MorningStar Music Publishers

Search by		Composer
		Product #
		Title
		Tune Name

	* Advanced Search *

A Taste of Heaven’s Joys, - Patricia Blaze Clark and Kathleen Thomerson
MSM-90-35, $12.00

Pastoral Music “Reviews”, October-November 2006 issue
by Marie Kremer

This small collection of sixteen hymns resulted from the collaboration of Patricia Blaze Clark, who wrote the texts, and Kathleen Thomerson, who wrote the tunes. (Kathleen is well known as the author and composer of the hymn “I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light.”) These hymns are appropriate for various seasons—Advent, Lent, Easter—and some specific feasts. “When Jesus Called Simon,” for example, is appropriate for the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul; “Why Are You Standing, Looking Up” is perfect for the Ascension; and there are two hymns for the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple: “When Christ Went to the Temple” and “Mary, When You Heard the Warning.” In this latter hymn, after verse references to the various sorrows of Mary, the final verse ends: “May we look to you, dear Lady, when we find ourselves in pain, seeing through your eyes of promise, knowing joy will come again.” It’s good to see Clark and Thomerson pay attention to texts for church unity, such as “When Jesus Called Simon” and “Light That Passes through a Prism.” The marriage of text and tune seems especially successful in “Long Before Creation’s Dawning”: The chant-like melody suits the text very well.

There are topical, metrical, tune, first line, and alternate tune indices. Before the hymns, there are notes on the text and tune. Each hymn text includes Scripture reference, liturgical use suggestions, and topics covered in the text. The notes on the tunes mainly explain how the tune name was chosen with some reflections on the composition.

It is well worth taking a look at the quite lovely hymns.

A Taste of Heaven’s Joys, - Patricia Blaze Clark and Kathleen Thomerson
MSM-90-35, $12.00

The Hymn, Vol. 57, No. 4; Autumn 2006 issue
by Larry Wolz

This collection brings together the talents of two Hymn Society members who, although they both lived in the same Texas city at the time, met for the first time during the Society’s conference at Wake Forest University in 2002. Theirs is not the first friendship and professional collaboration to grow from the Society’s annual summer conferences. The inspiration, education, and fellowship at our annual conferences is one of the distinctives of The Hymn Society, and collaborations that result, like this one, continue to foster the vitality of our organization and its objectives.

Patricia Blaze Clark is a relative newcomer to hymn writing. Encouraged by Hymn society members Thomas Pavlechko and Russell Schulz during her graduate studies at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, TX, she began to blend her twin passions for poetry and hymnody. Remarkably, she had two full collections of hymns published in 2005. The Still Small Voice (Selah, 2005), a collection of texts, was reviewed in the last issue of THE HYMN, and A Taste of Heaven’s Joys validates the promise of that first collection. The Rev. Dr. Williams Seth Adams, Professor-Emeritus at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, summarizes Clark’s special gifts in his preface to the collection: “There is grace and beauty here and there is nothing that cloys or rings hollow with false piety.” All of her hymns are thoroughly based in scripture and Clark provides in her “Notes on the Texts” (pp. 8-9) the scriptural references and allusions as well as a variety of useful topical categories and suggestions for liturgical use. The range and variety of these sixteen hymns certainly cannot be apprehended in such a short review, but I have chosen one of my favorites (both text and tune) as a representative example. “God’s Reign is Very Near” is one of at least two (probably three) hymns in the collection based seemingly on the traditional Trinitarian formula. But instead of the expected hymn of praise to the persons of the Trinity, we are instead told of the reign of the Kingdom from God to Christ and through the Holy Spirit. The final stanza exults:

Spirit is reigning now;
we bear upon our brow
seal of God’s promise that we have been chosen:
called to defend the poor,
knowing God’s help is sure;
strengthened, we hasten toward a new creation.

The tunes for all of Clark’s texts in this collection are provided by Kathleen Thomerson, who is organist and music director at Mt. Olive Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas. Her text setting throughout is sensitive as one would expect since she herself is also a text writer. Most of the tunes in the collection are unison tunes with keyboard accompaniment. Three of the tunes (SACRED SPACE, GUIDING HAND, MEYER) are in the traditional four parts. MEYER, with Clark’s text (“With Heavy Hearts”) reflecting on the Road to Emmaus story, would make an effective choral offering in a communion service. I am most impressed with Thomerson’s accompaniments for the unison tunes. The contrapuntal interest that she maintains in all of them is masterful. Her tune FLIPPIN written for “God’s Reign is Very Near” is a good example of her writing throughout the collection. The self-propelling, narrow-ranged tune is one that congregations can easily learn in one hearing. The pseudo-canonic repetition of the opening melodic motive in the tenor voice of the accompaniment in the third phrase is typical of the attention to detail that you will find often in her tunes and accompaniments. Thomerson also provides, most helpfully, two pages of notes on the origins of the tune names (pp. 6-7).

MorningStar has produced an excellent looking collection that includes all the indexing that one would expect for any hymn collection. An index of suggested alternate tunes for some of the hymns is also included. The texts are presented as poetry as well as being underlaid with the music, just as they should be. One suggestion to MorningStar that would make the collection even more “user-friendly” would be the inclusion of single-page versions of the unison tune hymns (text and tune only) for reproduction in orders of service. With their accompaniments, these hymns range over two or three pages, making them impractical for insertion, a fact that might limit their immediate widespread use.