What was I thinking?
for Sunday, September 20, 2020Anatomy of a hymn
After the first official What was I thinking? I should probably explain that I have not traveled the world and visited the place where every hymn tune was written or discovered. I’m sorry to say that I won’t be sending pictures and personal stories for every hymn. The plan is for these writings to be e-mailed to you and posted on the
church’s website, but if you missed anything, ask me to e-mail any of these again. Also feel free to forward these to friends and family. The word can spread. When we get to
Christmas, I’ll share a story of how one of the most famous Christmas hymns of all time was circulated around the world, all because a single copy was left on a church organ and the organ repairman took it.
Last week I wrote about hymns having texts and tunes, how the tunes have names, often with interesting stories behind them, and how text and tune, can be paired. If the pairing is successful, it can seem like a match made in heaven, literally for some people, as one of my teachers says, “that’s the way God wrote it.” Well, maybe God
does play a part in bringing words and music together in a way that speaks to us. But, allow me to explain a bit more how this works.
In St. Andrews Choir rehearsals, one of our favorite activities in our training is
looking up, learning about, and singing hymns. One of the best ways to teach is to ask questions. If I tell a choir something, they may not be paying attention and miss what was said, or it may not sink in. But, if I ask a question, the choristers have to look
intelligently at what we’re talking about and think to find the answer. If we were in St. Andrews rehearsal, hymnals would be at the ready, young singers would be bouncing in their seats with excitement, and I would call out a number. Pages would madly shuffle, followed by “Oh! Oh! Pick me!” We’ll do it a bit more calmly here. Let’s start at the very beginning. (It’s a very good place to start.) Our 1990
We see the title, Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus. Under that, as we saw last week, we see the tune name, STUTTGART. Next to that, we see 8.7.8.7
What do those numbers mean? That is the meter for the hymn text. Each number indicates the number of syllables in each line of poetry. Here’s how it works: Come, thou long-ex-pect-ed Jesus, (8 syllables)
born to set thy peo-ple free; (7 syllables)
from our fears and sins re-lease us; (8 syllables) let us find our rest in thee. (7 syllables)
A hymn text has a form. Some of these meters are more predictable and common (one is literally called Common Meter), but some are more unique.
When putting the text with music, the two have to fit together, so the number of syllables needs to fit with the notes, more or less. It doesn’t have to be an exact match, because a syllable can be sung one more than one note, but hymn tunes have meters too, and tune and text have to fit.
Now look at the hymn again. Who wrote the words and who wrote the music? The text was written by Charles Wesley in 1744 as we see on the upper left corner above the music. I think Charles is in the Guinness Book of World Records for writing the most hymns!
On the other side of the page, we see the tune came from Witt’s Psalmodia Sacra, 1715;
alt. We don’t actually see who wrote it, but we see the collection from which it came,
and we see that it was around almost 30 years before Wesley wrote the text. Also, you
see “alt.” which means the tune, at some point, was altered to become the hymn tune we see. We sometimes see “alt.” beside hymn texts and tunes, which makes some
people’s blood pressure rise. “They can’t change that. It’s not the way God wrote it!”
Many hymns have evolved over time, more than we might think, and some hymn writers have altered their own work. Yes, sometimes it’s poorly done by hymnal editors, but not always, and what we think is “original” is often not.
One more thing before we leave this page (or two things, actually) – notice that this hymn has four stanzas and hold that thought. Also, if you have sharp eyes, you may have seen a note at the bottom of the page indicating an alternate tune.
We see the title Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus. That can’t be right, that was Hymn 1. This is not the same music. This is not the way God wrote it. Here, under the title, the tune is HYFRYDOL. Beside that we see the meter is 8.7.8.7. D
Who wrote the words? Charles Wesley in 1744. The words are the same as Hymn 1. Who wrote the tune? Rowland Hugh Prichard, 1831. The tune name is Welsh and means “delightful.” The tune was written quite some time after Wesley wrote his text. What about this meter? We now understand 8.7.8.7 but what’s the D? The D stands for “double.” In other words, the pattern of the meter is gone through two times. The
words to this hymn are the same as Hymn 1, but now there are only two stanzas. The tune is twice as long, so we can get through two of the stanzas of words by singing the tune only once.
We have one text, but it fits with and can be sung to two different tunes. That comes in handy in Advent if we want to sing these words twice, we can do it without having to repeat the same tune.
Now that we understand how texts and tunes can be interchangeable, let’s turn to a hymn we’ll sing this coming Sunday, How Firm a Foundation. I’ve written in margin
notes that it would be odd to sing these words to the tune ADESTE FIDELES (O Come, All Ye Faithful), but that’s what mainline churches used to do. This is from our own 1955 hymnal:
Try singing that! It does fit, but it’s not the way God wrote it, so it feels strange. The meter is 11.11.11.11 It seems there was a bias against shape-note music so it took awhile for the text to be put with the tune we know:
That’s more like it. Let’s apply what we know to figuring out this hymn. We see the
title, the tune name FOUNDATION, and the meter. Who wrote the words? This one
is a puzzle. The writer is only known as “K” and the text comes from a collection
called A Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors, edited by John Rippon, 1787. There was a Richard Keen who was a songleader in the Baptist church in London where Rippon was the pastor, so that’s a good possibility, but no one knows for sure. The tune FOUNDATION is an American folk tune published in Genuine Church Music, 1832. If you aren’t confused enough yet, this tune has also been called BELLEVUE, HUGER, and THE CHRISTIAN’S FAREWELL. And if that’s not
enough, the tune ADESTE FIDELES (O Come, All Ye Faithful) has also been called PORTUGUESE HYMN. Just when you thought you had things figured out. OK, I think that’s enough for this lesson. My head is starting to hurt. Now you see
how much fun hymnody class was in school.
Other music this Sunday Organ music:
The prelude is a setting of our first hymn, The God of Abraham Praise (LEONI) by
American composer Richard Proulx. It’s in a form called “ritornello,” which means “return.” There’s an introduction before the first phrase of the hymn, and the same music keeps returning between phrases. The offertory is a piece by J.S. Bach from his collection called the Orgel-Büchlein or “little organ book,” probably called so becaue the original was 7 ½” wide and 6” high. It’s a collection of pieces based on Lutheran
hymns covering the church year. The postlude is also by Bach, this time from a collection called Clavier-Übung (“Keyboard Practice”) III. The piece is based on the
Lutheran chorale or hymn version of the creed, We All Believe in One God. Solo:
Kendall Kookogey will sing Mozart’s Laudate Dominum from the Solemn Vespers. The text is Psalm 117.
Hymns:
The God of Abraham Praise is an English version of the Yigdal, a canticle or song based on an ancient Hebrew statement of faithoften used in synagogue worship.
The text of My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less was written by a cabinetmaker who later became a Baptist minister. One morning while starting work, he got the idea to write a hymn. He wrote the refrain first, then the stanzas. The next Sunday he took them
when visiting a friend’s wife who was sick, and his singing seemed to cheer up the
dying woman. He wrote two more stanzas when he got home. At the request of his friend, he made a copy of the whole hymn and it was eventually published. The text was sung to other tunes before finally being paired with the current one.
Once again, I know worshiping and especially singing from home over the internet is not what we want, but right now, it’s what we have to work with. Paul wrote to the
Philippians, “I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty.” Right many of us are feeling like we “have little.” Some people really do have little,
much less than many of us have. I have a nice home, and beautiful wife and child that I love more than anything, and I have a great church to serve. Even so, I feel down in
the dumps sometimes these days, for good reasons, but I have a lot to be thankful for. Though our situation right now is not what we want, we can and will get through it, and if we can, we should help those who truly “have little” in these difficult times.
Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.” My goal in these writings is to give you more understanding of the music in our worship, to make it more meaningful for you. My hope is that you will sing with spirit too, even while you are at home, and even more so when we all come back together again.
God be with you till we meet again. God bless,
John