Voluntary    Air from Suite for Organ   Florence Price (1887-1953)

Florence Price was an American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Price was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. Price composed over 300 works. In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers was found in her abandoned summer home.

Processional Hymn 535    Ye servant of God, your Master proclaim    Paderborn

Gloria S280     Robert Powell (b.1932)

Sequence Hymn 371    Thou, whose almighty word    Moscow

Offertory Music    Precious Lord, take my hand    George Allen (1812-1877), arr. Roy Ringwald (1910-1995)
Text by Thomas A. Dorsey, adapted by Joyce Merman following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Bring me home through the night,
Through the dark, through the storm, to thy light.
I have been to the mount, I have seen the promised land,
Precious Lord, precious Lord, take my hand.

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Bring thy child home at last,
Where the strife and the pain are all past:
I have dreamed a great dream that thy love shall rule our land,
Precious Lord, precious Lord, take my hand.

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Take thy child unto Thee,
With my dream of a world that is free;
For that day when all flesh joins the glory thou hast planned,
Precious Lord, precious Lord, take my hand.

Choir leaders everywhere rated Roy Ringwald as one of the most accomplished arrangers of our time. He joined Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians as a singer and arranger in 1935. He arranged Julia Ward Howe’s The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which was performed by Waring’s Pennsylvanians on radio June 22, 1943. By 1962, one million copies of Ringwald’s arrangement had been sold. His music studies were limited to the elementary courses he received in parochial and public schools. Thereafter, he studied on his own. Following high school, he went directly into a professional career as performer and arranger, organizing his own professionally successful groups. He continued to write music until his death.

Sanctus  S130    Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Fraction anthem S164    Jesus, lamb of God     Franz Schubert

Communion Anthem    They cast their nets    arr. Michael McCabe (b. 1941)
Text: William Alexander Percy (1885–1942)

They cast their nets in Galilee
Just off the hills of brown
Such happy simple fisherfolk
Before the Lord came down

Contented peaceful fishermen
Before they ever knew
The peace of God That fill’d their hearts
Brimful and broke them too.

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail,
Homeless, in Patmos died.
Peter, who hauled the teeming net,
Head-down was crucified.

The peace of God, it is no peace,
But strife closed in the sod,
Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing–
The marvelous peace of God.

Communion Hymn 325 Let us break bread together on our knees Let Us Break Bread

Hymn in Procession 7    Christ, whose glory fills the skies    Ratisbon

Voluntary    Toccato from Suite for Organ    Florence Price