When I arrived at Tennessee Wesleyan University, I was pleased to hear that the Alma Mater tune I heard at my first summer commencement used a gorgeous tune called Hyfrydol (a Welsh word, pronounced “huh-VRUH-doll,” meaning “lovely”). Folks who sing hymns regularly know this tune as “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus,” “God the Spirit, Guide and Guardian,” “Alleluia! Sing to Jesus!” and “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.”

In 2016, Tennessee Wesleyan College became Tennessee Wesleyan University. This name change rendered the previous Alma Mater useless, since it had a rhyme on the “C” of “T. W. C.”

Our strong band can ne’er be broken
Formed at T. W. C.
Far surpassing wealth unspoken
Sealed by loyalty.

Refrain
Lift the chorus, speed it onward,
Loud her praises be;
Hail to thee our Alma Mater!
Hail to T. W. C.

School life here at best is passing,
Fast the moments flee.
Let us pledge in work and deed
Our love for T. W. C.

Refrain

One of the music professors, Keith Wheeler, adapted the old Alma Mater (which was using Cornell’s Alma Mater tune) to conform to the school’s new name, and chose Hyfrydol for its new tune. This single verse served us well for several years, but it always struck me as a bit too short at one verse:

Our strong band can ne’er be broken
formed at Tennessee Wesleyan.
Far surpassing wealth unspoken,
Light and Truth united as one.
Lift the chorus, speed it onward,
let us pledge in word and deed:
Hail to thee, our Alma Mater,
loud her praises ever be.

“Light and Truth” is a reference to our university motto, “Lux et veritas.” He also fixed “work and deed,” which made little sense. The whole second stanza was omitted, since it was a bit depressing. It isn’t as important to remember how fleeting the school days are, I think, but rather to invest in each other and to the program to grow in life, which includes those school days. Life happens wherever you are, after all.

There are some natural challenges with this text, such as having a dactyl “Tennessee” that does not sound natural anywhere you thread it into the tune, other than to speed up the rhythm on just that one word. To write a second verse, I would need to mimic that dactyl in the same spot. The same thing happens at “united as.” Thus the text doesn’t conform exactly to the 8.7.8.7D (eight syllables, seven syllables, eight, seven, double) meter that Hyfrydol typically uses. Instead, it is technically LM (four eight-syllable lines) followed by 8.7.8.7.

So on a lark, I started drafting a second verse to lengthen the song and express more of what goes on at our ceremonies. Here’s what I came up with:

Our best memories live surrounded
By the hackberry and the oak.
May our lives, like them, be grounded,
Deeper roots in Truth we invoke.
Let each spark begin to glimmer,
Every falsehood we will shed;
Let the Light within us shimmer,
Then from mountains will it spread.

So, here, I’ve retained the dactyl with “hackberry” and with “Truth we in-,” so that the two stanzas follow the same pattern. The hackberry and oak are two symbols of the university represented in a legend about star-crossed lovers being buried underneath those two trees. It is also on the seal of the university as two crossed boughs with their respective leaves. So I refer to them as symbols of being deeply stable through anchoring to Truth. The second half deals with something we symbolize each year through our honor code signing ceremony and the commencement ceremony, when we light candles as a faculty and pass them on to the graduates while a song is sung. Mountains obviously refers to our situation within the foothills of the Appalachian mountains.

So here’s the tune:

It has been received well. Hopefully it maintains a sense of idealism to the work done learning the liberal arts.

At some point, one of the alumnae of Tennessee Wesleyan University shared a handwritten manuscript of a fight song for our school. No one had heard of it, so I typeset it and inserted it into our annual Homecoming concert last October. It looked like this:

When the concert came, our accompanist improvised a lovely piano part for it and we gave it a solid go:

Fight! Fight!

To begin with, the Episcopal Church is quite new to me, other than having sung in a lot of Anglican services with touring choirs during my college days. Earlier this year, I was asked if I may be interested in stepping in as the music director at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Athens, Tennessee. I had avoided a church post for a while, enjoying visiting loads of different churches (I think I visited around 30 churches in East Tennessee in my first year here) and the regular Wednesday night bagpipe practice in Chattanooga with the Shriners. However, I knew that this church post would probably be a great deal of fun, so I jumped in. I had already made several friends at that church, not to mention several friends in the Episcopal music circles of Chattanooga through singing with Chorus Angelorum and the Chattanooga Bach Choir. I figured I wouldn’t be a fish out of water entirely.

I was raised Methodist and spent fourteen years serving in one capacity or another at First United Methodist Church in Baton Rouge. That was helpful experience for this job, which consists of quite a bit more than what I learned in music school! So, what have I figured out so far about how to put together the musical side of a Sunday service in these last few months? Here is my current understanding:

An Episcopal Sunday service has two basic parts: the proclamation of the Word (readings, sung responses, sermon, prayers, and so forth) and the Eucharist (a reenactment of Jesus’s last supper with his disciples).

Generally, two hymns happen in the proclamation of the word section and two hymns happen in the communion section. The Episcopal Church has resources to narrow down hymns to usually about 40 applicable options in its three usual hymnals, The Hymnal 1982, Wonder, Love, and Praise, and Lift Every Voice and Sing II. The fun is choosing hymns that draw the most direct connections to the lectionary readings and the emphases that will likely occur, keeping them accessible but still interesting. Sometimes that involves putting a good text to a more familiar tune thanks to bulletin inserts!

The first section of the service consists most reliably on four scriptural readings that are set by the lectionary. If one wanted to deliver another lesson than that from the lectionary, it would require permission from the Bishop, who presides over the region, called a diocese. Before the scriptures are things that prepare us to hear it: a prelude, a processional hymn with relevant text, an opening acclamation, a collect (prayer) for purity, a “Gloria” or hymn of praise, and a daily collect (set by the Book of Common Prayer, which orders the rituals of the Episcopal Church). That primes everyone up for being in the right mental and emotional place to hear and read the lessons. We read three first, usually an Old Testament reading immediately followed by a psalm (usually read responsively, but one can deliver a psalm in any appropriate way), which is immediately followed by a reading from the New Testament that isn’t the Gospel. The people respond to those first readings with a hymn, which we call a “sequence hymn,” since it both responds to everything before it and prepares us for what follows. What follows is the prescribed reading from the gospel, to which we respond with a very brief musical reflection on it. Next is a sermon that comments on the readings and contextualizes them for the people. Next is the Nicene Creed, followed by a set of prayers, which are enunciated by a pre-selected group of readings scattered around the room. What follows is a prescribed prayer of confession and one of absolution, then the passing of the peace, which asserts that everyone in the room is in right relation one with the other before proceeding to the second part of the service (the supper).

So here’s today’s readings and responses to get a sense of it.

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