He lied van de komende Heer = The Song Of The Lord's Coming , 1960 - 2021

Among the earliest Oosterhuis-Huijbers songs, this was piece was the gathering song of the first Frame-Song settings Huijbers ever made, 1960. The second song, an intermezzo piece has been lost, as has the final song. Kees Kok describes how this choral song, which drew in all of the assmebly, as the birth of the vernacular liturgy movement in The Netherlands. It was written for the Amsterdam Student community. Oosterhuis had chosen the Germanic melody, O Heiland, Open U Poort - O Savior, Open The Gates, which Huijbers arranged as a 3-section Frame Song to cover the gathering, intermezzo and closing rites of the recently-formed Student Church liturgy. I have preserved the archaisms, to preserve the authenticity of the piece. Huijbers wrote it as an entire concert setting, a full-throated choral arrangement with orchestra. Verses 1 and 3 are for SATB choir, verse 2 unison for the assembly, and verse 4 choral with a soaring descant, the assembly singing with the altos. And how they loved it! This was their first venture into embodying an entire liturgy in the vernacular. The song was written for the First Sunday of Advent, like a bolt out of the blue! Never before, since the 3rd Century, had local languages been 'allowed' in the liturgy. This was to be the game-changer even at parochial level. Innovations had been happening since the 1930s, especially with the Augustinians; Pius Parsch the so-called father of the European liturgical movement, was an Augustinian. Before I first met Huijbers, I'd been spending summers with the Augustinians in their Nijmegen 'experimental' Boskapel. Globally, Latin was still the mandated language of worship, rich in Gregorian chant and sacred choral setting, satisfying the assembly with pious hymns. Oosterhuis persuaded Huijbers that the vernacular was henceforth the future. New texts were replacing the old, freed of the feudal language and thought patterns of the past. And Huijbers ensured that this was ritual song, embodying the entire assembly, no longer wallpaper accompaniments for accomomplished choirs alone.