I’ve had the privilege of singing a piece titled “Beautiful In His Time” by the American composer/arranger Dan Forrest, which uses a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 in the Jewish Bible. Forrest is by no means the first to set verses from this chapter to music, though; there’s a long history of doing that, going all the way back to Brahms. Before I get to an overview of that history, though, I’d like to comment a bit on the book as a whole, since Ecclesiastes is fascinating in and of itself, considered to be part of the “wisdom” section of the Old Testament along with Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Solomon. Yet it seems to have a very different message from any other book of the Bible, for it can come across as cynical and fatalistic, especially in the earlier chapters. Most Bible scholars believe that it was written by Solomon, king of Israel after David, who would certainly fit the description of “teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem” given in the first verse. But why would Solomon, whom the Bible says had the greatest wisdom of all mankind, say in verse 2, “It is useless, useless . . . life is useless, all useless”? We are given at least a partial answer at the end of chapter 1: “The wiser you are, the more worries you have; the more you know, the more it hurts.” (Good News Translation)
All of the choral settings I have found are from chapter 3, so I’m going to go in order through that passage. (Just to be clear: chapter and verse divisions were inserted later on as the Bible became more widespread, but they make locating specific statements much easier.) The first eight verses contain what is probably the most famous pairing of opposites in all of literature: from “a time to be born and a time to die” to “a time for war and a time for peace.” The American folk singer Pete Seeger wrote his version in the late 1950s, telling an interviewer that he “wrote the song in about 15 minutes” because he was mad at his publisher. I’m guessing that the publisher was nagging him for a new song and he spit this one out on the spot? That’s the best I can come up with. The song was first recorded in 1962 by a folk/rock group called The Limeliters; that morphed into The Byrds, who did a 1965 recording that went ballistic. Wikipedia tells us that “since Ecclesiastes is traditionally ascribed to King Solomon in the 10th century BC, the Byrds’ 1965 recording of the song holds the distinction in the U.S. of being the number 1 hit with the oldest lyrics.”
The next verses have been used in a couple of settings, including the one by Dan Forrest. He begins with verse 11, “He hath made all things beautiful in His time.” That’s a lovely way to put it, but perhaps a better translation would be, “Everything is appropriate in its own time” (Living Bible) or “He has set the right time for everything” (GNT). Forrest uses only three phrases from the chapter: the one quoted above, then the beginning of verse 14: “And I know that what God doeth it shall be forever” and then jumps up to verse 1: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” All of these are from the King James Version.
A much better-known use of ideas from verse 11 is the 1978 song by Diane Bell, “In His Time.” All I can find out about Bell is that she “was a camp director of a conference center in Northern California and is the mother of four children.” Apparently this was her only published song. Her birth date is 1941, so she’d be 80 today as I write this in 2021. It would be so interesting to find out more: Was she asked to write something for the campers to sing? How did the song become such a hit? Etc. I would have to say that Dan Forrest’s setting is much more musically complex and a joy to sing. But there’s a place for simple and easy songs too. I’ll have to leave it there.
But I don’t have to leave the third chapter of Ecclesiastes just yet, because, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Brahms had a go at this passage also, with a setting of the last few verses of the chapter and also one with the beginning of the next. He included these two pieces in his final song cycle, Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), written in 1896. I’m not going to spend much time on this composition since my concentration is on choral music and these songs were written for solo voice. But their background is quite interesting and tragic, as he wrote them in the expectation of his longtime friend Clara Schumann’s death after she had suffered a stroke in March. She died two weeks after Brahms completed the work in May. The two songs he wrote from Ecclesiastes focus on some of the darkest verses in this very dark book: “Denn es gehet dem Menschen” (“It is for a person as it is for an animal”) from 3:19-22 and “Ich wandte mich, und sahe an” (“I turned and looked upon everyone”) from 4:1–3, with the ending “But better off than either are those who have never been born, who have never seen the injustice that goes on in this world.” (GNT)
Brahms’ song cycle doesn’t end there, though, as his fourth piece is taken from the Christian New Testament book of I Corinthians, chapter 13, the “love chapter,” with a plea for faith, hope, and charity. And the book of Ecclesiastes doesn’t end with chapter 4. If it did, I don’t know why it would be part of Scripture because it would just be depressing. Ecclesiastes can be a very uplifting book, but you have to keep going. I once spent several months in a group studying it, and all of us agreed that we had been encouraged. By the end Solomon has found some certainty: “The last and final word is this: Fear God. Do what He tells you. And that’s it. Eventually God will bring everything that we do out into the open and judge it according to its hidden intent, whether it’s good or evil” (12:13-14 The Message).
Here’s the Dan Forrest version, appropriately enough in a Zoom choir version for 2020. Note the loveliness of the accompaniment as well as the singing:
And here’s a version of the simpler, earlier version by Diane Ball:
And, of course, I have to include a video of The Byrds!
© Debi Simons
