Three of his grandparents died from starvation shortly before the war’s end. “Emerging from the war a committed pacifist, I became interested in the faith and began the study of theology and psychology at Utrecht University,” he is quoted as saying. He wrote six collections of hymn texts, many of which have translated into a number of languages. One of his most well known hymns is “For the Healing of the Nations”.

The Reverend Dr. Carl P. Daw, Jr. (b. 1944) is a hymn writer and former Executive Director of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Daw grew up in a succession of towns in Tennessee where his father was a Baptist pastor. He received his undergraduate education at Rice University, his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and his M.Div. at the School of Theology of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. His texts appear in most denominational and ecumenical hymnals published in North America, and can also be found in hymnals in England, Scotland, and Australia. Many of his hymn texts have been translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese.

Henry Purcell (1659-1695) is regarded by many today as the finest and most original English composer of his day. Although his life was brief, he left a large body of work. His father was employed at the Chapel Royal, a training ground for court musicians, and Henry was a chorister there as a young boy. After his voice changed, he continued to work for the court in a variety of music positions. These positions included keeper of the king’s instruments, organist, composer, and organ tuner. Purcell’s most important appointments were as organist for Westminster Abbey and organist for the Chapel Royal. He spent his entire life in Westminster, employed in the service of King James II, King William III, and Queen Mary. There is hardly a department of music, as known in his day, to which Purcell did not contribute with true distinction. His anthems have long since been accorded their place in the great music of the church; as well, he wrote incidental stage music for the theatre, chamber music, keyboard works, and songs. His one true opera, Dido and Aeneas, is an enduring masterpiece. To honour his stature as the most important English composer of his day, he was buried under the organ of Westminster Abbey.

Edward Elgar (1857-1943) was an English composer whose works in the orchestral idiom of late 19th-century Romanticism – characterized by bold tunes, striking colour effects, and mastery of large forms, stimulated a renaissance of English music. In fact, Elgar was the first English composer of international stature since Henry Purcell (1659-1695), and liberated his country’s music from its insularity. The son of an organist and music dealer, he left school at age 15 and worked briefly in a lawyer’s office. He was an excellent violinist, played the bassoon, and spent periods as a bandmaster and church organist, but had no formal training in composition. After working in London (1889-1891), Elgar went to Worcestershire and began to establish a reputation as a composer. One of his most popular works is his D Major Pomp and Circumstance March which contains the famous trio section that was later to become Land of Hope and Glory. Elgar appreciated its worth: he had prophesied:”I’ve got a tune that will knock ‘em flat! … a tune that comes once in a lifetime.” His Enigma Variations for orchestra are based on the countermelody of an unheard theme, which he said was a well-known theme he would not identify – hence the “enigma”. Repeated attempts to discover it have been unsuccessful. Elgar was knighted in 1904, and in 1928 he was created Knight Commander of the Victorian Order.