Music Notes 4-2-26
John Purifoy is an ASCAP composer and arranger with various published choral anthems,
cantatas and keyboard collections and works recorded by Carol Lawrence, Anita Kerr, the
Chicago Master Chorale and other artists. His work for chorus and orchestra, We Hold These
Truths, narrated by Alex Haley won the 1987 Freedoms Foundation Award for musical
programs. He is the composer and lyricist of the stage musical, Lambarene, which received a
workshop production at the state theatre of New Jersey in 1991. John lives in Knoxville,
Tennessee with his wife Vicki, a television news producer, and two teenage sons, Drew and
Michael. The Triptych for Easter Week was written in 2014 and was published by Hal Leonard
Publishing. The Triptych has 3 musical meditations on the various stages of the Passion – the
Garden, The Betrayal and the Crucifixion. Each meditation reflects on the emotions of the
moment, on the heightened senses common to moments like that. It’s a very powerful piece. I
discovered it for my first Easter Week here at FPCE and have been promising the choir we would
do the whole thing for Maundy Thursday “soon”…..“soon” is now.
O Sacred Head, Now Wounded is a Christian Passion hymn based on a long Medieval poem,
Salve mundi salutare, which addresses various parts of Christ’s body hanging on the cross – the
feet, the knees, the hands, the pierced side, the breast, the heart and the face. The last stanzas
that deal with the head, the ones the hymn is taken from, begin “Salve caput cruentatum” –
essentially, “Hello, bloody head”. The poem was translated into German in the 1600’s by Paul
Gerhardt and into English in 1752 by Paul Gambold – his version begins “O Head, so full of
bruises”. Gerhardt reworked the Latin words into something more meditative on the Passion of
Christ, and it first appeared in Johann Crüger’s hymnal in 1656. Since then, it has appeared in
virtually all hymnals in numerous languages, and has been the source for numerous musical
endeavors, one of the more prominent being the St. Matthew Passion of J.S. Bach, where the
hymn appears several times in several harmonizations.
What Wondrous Love Is This is a hymn that has a multi-layered past. The text’s author is listed
as “Anonymous”, which means that it could have gone through a variety of authors, iterations,
and rewrites before arriving in the form we now know. It was first set to the tune we know in
William Walker’s 1840 second edition publication of Southern Harmony. Interestingly, the tune
comes from an old English ballad about the infamous English pirate Captain Kidd:
My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed, when I sailed;
My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed;
My name was Robert Kidd, God's laws I did forbid,
So wickedly I did when I sailed, when I sailed
So wickedly I did when I sailed.