On "Emerson Te Deum"

Tomorrow, the Choir of St. David's Episcopal Church, Roland Park, MD, under the direction of Dr. Douglas Buchanan, premieres my new anthem, Emerson Te Deum for SATB choir

and organ.

The performance is part of their Festival Evensong service, starting at 4:30pm.

It will be livestreamed via Facebook and YouTube (recommended) at https://www.youtube.com/@stdavidsbaltimore

I'm very grateful for Doug and the choir taking on this new piece with their trademark generosity and musical prowess.

Photo of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Matthew Brady, 1856.

Emerson Te Deum is a setting of portions of a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), contextualized within excerpts from the "Te Deum" text found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

The texts are printed below. The work was composed in Februrary-April of this year, after a visit to Concord, MA in November of 2025. It was my first visit to Concord. I had occasion to visit the historical markers commemorating the the remarkable outset of the American Revolution, as well as Walden Pond and the site of Henry David Thoreau's cabin, and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where Thoreau and Emerson are both buried (also Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne).

The graves of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his wife and daughter in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, MA.

The trip motivated me to do a concentrated read of some of the writings by the New England Transcendentalists. I revisited parts of Thoreau's Walden and Civil Disobedience, and browsed through a collection of Emerson's essays (a souvenir from the Concord Bookshop on Main Street.). What struck me most was a summative biography of Emerson, included as an appendix with the essays. The caricature of RWE I had carried on assumption was incomplete and incorrect; I had no idea how truly progressive he was. Nor was I aware of how deeply, and for how long, he struggled to reconcile his faith with both his sense of the world and the reality of the world around him. And though this is a longer topic for another day, I'll simply say that I greatly identified with him in such crisis.

Yet another surprise to me was Emerson's prolific output as a poet - well over 600 poems, fragments, and translations. A particular poem from 1831 caught my eye; in it, Emerson seems to synthesize philosophy, spirituality, and aesthetic with his signature literarly elegance. I set portions of this poem, titled Γνώθι Σεαυτόν “Gnothi Seauton” (“Know Thyself”) for the main text of the new anthem. Seven years after he wrote this poem, Emerson would give his controversial address to the Harvard Divinity School, echoing much of this radical new approach to Christian worship. Denounced as an atheist and infidel, Emerson would not be invited back to Harvard for nearly 30 years.

In his address, he enumerates a central tenet of Transcendental thought: the virtues of goodness and morality are inherent in man and nature, and it is this that defines God in all things:

"The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, address to Harvard Divinity School, July 1838. Emerson would leave the ministry a year later, but his ideas would ripple throughout American religious society. In 1866, Emerson would return to Harvard to be awarded an honorary doctorate; in the Harvard Divinity School, a plaque commemorating his address hangs to this day.

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EMERSON TE DEUM (2026)

Text: excerpted from the Book of Common Prayer (1662)

With fragments from a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

We praise thee, O God; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.

All the earth doth worship thee, the Father everlasting.

To thee all angels cry aloud, the heavens and all the powers therein.

To thee cherubim and seraphim continually do cry,

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth;

Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of thy glory. (...)

If thou canst bear

Strong meat of simple truth

If thou durst my words compare

With what thou thinkest in my soul’s free youth,

Then take this fact unto thy soul,—–

God dwells in thee.

It is no metaphor nor parable,

It is unknown to thousands, and to thee;

Yet there is God.

He is in thy world,

But thy world knows him not.

He is the mighty Heart

From which life’s varied pulses part.

Clouded and shrouded there doth sit

The Infinite

Embosomed in a man : (...)

This is the reason why thou dost recognize

Things now first revealed,

Because in thee resides

The Spirit that lives in all;

And thou canst learn the laws of nature

Because its author is latent in thy breast. (...)

The selfsame God

By the same law

Makes the souls of angels glad

And the souls of devils sad

See

There is nothing else but God

Where e’er I look

All things hasten back to him

Light is but his shadow dim.

Shall I ask wealth or power of God, who gave

An image of himself to be my soul?

As well might swilling ocean ask a wave,

Or the starred firmament a dying coal,—–

For that which is in me lives in the whole.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson From Γνώθι Σεαυτόν “Gnothi Seauton” (“Know Thyself”), 1831

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth;

Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of thy glory.