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The Liberal Catholic Church
Christ ever lives as a mighty spiritual presence in the World, guiding and sustaining his people. The Liberal Catholic Church exists to forward Christ's work in the world.
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Liberal Catholic Church
Our hearts are ever restless until they find their rest in Thee
Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor
Sung August 11, 2019
The full text of the poem is as follows:
The New Colossus
— by Emma Lazarus, New York City, 1883 —
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The lyrics are:
Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor
— Lyrics by Emma Lazarus, from her sonnet "The New Colossus", New York City, 1883 —
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor - I. Berlin - Zamir Chorale The Zamir Chorale singing Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, a poem by Emma Lazarus, set to music by Irving Berlin, at the 19th Annual North American Jewish Choral Festival in 2008, conducted by Matthew Lazar. Clip from "A Jewish Spirit Sings," a DVD Concert Tribute to Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
Sandi Patty (Cincinnati Pops, 1999)
Sandi Patty (Cincinnati Pops, 1999) Sandi Patty performing with the Cincinnati Pops in 1999
Portland Choir Orchestra
Portland Choir Orchestra"Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" by Irving Berlin and arranged by Roy Ringwald. Performed in June 2015. This arrangement greatly popularized the song.
Soprano (7-30-19 12:03:50) | |
Alto (8-9-19 12:45:25) | |
Tenor (7-30-19 12:03:51) | |
Bass (7-30-19 12:03:49) | |
Choir with Piano (8-9-19 12:48:31) |
Liner Notes
Composed to a book by Robert E. Sherwood, directed and coproduced by Moss Hart, Irving Berlin’s musical comedy Miss Liberty is a mostly fictitious account of the history behind the creation of the Statue of Liberty. The song Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor served as the final number in that 1949 production.
In a humorous, deliberately perpetuated farce of mistaken identity, a Frenchwoman, Monique DuPont, is falsely assumed to have been the statue's model (in fact, as is later revealed onstage, it was the mother of the statue's sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi). She goes along with the deception out of affection for its perpetrator—a newspaper publisher who, in this imagined scenario, seeks to gain an advantage over his supposed rival, Joseph Pulitzer, by publishing in his own paper his “discovery” of the identity of the statue’s undisclosed model. Eventually, after the ruse is uncovered, she renounces the pretension. Nonetheless, just before the final curtain she sings Berlin’s song to Emma Lazarus’s words—not at the unveiling, but at Castle Garden, the landing site and processing center of hundreds of thousands of immigrants of the type described by Lazarus (which preceded the construction of the Ellis Island facility). Rescued there by Pulitzer at the last minute, while awaiting imminent deportation for the deception, she breaks enthusiastically into “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” when Bartholdi asks if she remembers the poem she once showed him in his Paris studio. In the original staging, the walls of the immigration hall dissolved while she sang, revealing the floodlit statue in the distance—its torch shining with increasing intensity as the curtain fell.
In the original Broadway production, the role of Monique was played and sung by Allyn McLerie. Only the music received uniformly favorable press reviews. Miss Liberty, overshadowed by two other Broadway musicals produced that year, Show Boat and Kiss Me Kate, did not live on to become a classic and is remembered now primarily among the circumscribed circles of Broadway buffs and historians. Some of the songs—“Just One Way to Say I Love You,” “Falling Out of Love Can Be Fun,” and “You Can Have Him”—have enjoyed postproduction success. But none ever achieved the enduring fame of “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor,” whose perpetuation is due largely to its choral arrangement by Roy Ringwald for the Fred Waring choral series, for mixed SATB chorus and piano. Copyrighted in the same year as the original song (1949), that arrangement quickly became a staple in the repertoire of high school, college, and other amateur choruses as well as Waring’s own ensemble, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, in the aftermath of the Second World War and during the chilling days of the Cold War, it was consistently programmed not only at concerts but also at school assemblies and patriotic civic ceremonies celebrating American liberty.
By: Neil W. Levin
Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus" (1883)
Emma Lazarus' famous words, "Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" may now be indelibly engraved into the collective American memory, but they did not achieve immortality overnight. In fact, Lazarus' sonnet to the Statue of Liberty was hardly noticed until after her death, when a patron of the New York arts found it tucked into a small portfolio of poems written in 1883 to raise money for the construction of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. The patron, Georgina Schuyler, was struck by the poem and arranged to have its last five lines become a permanent part of the statue itself. More than twenty years later, children's textbooks began to include the sonnet and Irving Berlin wrote it into a broadway musical. By 1945, the engraved poem was relocated--including all fourteen lines-- to be placed over the Statue of Liberty's main entrance.
Today the words themselves may be remembered a great degree more than the poet herself, but in Lazarus' time just the opposite was true. As a member of New York's social elite, Emma Lazarus enjoyed a privileged childhood, nurtured by her family to become a respected poet recognized throughout the country for verses about her Jewish heritage. A reader and a dreamer, Lazarus had the good fortune to claim Ralph Waldo Emerson as a pen-pal and mentor. Before her death at age 37, Lazarus grew from a sheltered girl writing flowery prose about Classical Antiquity to a sophisticated New York aristocrat troubled by the violent injustices suffered by Jews in Eastern Europe.
In "The New Colossus," Lazarus contrasts the soon-to-be installed symbol of the United States with what many consider the perfect symbol of the Greek and Roman era, the Colossus of Rhodes. Her comparison proved appropriate, for Bartholdi himself created the Statue of Liberty with the well-known Colossus in mind. What Bartholdi did not intend, however, was for the Statue of Liberty to become a symbol of welcome for thousands of European immigrants. As political propaganda for France, the Statue of Liberty was first intended to be a path of enlightenment for the countries of Europe still battling tyranny and oppression. Lazarus' words, however, turned that idea on its head: the Statue of Liberty would forever on be considered a beacon of welcome for immigrants leaving their mother countries.
Just as Lazarus' poem gave new meaning to the statue, the statue emitted a new ideal for the United States. Liberty did not only mean freedom from the aristocracy of Britain that led the American colonists to the Revolutionary War. Liberty also meant freedom to come to the United States and create a new life without religious and ethnic persecution. Through Larazus' poem, the Statue of Liberty gained a new name:
She would now become the "Mother of Exiles," torch in hand to lead her new children to American success and happiness.
Sung August 26, 2018
Cry No More (SATB)
by Dan Forrest, lyrics by Johanna Anderson, & Eva Norlyk-Smith
A nice country song (someday I'll write a nice choir arrangement)
10,000 Reasons (Bless My Soul)
by Matt Redman
Ave verum corpus
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
K 618, Baden, June 17, 1791
Sung
Sung August 11, 2019
more: Ave Verum Corpus (videos, parts, etc.)
There Is A Balm In Gilead
Sung
Here are some different arrangements of this traditional African American spiritual. We can include some of these features as we develop. For now we are starting with a simple a cappella arrangement that we can learn and perform quickly.
There's many more secular harmony songs here, here and great voices here.