Gij die on aarde aan ons geeft -- tafelgebed = You Who Give Us The Earth, 1967 - 1982

This Tableprayer has been modeled on the structure of the 2nd Century Eucharistic tableprayer, the Didaché. After a presider (or leader) has read a monologue, an anamnesis leading to an institution narrative, the assembly sings in response, an epiklesis of the immediacy of the One whose memory has been revived.

Huijbers has composed this piece as a recitative, to be interpreted by an intelligent approach to singing text and its accents. I recommend always to be familiar with a text, interiorizing it till it becomes your own, and then you'rer not just singing it but praying it. This is more than mere words and black notes on a page. This is a dialogue between the choir and the assembly, with occasional interventions by the cantor. The accompaniment provides a pattern of constant movement, sustaining the dynamic of the recitative. This post-instititution narrative is sung twice, the second time an interval of a third higher

This was a very taut piece to translate, since the Dutch phrasing and music notation are so closely bound together. To be faithful to the meaning and the economy of rhythm has been a challenge for me throughout, how to best preserve the flow with compromising the integrity of the piece.. Many of the Dutch rhymes and plural forms are two-syllabic, with no equivalent in English.

You Who is a common form of address used by Oosterhuis for the Deity. It is based on the traditional collect prayers of the Roman Missal, Deus qui...., followed by attributes or deeds performed on our behalf. He has crafted this post-institution narrrative as a litany, with each line beginning die - who. This is the God in human form, entangled in the human condition. Where grammatical English would require whom, and whose, in the poetry of Oosterhuis who is comfortbaly used, as a descriptive phrase, with Who being predicated on the Deity, since God is beyond all names, as a descriptive phrase. Therefore, to preserve the who symmetry, I felt justified in translating die wij herkennen as who we now recognize, and likewise die wij verondigen as who we proclaim. See page 2 for the full text of the tableprayer with its sung component - Tony Barr