LANSING (Gabriel)

Composer: Charles Hutchinson Gabriel

LANSING is one of several tunes by Charles Hutchinson Gabriel (b. Wilton, IA, 1856; d. Los Angeles, CA, 1932) included in the 1912 Psalter, where it was set to the second part of Psalm 24, "Ye Gates Lift Your Heads." The tune title refers to the Illinois city just south of Chicago near which Gabriel settled in 1895. This tune is a fine accompaniment to the psalm text and should be sung with confidence and enthusiasm. To bring out the structure of the current versification, try singing stanzas 2 and 3 antiphonally, with one group asking the questions in the first two lines and the other responding. Then sing stanzas 4 and 5 with full voice and majestic accompaniment, though there also the questions in line 3 could be sung by select voices.

For the first seventeen years of his life Gabriel lived on an Iowa farm, where friends and neighbors often gathered to sing. Gabriel accompanied them on the family reed organ he had taught himself to play. At the age of sixteen he began teaching singing in schools (following in his father's footsteps) and soon was acclaimed as a fine teacher and composer. He moved to California in 1887 and served as Sunday school music director at the Grace Methodist Church in San Francisco. After moving to Chicago in 1892, Gabriel edited numerous collections of anthems, cantatas, and a large number of songbooks for the Homer Rodeheaver, Hope, and E. O. Excell publishing companies. He composed hundreds of tunes and texts, at times using pseudonyms such as Charlotte G. Homer. The total number of his compositions is estimated at about seven thousand. Gabriel's gospel songs became widely circulated through the Billy Sunday-Homer Rodeheaver urban crusades.

--Psalter Hymnal Handbook

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Psalter Hymnal (Red): doctrinal standards and liturgy of the Christian Reformed Church (1934), p.53