About setting one

Currents in Theology and Mission, Oct, 2003 by Richard Hillert

The music for LBW Setting One was written in 1974-75 at the request of the Liturgical Music Committee (LMC) of the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship (ILCW).' I accepted this composing assignment in a spirit of duty and obligation as well as enthusiasm, but with only a dim awareness of all that would be involved in its production.

The developments leading to the publication of LBW in 1978 have been largely documented in several other places. The composition of Setting One of the Holy Communion has its own microhistory that, for me as the composer, begins with the earliest meetings of the LMC in 1967-68.

A preoccupation with Lutheran unity took priority in the earliest meetings of the ILCW. The proposed all-Lutheran book of worship was to be a major catalyst in achieving that unity. There were several stages of development within the LMC itself as it sought to fix guidelines and formulate its duties. There were to begin with no firmly established liturgical texts to work with. Nor was there a clearly defined understanding of the function, or even agreement about the nature of music for liturgical texts. These were to be formed only over several years' time. Eugene L. Brand, who was later to serve as Project Director for the ILCW, summarized these early meetings most succinctly:

At first the working committees were issue-oriented. They commissioned papers, and they asked staff for bibliographies and historical comparison charts. While these provoked lively debate, it soon became clear that such debate could continue for a long time without the production of any materials. The committees, therefore, shifted to the project-oriented method. (2)

With no projects for the LMC immediately at hand, we explored and evaluated new liturgical music of other contemporary churches. It is interesting to recall that the late 1960s was a period of rampant unease that was to disturb the status quo in church music, especially among Roman Catholics, who were desperately seeking a "music for the people's song" and were experimenting with folk- and pop-oriented settings of hymns and liturgy, all in response to Vatican II. This search for a new, popular ("contemporary") music was also prevalent in some places within Lutheranism, although it had not yet reached a point of heated concern.

Behind these preparatory discussions there loomed always the theological, liturgical, and aesthetic issues concerning the heritage of Lutheran liturgical music. Whose "Lutheran heritage" would it be? About ten years before, in 1958, the American Lutheran Church (ALC) and the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) had managed some tenuous compromises in Service Book and Hymnal (SBH). Now, with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) and its uniquely defined canons of worship and music added to the mix, the current ILCW makeup rather nicely represented a mild diversity of views about the nature of liturgical music in our time. Retrospectively it is a tribute to the entire ILCW enterprise that many of these apparent diversities ultimately vanished, at least for the time being, in the melding process of attaining a common worship resource.

There was one undisputed basic assumption: the music for the liturgies would be primarily the people's song, sung by the assembled congregation. But other fundamental questions about musical style and the role of music-unison song, accompanied or unaccompanied chant, homophonic hymn texture, "contemporary" vernacular style, the role of the cantor and the choir--would go unsettled until we were actually confronted with a given liturgy. Of equally practical concern was how to acquire the kind of musics that would be needed. Should we adopt and adapt music already existing in the various service books? Who would write any new, original music that might be required? (3)

In the meantime I took part in another project that was to be important for the future composition of Setting One. That was the preparation and publication (1969) of Worship Supplement (WS), prepared by LCMS's Commission on Worship, Liturgics and Hymnology. This book was meant to be complementary, a preparatory rather than a counter proposal. The ILCW had given explicit permission to issue this publication. It represented several years of creative and intensive work within the LCMS-begun in 1961, before the ILCW came into being. This editorial work was originally intended as a thorough revision of The Lutheran Hymnal (TLH), 1941. But that project was abandoned in 1965 when the LCMS invited the other Lutheran churches to join in the preparation of an eventual all-Lutheran service book and hymnal.

WS offered a Hymn Section with a broad, ecumenical range of previously unfamiliar tunes and texts, and a dozen or so completely new, original hymns. And, just as important, half of the 200-page volume was devoted to a Liturgical Section with the classical texts of the Eucharist revised, or adapted from other new text sources, into contemporary English. In the words of the Foreword the WS described itself as "experimental and exploratory in nature," seeking to respond to "a need for updating liturgical and hymnodic materials both as to language and form." (4)