Friday 18th April 2025 Good Friday

 "Is it nothing to you"  Ouseley (1825 - 1889)

Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley was born in London and showed a prodigious faculty for music, composing his first opera at the age of eight! In 1844 he inherited the baronetcy and also went to Christ Church, gaining his BA in 1846 and his MA in 1849.  He was ordained the same year as gaining his MA and served as curate in St Paul's Church, Knightsbridge.  He was throughout his life conflicted by his aristocratic heritage and his performance of Anglican music, considered to be below someone of his standing. In 1850 he took the degree of Mus. B at the University of Oxford, 4 years later the degree of Mus.D.  In 1855 he was Heather Professor of Music at Oxford until 1889.  In 1856 he founded and endowed with his own money, St Michael's College, a model choir school in the Anglican tradition.  He was also its first Warden. His works are little known today, but his most notable student was Sir John Stainer.

Ouseley
Picture from Wikipaedia

Lamentation 1:12

“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?

    Look around and see.

Is any suffering like my suffering

    that was inflicted on me,

that the Lord brought on me

    in the day of his fierce anger?

Were You There?  Arr. Francis Westbrook 1903 - 1975

This is an old American Spiritual,  first published in 1899, but likely composed by enslaved African - Americans.  It was the first spiritual to be published in an American hymnal.

Francis Westbrook, taken fromm Praise.org.uk  b Thornton Heath, Surrey 1903, d Harpenden, Herts 1975. Whitgift (now Trinity) Middle Sch, Croydon; Didsbury Theol Coll Manchester; ordained 1930 (Wesleyan Methodist). Distinguished pianist; BA (London), FRCO, MusD (Manchester, while in circuit ministry). Prof at London Coll of Music 1968–75; Principal, Williams Sch of Church Music, 1971–75. Held office at RSCM and Methodist Ch Music Soc; edited The Choir 1948–64. 2 tunes and 20 arrangements in The School Hymn Book of the Methodist Church 1950, which he helped to edit, as also Hymns and Songs, 1969. H&S had 6 of his tunes, Praise for Today (1974) had 3. Other music includes cantatas, motets, and anthems. Methodist though he was, FBW commended John Merbecke’s plainsong Music for the Congregation at Holy Communion (1550, some 6 years after JM compiled the first-ever English Bible concordance) as a work ‘which for simplicity and beauty has never been surpassed’; he also believed that, unlike N American churches, British ones did not offer their members ‘anything that deserves to be called a hymn book’—since they hand out no more than word-books! (Or often, not even that.) Fred Pratt Green’s tribute in verse, among Ten Friends, begins ‘Of all the people I have known well, you were the nearest to being a genius.’