A Grace Unknown
By Richard Kosowski
Interim Minister of Music
This week’s anthem, “Pavonne,” by Andrea Klouse, holds a special place in my spiritual and musical heart and mind. The anthem is a setting of the familiar text “Alas, and Did My Savior Bleed” (originally titled, “Godly Sorrow Arising from the Sufferings of Christ”) taken from the six-stanza hymn written and published in 1707 by Isaac Watts.
Chris Fenner in Hymnology Archive, summarizes Watts’ hymn text as follows: “At its core, it is a hymn of wonder, reverence, and amazement at how the Saviour of humankind would die for…us. The final two stanzas are especially emotive and show a raw outpouring of grief and gratitude.”
Klouse takes some liberties with the text setting itself, rearranging stanzas of the original text and paraphrasing other lines of Watts’ hymn. For me too, the hymn text is about our wonder and reverence for the unfathomable sacrifice of God’s Son on the cross and our amazement at, in Watts’ own words, a “grace unknown” promised through the forgiveness of our sins through Jesus’ sacrifice.
Alas, and did my Savior bleed, and did my Sovereign die?
Would He, His sacred head devote to sinners such as I?
A pavane (an alternate spelling “pavonne” is used by composer Klouse) is a solemn, processional dance that has its origins in either Renaissance Spain or Italy, as we hear examples of the dance contemporaneously in both countries. The dance is usually in a 2/2 meter (1-2, 1-2, etc.), but in the case of our anthem, it is in a 3/2 meter, very similar to the rhythm of Henry Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament” and more relevant to our discussion, J.S. Bach’s setting of the “Crucifixus” movement of his monumental Mass in B-minor.
Amazing pity! And grace unknown! He suff’red for me!
Klouse’s musical setting of the text certainly demonstrates the “raw outpouring of grief” and pain at Jesus’ crucifixion, throughout the anthem with its unceasing rhythm of 1 and 2 and 3 and, 1 and 2 and 3 and…. However, it feels like the vaults of heaven and the gates of hell open following the text “He suff’red for me!” The organ thunders and cries out at the horror of this moment, just as I imagine Jesus’ mother Mary, her sister Mary, Clopas’ wife, Mary the Magdalene, and John also cried out as they witnessed the awful scene. Listen for the unrelenting pounding of the nails into Jesus’ flesh in the pedal and left hand of the organ accompaniment. Yet, there is also a majestic beauty in Klouse’s melodic line as the pedal slowly descends towards death, the line finally exhausting itself before the choir’s entrance about two-thirds way into the anthem as it sings:
Yet drops of grief can ne’er repay the debt of love I owe.
Here, Lord, I give myself away, ‘tis all that I can do.
The first time I sang this anthem, the text, and the music shook my soul, moving me to tears. They still do.
There is no sacrifice that I could offer God that would match the sacrifice of Jesus. But I can offer myself, my whole being, my heart, and my soul through my faith and acts of devotion. After all, isn’t that what we’ve been preparing for over these forty days of Lent? I hope the choir’s musical offering this blessed Palm Sunday moves and transforms you as much as it has the choir as we’ve rehearsed this beautiful piece of music in preparation for Sunday’s worship service and our entrances into Jerusalem as we experience the events of Holy Week with hearts full of awe, wonder, and gratitude.
