Communion Music

A couple of folks asked what I played during the distribution on 2/22. It was a Laotian tune, "SOI SUN TUD," which appears with the text "Come, all of you" in the United Methodist Hymnal (#350) of 1989. Information about the hymn online is quite limited. Here is the first (of four) stanzas:

Come, all of you, come men and women, come forward;
drink of the water provided for you;
all of you who are thirsty come to me to drink
from the water of life, provided by Jesus your Lord.

Subsequent stanzas invite "bearers of burden;" "trouble-minded;" "hungry and poor." Though not explicitly a communion hymn the concluding line of the last stanza reads, "receive the bread and the water of life."

The words were translated from Laotian by Cher Lue Vang in 1987 and are loosely based on Revelation 22.17, Matthew 11.28, John 14.27 and Isaiah 55.1-2. The poetry has an "Irregular" meter, which in practical terms means that this is the only tune that meshes easily with the lyric.

The tune is pentatonic (a common scale in folk music around the world), using the first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth tones of our western seven-tone scale. This is an E-flat pentatonic song, but the key signature is A-flat in the hymnal setting; the third and seventh tones of an E-flat scale do not appear in the melody at all. I was confident that the former missionaries in our congregation who had served in Asia would recognize the "sound" of the tune as being Asian, even if they did not know the specific tune.

As is common for me, I improvised on the tune during worship this week, rather than using a notated setting. This allows me flexibility to get in and out of the music quickly and easily as the actions of the distribution dictate. The tune has been set at least once in an arrangement by Jane Latva from Augsburg-Fortress; I may have to track it down.

For the hyper-curious, I used a mutation stop on the organ to give a distinct sound to the melody. I had on a unison flute and a rank that sounds 2 1/2 octaves higher than unison (a 2 2/3-foot stop is its organ nomenclature. Aurally one gets a good sense of unison pitch with a heavy emphasis on the harmonic fifth. It's a distinctive organ sound. (One experiences something similar in Ravel's Bolero in the sections where more than one instrument is covering the melody and playing it in different keys as when the piccolos are in G and E while the melody continues in the horns in C.) The accompanying voice on the organ was a single unison flute for the left hand and a 16-foot pedal. (I used something similar a couple of weeks ago on an Italianate Bach piece (the Siciliano from the D-minor organ concerto).

Thanks for asking about the music. I hope that even without knowing the context, it helped the listener to worship last Sunday.