Free sheet music
Lowry, RobertRobert Lowry
United States (USA) United States (USA)
(1826 - 1899)
24 sheet music
10 MP3 - 5 MIDI
All sheet music
INSTRUMENTATIONS :
PIANO
› Piano solo 1
CHOIR - VOCAL
› Lead sheet (with lyrics) 1

ARRANGERS :
› Osborne, Hoyle 1
› Zisi, Matthew 1
Composers
Members Historic All

"For more than 20 years, we have been facilitating legal access to free sheet music. If you appreciate and use Free-scores.com, please consider making a donation."

About / Member testimonies





Shall We Gather at the River

Shall We Gather at the River
Robert Lowry


Piano solo
Skill :
Rate :

ViewDownload PDF : Complete sheet music (4 pages - 276.13 Ko)1,003x⬇
Log in or sign up for free
and participate in the Free-scores.com community :






assign an heart (and thus participate in improving the relevance of the ranking)
leave your comment
notate the skill level of this score
add this score to your library
add your audio or video interpretation







Download MP3 (2.94 Mo)94x⬇ 485x

Composer
Robert Lowry
Robert Lowry (1826 - 1899)
Instrumentation

Piano solo

Style

Hymn - Sacred

Arranger
Robert Lowry
Zisi, Matthew
CopyrightCopyright © Matthew Zisi
For those of you who are fans of C-sharp Major, you're going to love this arrangement! Perfect for prelude, offertory, or other special service music.
Sheet centralShall We Gather at the River (2 sheet music)
Added by crosby3145, 25 Jul 2017

0 comment


Buy sheet music books
PIANO HYMN - SACRED
World wide shipping
Report problem

This sheet music is part of the collection of crosby3145 :
Shall We Gather at the River and Nine Other Hymns by Robert Lowry

If you look through a hymnal, you’ll find that many times, the person who wrote the words is different from the person who wrote the tune. John Newton wrote Amazing Grace, but the tune is an American folk song. For the Beauty of the Earth has words by Folliott S. Pierpoint but music by Conrad Kocher. Even the wonderful hymns of Fanny Crosby usually have a different author listed for the tune. However, there have been some hymnwriters who have produced both the words and the tune that went with them. One of the first such was Robert Lowry.
He was born in Philadelphia March 12, 1826. Growing up, he enjoyed music a great deal and would fiddle around with any instrument he could get his hands on. More importantly, he got saved at the age of seventeen, and subsequently joined the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia, where he was soon teaching Sunday School and singing in the choir.
George B. Ide, Lowry’s pastor, soon encouraged the 22-year-old Lowry to take up a career in the ministry. To this end, Lowry took classes at University of Lewisburg. Still around today as Bucknell University, the college was so small when Lowry was there that meetings were held in the basement of the local Baptist church. Lowry was quite active while a student there—he organized and directed a choir and graduated in 1854 with the highest honors. That year, he also married Anna Rhees Loxley.
Lowry’s first preaching assignment was at the First Baptist Church in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He pastored there for four years, then moved to New York, where he first preached at the Bloomingdale Baptist Church for two years, then started preaching at the Hanson Place Baptist Church in Brooklyn.
It was while at Hanson Place that Lowry wrote what is probably his most famous hymn, and undoubtedly one of the most famous of all-time. During the summer of 1864, an epidemic in Brooklyn had caused many deaths. On one particularly hot day, Lowry suddenly thought of the first verse of Revelation 22: “And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.” He proceeded to write “Shall We Gather at the River,” which has enjoyed widespread popularity to this day. Ironically, Lowry was not a huge fan of it: “It is brass band music, has a march movement, and for that reason has become popular, though for myself I do not think much of it.” He was honored, however, once when visiting London he was recognized as the author of the hymn: “I felt…that, after all, I had perhaps done some little good in the world, and I felt more than ever content to die when God called.” The hymn has been used very commonly in movies, particularly westerns.
Following William B. Bradbury’s death in 1868, the New York publishing firm of Biglow & Main approached Lowry, asking him to replace Bradbury as their hymnal editor. Lowry was initially reluctant—he considered himself first a pastor and didn’t want to shirk on his pastoral responsibilities—but he was encouraged to accept, and he continued to work as pastor at the same time. While at Biglow & Main, he worked with other such notable hymnwriters as William H. Doane and Ira D. Sankey. Mostly during his time with Biglow & Main, he produced or coproduced over 25 collections of hymns, which featured many of his own works among them.
A year after taking the Biglow & Main position, Lowry was invited by the president of the University at Lewisburg to pastor the Baptist church there, which was in the process of finishing up their new building. Lowry’s oratory is credited as convincing the congregation to quickly pay off the church’s building debt. He also began teaching at the university, as professor of rhetoric. Still, with all these responsibilities, Lowry made time to write hymns.
Lowry stayed in Lewisburg until 1875, when he resigned the professorship to move to Plainfield, New Jersey, where he became pastor of Park Avenue Church. He pastored there for ten years before resigning due to ill health. Lowry then toured the American south and west extensively—this had a recuperating effect on his health, and he went back to preaching when he got back to Plainfield. His wife died in 1890, and he married Mary Jane Runyon two years later. In 1894, he had the honor of writing a hymn to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Baptist church in Lewisburg. He passed away November 25, 1879, at the age of 73.
It was as a pastor that Lowry hoped to be remembered. His gift for oratory was described as spellbinding. Park Avenue erected a memorial stone to Lowry twelve years after his death, and Lowry himself said, “I would rather preach a gospel sermon to an appreciative, receptive congregation than write a hymn.”
Still, Lowry wrote many wonderful hymns—his contributions in this field certainly cannot be ignored. Lowry was self-taught as a hymnist, but he was an earnest student of it. Once he became a music publisher, he got several music textbooks and studied them, seeking to better refine his skills. Lowry described his compositional technique as follows: “I have no method. Sometimes the music comes and the words follow, fitted insensibly to the melody. I watch my moods, and when anything good strikes me, whether words or music, and no matter where I am, at home or on the street, I jot it down. Often the margin of a newspaper or the back of an envelope serves as a notebook. My brain is a sort of spinning machine, I think, for there is music running through it all the time. I do not pick out my music on the keys of an instrument. The tunes of nearly all the hymns I have written have been completed on paper before I tried them on the organ. Frequently the words of the hymn and the music have been written at the same time.” He wrote his first hymn, “When the Morning Light,” at the age of 21, and he followed it with many more. The ten represented in this collection are but a small portion of his work.
The Dictionary of Hymnology by John Julian from 1907 has a list purporting to be Lowry’s most famous hymns. On it are the classic “Shall We Gather at the River,” “Up from the Grave He Arose,” and “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus,” all of which are represented here. Ironically, though, many of the others are completely familiar today, and other better-known hymns by Lowry are not represented in Julian’s list. This collection contains the eight by him from Great Hymns of the Faith, plus a couple of the forgotten ones from Julian’s list—“Beautiful Land of Rest” and “Marching On, Marching On”—I would encourage you to check those out as well. I hope this collection proves a blessing to you!

Sheet music list :
› All the Way My Savior Leads Me
› Beautiful Land of Rest
› Follow On!
› I Need Thee Every Hour
› Marching On! Marching On!
› Nothing but the Blood of Jesus
› Shall We Gather at the River
› Something for Thee
› Up from the Grave He Arose!
› We're Marching to Zion