Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today’s Gospel lesson from John 15 has inspired many wonderful musical settings from various composers. We could speak of Anglican favorites like Thomas Tallis’ If ye love me or topical anthems like John Ireland’s Greater love hath no man.

However, a more comprehensive setting is Arvo Pärt’s English anthem I am the true vine. Pärt uses a lengthy and continuous portion of the passage (verses 1-14) and sets the text with a carefully calibrated system that highlights the poetic nature of Jesus’ metaphor.

‘I am the vine, you are the branches’ (v. 5). Through this image, Christ paints a picture for us to understand the nature of our life. The organic picture of the vine reveals a connection not incidental, but essential. As Saint Paul described it, quoting the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28).

Pärt sonically paints the vine with its twisting shoots by means of a strict pattern, which proceeds from lower voices to higher ones in a kind of winding arc, returning back to the lower voices. These tendril-like phrases are woven into a longer pattern that repeats six times in the course of the anthem. In spite of applying what might seem to be a dissociating technique, Pärt hold the material together with a medieval ‘hocket’, by which the words are passed along the chain of moving voices. Thus, we hear the full text moving continuously between different voices, allowing us to sense both individuality and a larger unity of belonging.

As always, Pärt musically incarnates the text in a way that allows us to feel included, heard, and comforted. Listen to the setting here.

Yours in Christ,
Justin