God's glory fills the heavens with hymns

This 2nd version was written by Carl Daw for Alec Wyton, and included in his musical work Sing a new song unto the Lord for the 1982 bicentennial of the Reformed Presbyterians in N America. The author revised the text in 1988 for the UK’s Psalms for Today (1990) and it also appeared that year in his own collection A Year of Grace. There he notes that his stzs reflect the 3 parts of the biblical Psalm: the revelation of God’s power through creation, the revelation of God’s love through the giving of the law, and the human response to both. C S Lewis (no hymn-lover) counted this the most beautiful of the Psalms. Although 215 is in no way a paraphrase, Thomas Ken may well have had it in mind as he wrote his ‘Morning hymn’. Another fine 19th-c paraphrase is Walter Trevor’s Lord, the heavens declare thy glory (1831). In his first collection of hymns (1990), the author commented that ‘The text works well with ST PATRICK’S BREASTPLATE’ (=ST PATRICK, 842). Thomas Pavlechko’s tune RADIANT CITY, composed c1994, was supplied by the author at David Preston’s request. It shares an American origin with the text; more important is ‘the strong, positive character of the tune’—DGP.

b Louisville, Kentucky 1944. Rice Univ, Univ of Virginia, Univ of the South. From a Baptist background, he became an Anglican and was ordained to ministry with the Episcopal Ch of the USA, serving churches in Virginia and Connecticut and the Community of Celebration, Aliquippa, Penns, also teaching English. He began hymnwriting in 1980 while consultant for The Hymnal 1982. His collected texts are found in A Year of Grace (1990), To Sing God’s Praise (metrical canticles, 1992) and New Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1996). Has written widely on hymnody, and shared work on A Hymntune Psalter (1998–9) From 1996 to 2009 he was Executive Director of the Hymn Society in the U.S. and Canada—a job entailing much administration, editing the periodical leaflet The Stanza, and teaching the hymnology course at the Boston Univ Sch of Theology. As writers, he and Thos Troeger (qv) are ‘the two most widely published hymnists from the United States’—Paul A Richardson, who includes 9 of his texts and a paraphrase in the 2005 edn of A Panorama of Christian Hymnody. He notes Daw’s ‘ability to perceive deeper meaning in biblical stories, more or less familiar’, adding that ‘both [authors] have written with the intent to make the church’s song more biblical’ and that Daw ‘is particularly effective when contemplating the God beyond human conception.’ CPD has conducted many hymn festivals and similar events in N America; he has 6 texts in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), 7 in The Book of Praise (Presbyterian Church of Canada, 1997), 16 in Worship and Rejoice (2001), 21 in the United Church of Canada’s Common Praise (1998), 3 in the UK book of the same title (2000), and 22 in the new edn of the Anglo-Chinese Hymns of Universal Praise (2006). Nos.19B, 530.