Thanks Be to God Our Savior

Here at Church of the Servant we have a little thing we do called the “Joyful Noise Orchestra,” or “JNO” to insiders. It’s a group of a dozen or more instrumentalists who lead the congregational singing every few months–kind of an updated version of the West Gallery Players. On November 2 we led the lectionary Psalm 107 in the form of the song “Thanks Be to God Our Savior (MP3).”

This song has an interesting history. COS member David Diephouse wrote the text in 1985 for the Psalter Hymnal and the text was paired with the early Reformed tune GENEVAN 107. (David, if you’d like to comment on that process, I’d love to hear it.) Last Summer when Guitarchestra led worship I needed a song for the lectionary Psalm 107 that the guitarists could play, so I wrote new music for David’s text. When Psalm 107 came up again in the lectionary, this time with JNO, I decided to rework the song for piano and instrumental ensemble.

If there were a battle between GENEVAN 107 and my tune, I doubt mine would prevail. But it does make an interesting study in song “migration” and word/text pairing.

Posted by: Greg

One Response to Thanks Be to God Our Savior

Comments

Greg

Comment by Greg | 2008/12/01 at 15:52:18

David Diephouse responds:
Since you were wondering about the back story of Psalm 107, as I recall it goes something like this: The PH revision committee was fairly close to the end of the whole project when they discovered that they didn’t have a usable text that would fit the Genevan tune they were committed to using. At that point, Howard Slenk, a member of the committee, happened to recall that as a Calvin student back in the 60s I had done English verse translations of a couple German song texts for a Capella concert program (another long story), and the committee asked me to try my hand rather than go back and commission one of their Usual Suspects. Why, I have no idea. (I had not been involved in the hymnal project at all.) Why I agreed, I also have no idea. (A lyricist I’m definitely not.) But on a fairly short deadline I managed to cobble the text together. Since the tune was a given, I tried to make the text reflect the peculiar contours of that tune. The committee apparently liked it, because awhile later, even closer to the final project deadline, they discovered that they really didn’t like either the proposed text or tune for Ps. 62 and came knocking again. As I was reading the first lines of the psalm, I kept hearing that lovely Tallis tune in my head–maybe I had recently listened to the Vaughan Williams Fantasia–so I used that as inspiration and suggested it to the committee–which is how the Tallis made it into the PH. Those two psalm settings were/are the beginning and end of my songwriting career.