My Shepherd Will Supply My Need, for Mixed Choir and Piano

Duration: 4:00
Completed: 2006
Instrumentation: SSATTB

Program Notes

Every song has its own history, which explicitly and implicitly informs its meaning. In the 17th Century, the American Puritans had intentionally reduced singing in church to only 13 melodies. People forgot how to sing; one 17th Century pastor wrote that “the tunes are now miserably tortured…” By the 18th Century, people had decided to start building up from this artistic ground zero, but had to re-learn art by themselves. It is a testament to this effort that any of their hymns are still used; perhaps 10 to 15 melodies (none of their harmonizations are used) from about 500 new hymns remain in our hymnals. These surviving melodies include How Firm a Foundation, Amazing Grace, Rock of Ages (shelter me), and My Shepherd Will Supply My Need. “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need”, a setting of the 23rd Psalm, takes a broad view of time; one observes God’s care and sustenance in a distant rumination. The first verse focuses on a pastoral picture of God’s creation at rest, cared for and directed; we are in Jehovah’s pasture, by God’s living stream, and walking God’s paths. The second verse is about threats of foes, fears, and death, remembered as past threats, remembered with God’s presence. The poetry diverges more prominently from Psalm 23 in the last verse. The Psalm’s “I will dwell in the house of Jehovah all my days!” becomes “may thy house be mine abode… There would I find a settled rest (While others go and come,)”, which breaks with the distant view of time to reveal that the author does not, apparently, currently dwell in Jehovah’s house, but might in the future (unlike all those other people who foolishly leave it). This awakens us from our serene reverie with a contemporary conflict. As we sing them today, various people have patched over most flaws and oddities in these hymns so that they almost blend seamlessly with our other songs (of course, those have also been patched over). For example, these hymns are not tonal and their original harmonizations would seem bizarre to us today, but we have surrounded them with tonal re-harmonizations and altered their language. I have not tried to “restore” the hymn, but rather to uncover some of the patched over places in the music and give peeks under barely veiled areas, so that we can see its story, as one appreciates a roman sculpture, even though barbarians knocked off its head and arms.