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Blog...Songs of victory?
(29 September 2014) At first it seemed strangely out of kilter with the times. The opening chorus is taken from Psalm 118 verses 15-16: 'There are songs of glad victory in the tents of the righteous: "The right hand of the Lord does valiantly, the right hand of the Lord is exalted".' With the euphemistically-described 'air strikes' taking place in Iraq and Syria, today did not seem a good time to be rejoicing with trumpets and drums in the triumph of power and strength. But later on in the cantata the mood changes. A solo bassoon, that least warlike of instruments, accompanies alto and tenor to the words 'Keep awake, holy watchers: the night is almost over', bringing to mind the Passion narrative when Jesus's disciples could not stay awake in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the final chorale is a different setting of the words which close Bach's St John Passion. At the very end of this cantata the trumpets and drums, having remained silent for a quarter of an hour, reappear unexpectedly for just a couple of seconds on the word 'ewiglich' (eternally). Today is a time to remember that the archangel Michael appears not just in the Old and New Testaments, but also in the Qu'ran. One hundred years ago the Fellowship of Reconciliation was formed when two Christian pacifists, one English and one German, shook hands at a German railway station and said 'We are one in Christ and can never be at war.' We need to reflect on whether our needs for today are those of reconciliation or of retribution. Neither answer is an easy one. A musician's licence
(23 June 2015, first published in the Methodist Recorder) My answer was that it’s often a case of horses for courses. If
a congregation has learnt a song in a particular way it’s usually best to stick
with what they’re used to. But if it was unfamiliar and if the musician is able
enough, the best thing to do for this song would be to keep as near as possible
to the written syncopation. If you learn a tune in a standard, unsyncopated
rhythm it can be virtually impossible to re-learn it another way. John Wesley’s
Directions for
Singing, first published in 1761, has a wealth
of useful instruction that’s still valid today. ‘Sing (these tunes) exactly as
they are printed here… and if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn
it as soon as you can.’ Many British people from the mid-19th century onwards
were brought up on four-square rhythms and Victorian adaptations that somehow
missed the point of many good tunes, and made it difficult to grasp what
syncopation was all about. It’s good that this trend is being reversed to some
extent, and European and North American Methodists seem to be much happier with
cross-rhythms and bars of irregular length than we are in Britain, at least as
far as our respective hymn books would imply. A church musician has remarkable licence to make or mar a
service of worship, even in the Methodist Church where the hymns are almost
always chosen by the person leading the service. (In many denominations this
licence is even more apparent as the director of music is usually the one who
selects the hymns.) As with football referees, it can be a mark of how well
musicians are doing their job if they’re not noticed. But there are still many
subtle things that can be done to enhance the worship of God. For example,
there’s a tricky bit in ‘I, the Lord of sea and sky’ (Singing the Faith 663)
where it’s easy to come in a bar too early on the fifth line: but if the
musician holds on to the D on ‘save’, the last note of the previous line, for a
bar longer than is marked, it’s a useful pointer to the congregation for where
to come in. The congregation can help too. Methodists are renowned for
their singing, but Wesley points out: ‘Beware of singing as if you were half
dead, or half asleep.’ ‘Above all sing spiritually… in order to do this attend
strictly to the sense of what you sing.’ Our challenge is to do the latter
without omitting the former. As for the speed
at which to play a hymn, I am in the Wesley camp rather than that of Ralph
Vaughan Williams, who in the otherwise admirable
English Hymnal
(1906) railed against the custom in English churches of singing hymns much too
fast. ‘It is distressing to hear “Nun Danket” or “St. Anne” raced through at
about twice the proper speed,” he wrote in the Hymnal’s preface. For ‘Nun Danket’
(Now thank we all our God) he recommended a speed of 42 beats per minute.
Granted, he was referring to a ‘fairly large building with a congregation of
average size’, and the acoustics and size of the building always need to be
taken into account, as David Grimwood and Richenda Milton-Daws mentioned in last
month’s column, but that speed seems funereal for a tune which should be thought
of as two beats to a bar, not four. Wesley said: ‘Take care not to sing too
slow. This drawling way naturally steals on all who are lazy; and it is high
time to drive it out from us, and sing all our tunes just as quick as we did at
first.’ But once again it’s horses for courses. A quick-on-the uptake
musician will adjust the speed, or the manner in which a hymn is played, to fit
with the sense of the service currently taking place. A former colleague of mine, Wesley
Taylor, who was for many years the organist of Highlands Methodist Church,
Leigh-on-Sea, used to tell the story of one of his first organ lessons. His
teacher asked him to play a verse of a hymn. He did so, and quite well, as he
thought. The teacher then asked ‘Which verse were you playing?’ He was unable to
answer, and never forgot that lesson. Attending strictly to the sense of what
you sing, or play, is what Dr Steve Kimbrough describes as the crowning
instruction of John Wesley and the Methodist movement: ‘singing in the Wesleyan
tradition is itself practical divinity. It engages the divine Spirit and human
experience, discipline, and art to shape a life of service to God and others,
and to illuminate the path toward holiness.’ (S
T Kimbrough, Jr:
A Heart to Praise My God – Wesley Hymns for Today,
Abingdon Press, 1996 Carols? In January?
(29 December 2015, first published in the Methodist Recorder) It’s sad that
Christmas is so played out before the actual day appears that we can find it
difficult to take time out to think, or too tired out to celebrate the festival
as it ought to be celebrated. Some years ago a group of Methodists offered to go
out to peoples’ houses to sing Christmas carols on any of the few evenings
after
Christmas, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, got no take-up whatever. The big
Christmas adverts on commercial channels used to disappear on the afternoon of
Christmas Eve, when the shops shut, meaning Christmas Day programmes had the
unusual accompaniment of furniture sales (although this year, with the increase
of online trading, the change was not quite so dramatic). Sometimes it even
happens that Christmas carols disappear from church services as soon as
Christmas Day has gone. An 18th century Irish carol ‘Christmas day is come’ hopes that
we will ‘find true pleasure in all the usual cheer: in dancing, spoting,
revelling with masquerade and drum; so be our Christmas merry, as Christians
doth become.’ Celebration should surely include dancing with masquerade and
drum (and harp, lyre, tambourine, sistrum and cymbal – see 2 Samuel 6:5). Here
in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, we celebrate each year with a Folk Carol Service, local
folk musicians and singers and a congregation of up to 200 playing and singing
traditional carols. Not traditional in the sense of those you’d expect to hear
in a service of nine lessons and carols, but those which have come down to us
through the oral tradition: composed or written by the common folk of the time,
not the skilled musicians; rarely written down, instead preserved by each
generation learning the tune and words by hearing them being sung, the name of
the original author or composer long since having been forgotten. A carol was
based upon dance music, and the Christmas carols would have been played by the
local dance band, so this is what we do. Some new songs
have been added, a couple of them reimagining the birth of Christ in our own
locality: ‘Come all good people of this town / Rich and poor come gather round /
For whoever you may be / A child is born in Leigh-on-Sea (A
Carol for Leigh, © 2007 Peter Monk). This isn’t
new, as Albert Bayly’s ‘If Christ were born in Burnley’ and Billy James & John
Wheeler’s Australian carols such as ‘The three drovers’ testify. My favourite
unlikely derivation of a Christmas carol is the one usually known as ‘Balulalow’
and which begins ‘O my dear heart, young Jesus sweet’. Sometimes credited as
Scots traditional, sometimes to John, James and Robert Wedderburn, it’s actually
a translation by one or more of the Wedderburn brothers of Martin Luther’s ‘Von
Himmel hoch’, the carol which always ends BBC’s Christmas Eve
Carols from King’s
in its organ arrangement by Bach. This surprising source is explained by the
fact that John Wedderburn was with Luther in Wittenberg in 1540. And, oh yes,
which tune shall we have? The standard tunes for ‘It came upon the midnight
clear’, ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ and ‘Away in a manger’ are all different
depending which side of the Atlantic you are on; ‘Hark! the herald-angels sing’
was sung to many tunes, including those now associated with ‘Christ the Lord is
risen today’ and ‘Thine be the glory’, before a setting of a chorus celebrating
the anniversary of Gutenberg’s printing-press came along (Mendelssohn welcomed
the use of his tune for other purposes, but thought it would never do to sacred
words); and the various tunes for ‘While shepherds watched’ would fill a large
book, partly because for many years it was the only legally authorised Christmas
hymn in the Church of England. ‘I saw three ships’ has two very similar and
almost equally-known tunes; ‘The holly and the ivy’ has more tunes than you may
expect. There are also a huge number of tunes for the Cherry Tree Carol ‘Joseph
was an old man’, the Gloucestershire version used at the Leigh-on-Sea Folk Carol
Service being one that doesn’t seem to occur in print anywhere else. And all of
these are
old
tunes: the vast expansion of recently-composed choral settings for carols, with
John Rutter and more recently Bob Chilcott being the best-known creators, is
another matter again. So get your
Christmas carol CDs out again, log on to the internet, or have a look at the
less-familiar carols in Singing the Faith.
They’re too good to keep just for the week before Christmas.
The other two
cycles were by a composer I’d scarcely heard of before, although he was featured
in August on BBC Radio 3’s
Composer Of The Week and a
couple of his orchestral pieces are quite popular, one being included in the
first half of this year’s Last Night of the Proms. I was introduced
to the songs of George Butterworth by my friend the singer Ian Pirie, whose
father was a music critic who wrote the introduction to two volumes of
Butterworth songs. I learnt that all but one of the songs in the two cycles
A Shropshire
Lad and
Bredon Hill and Other
Songs, both settings of poems by A.E. Housman,
had piano postludes like Schumann, and there was a great deal of fine
word-painting to rival the earlier composer. Many composers set Housman’s words,
but Butterworth was the only one whom the poet felt had come close to
understanding the meaning of what he had written. If you heard
The Banks of
Green Willow from the Proms, or any of
Butterworth’s other pieces from
Composer of the Week, do
listen to some of his songs. He could not in any way be described as a major
composer, but his settings are always interesting. Like his friends Ralph
Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp, he collected hundreds of folk songs,
particularly in Sussex. He wrote accompaniments to a few, though it’s possible
that many more may have been lost or destroyed.
The true lover’s
farewell, with which we ended the concert, is a
variant of The
turtle dove (Fare you well, my dear, I must be gone…),
known best in a setting by Vaughan Williams. The
Bredon Hill
cycle starts with the title piece, a seemingly cheerful and pastoral piece about
lovers preparing for their wedding to the sound of the church bells, before it
takes a darker tone and the pealing bells turn into a single funeral bell for
the loss of the loved one who ‘went to church alone… and would not wait for me.’
There is a remarkable leap of a ninth in the voice at the words ‘I hear you’.
The cycle ends with a deceptively simple setting of
With rue my heart is
laden. The
Shropshire Lad
cycle also begins in the countryside, with both voice and piano depicting the
cherry tree weighed down by blossom in
Loveliest of trees.
In Look not in
my eyes the beat shifts effortlessly between 5
and 6 in a bar as the story of Narcissus is re-told. Two of the songs, one from
each of the cycles, were later adapted by the composer into his orchestral
rhapsody also called A Shropshire Lad:
Loveliest of
trees and
With rue my heart is
laden. Like most
composers, Butterworth struggled to live on composition alone, supplementing his
meagre income by writing for the
Times, teaching and more
surprisingly being a professional morris dancer. Butterworth’s
songs, as well as the original Housman poems, seem to evoke a sense of the great
loss of the First World War.
On the idle hill of summer
has the steady tramp of soldiers,
The lads in their hundreds
the departure of young men who will never grow old, and the almost unbearably
sad Is my team
ploughing? (as well as featuring surely one of
the very few references to football playing in classical music) a dialogue
between the dead and the living. But the evocation of the First World War cannot
be, as the pieces were composed a few years before it happened. George
Butterworth didn’t live to become a pillar of the English folk song movement
like his friends Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp. He died in that pointless
waste of life called the Battle of the Somme, killed by a sniper in the early
morning of 5 August 1916. He was thirty-one years old. (There are many
recordings of the Shropshire Lad
cycle available but not so many of
Bredon Hill. Roderick
Williams and Iain Burnside’s recording on Naxos includes both of these as well
as the 11 surviving Folk Songs from Sussex. Sing Bach
(5 March 2017, first published in the Methodist Recorder) Bach’s best known
vocal works are the Mass in B minor
(never performed in his lifetime), the
Magnificat
(written for Christmas Day 1723 and first performed at the 1.30 pm Vespers
service on that day – anyone fancy a Christmas Day afternoon service?) and the
St Matthew and
St John
Passions. Much less known are his church
cantatas, with the possible exception of the
Christmas Oratorio
which is really a set of six cantatas for six of the feast days of Christmas,
New Year and Epiphany – and not especially typical of his other cantatas. I was introduced to Bach cantatas more than 40 years ago, in
the English translation of cantata 140 ‘Sleepers wake’; there’s a well-known
tune in the fourth movement. It became a regular journey to visit the wonderful
Enfield public library’s music department and take out massive box sets of his
cantata LPs on a single ticket, firstly those of Karl Richter with Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau singing the song about John the Baptist leaping inside his
mother Elizabeth in cantata 121, later those of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav
Leonhardt, pioneers of the use of early instruments. More recently the set of
John Eliot Gardner which was recorded during his Cantata Pilgrimage in 2000 has
been a joy. I am one of those ‘cantata nuts’ who listen to one of the pieces
every week, and have done so for 35 years or more – they never seem to fail to
have something to say, true sermons in music. A
cantata,
literally ‘a sung piece’, was originally a composition for a solo voice with
accompaniment, often alternating arias with recitatives, but around Bach’s time
the meaning expanded into pieces with both choral and solo sections. Bach’s
cantatas typically start with a piece for the choir, then a series of arias and
recitatives, and finish with a chorale (a harmonised hymn). But there are many
variations: one of the most exciting of all (number 50,
Nun ist das Heil und die Kraft)
lasts only five minutes, with the suggestion that it may be part of a larger
piece which has been lost; and a few come in two parts and last forty minutes.
Some are like the earlier cantatas and are for solo voice with accompaniment
only; some have lots of singing for the choir; and a few have extended
orchestral sections. What is truly remarkable, as alluded to earlier, is that they
were written in white heat, scribbled down furiously by Bach and rushed around
to his helpers – older schoolboys, his wife and children – to be ready just in
time for the one and only rehearsal, scarcely in time for the ink to dry or for
hideous copying mistakes to be corrected. One a week, extra for special
festivals, and three at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost! And truly there is not
a third-rate one among them. Just under two hundred survive, most of them
written in the space of a very few years when he first was appointed to Leipzig.
Many, if not most, were only ever performed a couple of times. Bach, like other cantors in large German cities, was appointed
by the city council not directly by the church, and was expected to perform
almost exclusively contemporary music. So after his death his successor would
have completely ignored this huge store of wonderful music. The season of
Lent, when you might expect there to be a wealth of Bach cantatas, is sadly
lacking because Leipzig, where Bach spent most of his working life, had no music
in Lent until Good Friday except for the feast of the Annunciation, 25 March. If
you’d like to listen to a cantata on the appropriate day, number 1 (for 25
March, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern)
is one of the best of them all, and numbers 54 (for the third Sunday in Lent,
Wiederstehe doch der Sünde,
short and written for one voice only, a solo deep-pitched alto) and 182 (for
Palm Sunday, Himmelskönig, sei willkommen),
both written in 1714/15 when Bach was in Weimar, are well worth a listen. The mystery of the missing
publisher
(3 February 2018, first published in the Methodist Recorder) Older Methodist
hymn books had printed companions giving such details, and the
Singing the Faith
Plus website has a page for each hymn, one of
whose objectives is to fulfil a similar role although it has a much broader
remit. It was a supplementary information sheet included in the
Hymns & Psalms
Companion that led me on a voyage of discovery. There are
interesting stories about the genesis of some hymn tunes, which on closer
inspection turn out to be spurious – such as the ‘mice eating through the organ
bellows’ explanation of how Silent Night came
to be written for guitar, a myth which still lives on, Alexander Armstrong
retelling it most recently in the documentary to his 2017 album
In A Winter Light.
(There’s no evidence that the organ at Oberndorf was out of action at Christmas
1818 at all.) But sometimes, the truth can be more interesting than the error. The tune WINCHESTER NEW, which is used for the Advent hymn ‘On
Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry’ and the Palm Sunday hymn ‘Ride on, ride on in
majesty’ – although some people with long memories will also recall ST DROSTANE,
which is in the same key and starts with the same three notes, for the latter –
has a history going back to Hamburg in 1690, and on that all are agreed. Now if you take a
music copy of Singing the Faith
and turn to either of these hymns you’ll find the name of Georg Wittwe. But
no-one of that name existed. The information
sheet in the Hymns & Psalms
Companion mentioned that the publisher of the book in which the tune first
appeared wasn’t George Wittwe but Georg Nebenlein’s widow, ‘wit(t)we’ being
German for ‘widow’. Unfortunately this was only partially correct as no-one of
that name existed either! After a bit of careful Google-ing the following story
came to light… Going back to Hamburg in the 17th century, the Rebenlein
(rather than Nebenlein) family were printers to the city council, and Georg
Rebenlein became the main printer at the age of 28 when his father died in 1662.
Georg died in 1684 and, as his younger brother had also died and there seem to
have been no other relatives, Georg’s widow took over the printing business for
eight years until she also died. One of the books she published, roughly
translated as Musical Handbook of Sacred Melodies with Tune and Bass, is where
we find for the first time an older version of WINCHESTER NEW. As was common at
the time, she used the titles ‘Georg Rebenleins Wittwe’ or ‘Georg Rebenleins
Erben’ (which means Georg Rebenlein’s widow or heirs) on the title pages of her
publications. In
English-speaking countries, then, it’s perhaps not surprising that even to this
day there are hundreds of references to the non-existent Georg Wittwe – and, as
far as I’m aware, just one single reference to the name of the actual publisher
of the book, and that’s on Facebook, apart from on the
Singing the Faith
Plus website. So what was the actual name of this enterprising woman, who
brought this tune to our notice over 300 years ago? She was born Margarethe
Trützen, and under her married name of Margarethe Rebenlein she carried on her
husband’s work. No-one knows when she was born, there are no pictures of her,
and it seems such a shame that her name should be blotted out of history. John Wesley
learnt the Rebenlein tune from the Moravians, and published it in his
Foundery Collection
of 1742, giving it the title SWIFT GERMAN TUNE. George Whitefield gave it the
name of WINCHESTER NEW in 1754 and changed it to three-four time. Wesley used
this version in his Sacred Harmony tune
book but for some reason it was called FRANKFORT (Frankfurt) there. It wouldn’t
have been referring to Frankfort, Kentucky, USA, as that city didn’t get its
name until after
Sacred Harmony was
published. Finally, William Henry Havergal revised it to the version we’re
familiar with in 1847. And lastly, there’s one more unsolved mystery. The hymn to
which the tune was set in Margarethe Rebenlein’s book was Georg Neumark’s ‘Wer
nur den lieben Gott läßt walten’, to which the author had written his own
excellent tune that’s still in use today, so why was an alternative tune chosen,
a seemingly brand new-tune which no-one currently knows who composed?
The kiss of the sun for pardon, I’ve never liked Dorothy Frances Gurney’s ubiquitous poem,
always finding it a bit too twee. But after moving house recently, the birdsong
was notably different: more varied, more intense. There’s definitely something
musical – and spiritual, too – about a garden full of trees and birds. Music and
birdsong have been intertwined for as long as music has been written down – and
probably even longer. From the 13th-century
Sumer is icumen in,
which references cuckoos, to Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 2017 percussion piece
Martland Memorial
(birdsong and quacking ducks), with countless others in between, birds have been
a constant favourite of composers. And of audiences, as well: Vaughan Williams’
The Lark
Ascending has been number 1 in Classic FM’s
annual poll of their favourite classical piece for nine of the last thirteen
years. Even more
recently, the RSPB’s Let Nature Sing,
consisting entirely of birdsong, was at number 18 in the UK singles chart in May
2019. As one wag said, it’s all chorus. But it’s not the first time that a
recording of birdsong has been a popular hit: in the earliest days of BBC radio,
the cellist Beatrice Harrison was regularly featured playing in her garden, with
nightingales singing along. There were even some broadcasts of the nightingales
singing on their own and of the dawn chorus in the same garden. This all ceased
abruptly during the Second World War when it was realised that as the BBC sound
equipment was being set up, Wellington and Lancaster bombers could be heard
approaching, and Nazi spies listening in may have been able to work out where
they were heading. Minnie Riperton’s hit single of 1975
Lovin’ You
had chirping songbirds throughout: apparently they were recorded accidentally on
the demo and were too good to leave out. And BBC Radio 4
has also been broadcasting, since 2013, a weekday programme of birdsong equally
waggishly entitled Tweet of the Day,
only 90 seconds long. Here are some more bird-related music worth further
investigation, roughly in chronological order:
·
Thomas Vautor’s
Sweet Suffolk owl (featuring the choir singing ‘te whit, te whoo’);
·
The 18th-century
The Bird Fancyer’s Delight for unaccompanied recorder, which, rather
than being an attempt to recreate the song of birds on an instrument, was
designed to teach your pet bullfinch, linnet or canary to sing human tunes –
bizarre but true;
·
François
Couperin’s Le Rossignol-en-amour and
subsequent pieces from his 13th order of harpsichord pieces (though it’s equally
effective played by a flute or recorder with keyboard accompaniment);
·
Frederick Delius’s
On hearing the first cuckoo in Spring (in which the cuckoo call
starts in the oboe, moves to strings, and finishes in the clarinet);
·
At the end of the third
movement of Ottorino Respighi’s symphonic poem
Pines of Rome, the composer calls for
a recording of a nightingale made on Rome’s Janiculum hill;
·
Olivier Messiaen’s
Catalogue d’oiseaux, a thirteen-piece piano solo in which each piece
references a particular French province, its landscape and the birds that sing
there. The contemporary Australian composer Hollis Taylor has
described her first hearing the pied butcherbird as sounding ‘like a jazz
flautist in a tree’. She makes a convincing case for the songs of the
butcherbird and the brown thrasher (both, surely, supremely ill-named) being
complex enough to be regarded as music in their own right. Unsurprisingly, birds occur in some of this country’s most popular hymns. ‘Each little bird that sings…’ ‘By him the birds are fed…’ ‘Blackbird has spoken…’ ‘When through the woods and forest glades I wander / and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees…’ John Bell and Graham Maule describe the Holy Spirit as ‘sit(ting) like a bird, brooding on the waters… she sighs and she sings, mothering creation’. They explain that it is the Spirit’s presence that enable us to understand the words of the Bible. Maybe, after all, we really are nearer God’s heart in a garden…
At the time of writing, one week has elapsed since Government restrictions were
loosened to allow public singing in places of worship once again.
For most people in England, congregational singing stopped in March 2020 and
only resumed in July 2021. There have been exceptions: some congregations have
recently enjoyed singing outdoors; some churches have had live singing by
professional choirs or soloists; and, conversely, some churches are still not
singing because it is now up to the churches themselves, not the law, to decide
on the best way forward. In the interim period, there have been many ways that churches
have explored how to worship God corporately without being able to meet in
person. The most common of these have been Zoom and YouTube, and it is good to
see that many of these will be continuing, to minister to those who are unable,
or find it difficult, to get to church services. Recorded and live music has
taken a prominent part in a lot of these services and it is interesting to see
how they have developed over the last 16 months. For myself, congregational singing
stopped on 17 March 2020 with the singing of
Abide with me at a funeral, and
restarted on 21 July 2021 with Lord of all hopefulness at another funeral. In between, I have
experienced several different approaches to music in worship:
·
To start with, no services
in person were permitted at all, so Zoom and YouTube were hastily brought in,
with recorded clips of music being used – sometimes recorded by local musicians
especially for the service;
·
When in-person services
resumed, most services were spoken only, others with pre-recorded music;
·
After a while, hymns were
either played on the organ so that the congregation could follow silently, or a
solo cantor or small group sang the hymns. There have been very few weddings: in fact 2020 was the first
year since 1978 that I played for no weddings at all. Ironically, 2020 was the
year of my own wedding to Kate, celebrated with no organist or live music, no
hymns, only the few allowed guests, and no reception – but plenty of love and
joy. In 2018 I gave a talk about music and poetry in worship to a
meeting of the Southend and Leigh Circuit Worship Academy, and mentioned that
there had been very few worship services, out of the thousands I had been to,
that had had no music at all. That number has vastly increased over the last
year. What hymns were chosen on the
resumption of congregational singing on Sunday 25 July? At St Mary’s Whittlesey
the small choir, delighted to be back, were asked to choose the hymns, and the
first one was (much to my pleasure) the Wesley favourite
Love divine, all loves excelling.
Another, rather more to my surprise, though I recognised it from the 1933
Methodist Hymn Book, was
Jerusalem the golden, which I’m sure I
have never previously played in 45 years. At a different church, mentioned on
the Ship of Fools website forum, an
unusual choice for starting singing again was
Let all mortal flesh keep silence. I
suspect this may have been tongue in cheek, although there is a possible
connection to St James’s feast day. Another surprise was how many times in
the past year The old rugged cross was
chosen as a funeral hymn, including once for a Requiem Mass at a Roman Catholic
church. I associate that hymn more with my father’s generation (he was born in
1910), but as it was a country and western song favourite in the 1950s, 60s and
70s, that may have a lot to do with its current popularity. Though written by an
American Methodist preacher, it has never been in a British Methodist hymn book
apart from the 2001 Kevin Mayhew collection
Methodist Hymns Old and New. Tastes do
indeed sometimes circulate and skip a generation:
Through the love of God our Saviour
was included in both the 1933 Methodist
Hymn Book and 2011’s Singing the Faith,
but not in the intervening 1983 Hymns and
Psalms.
I was recently asked, for a
forthcoming funeral, if I knew God be
with you till we meet again. Yes, I said, but there are two tunes, one 19th
century in the Moody-and-Sankey style with a chorus, and one by Ralph Vaughan
Williams without a chorus. And you can even have the Vaughan Williams tune with
the earlier chorus attached, which seems a little odd but does work. And then it struck me: not only are
there two tunes, but two different sets of words as well. Donald Hughes revised
Jeremiah Eames Rankin’s earlier words in the 1960s, and it was that version
which appeared in Hymns and Psalms in
1983. William Gould Tomer’s tune, written for Rankin’s hymn, may still be
familiar to some, despite Vaughan Williams’ tune RANDOLPH having been used in
hymnals as early as 1906 and having superseded Tomer’s tune in Methodist hymnals
since 1933. The co-existence of two hymns with the
same first line is not as uncommon as you might think. Fred Pratt Green was one
of those asked to write new words to existing tunes for the Methodist Church’s
supplementary hymnbook Hymns and Songs,
which appeared in 1969. He said that he never ceased to regret that his
inexperience caused him to use the same opening line as the existing hymn
This joyful Eastertide by George
Ratcliffe Woodward, leading to some confusion: the final line of the chorus is
also very similar. Both hymns are always sung to the marvellous Dutch tune
VRUECHTEN, and it is a shame that the Church of England, United Reformed Church
and Roman Catholic Church only know Woodward’s original. Another Easter hymn,
Christ the Lord is risen today, is a
Charles Wesley special which was modelled on the slightly earlier, and
anonymous, Jesus Christ is risen today.
Both hymns have survived to the present day, and as they are both often sung to
the same tune, it’s not surprising that they too can easily be confused. That
tune is the anonymous EASTER HYMN, from the same source as the earlier words: it
was called SALISBURY in some of John Wesley’s earliest collections and EASTER
MORN in the 1904 (Wesleyan) and 1933 Methodist hymn books. However, many hymn
books including that 1933 Methodist book have both of these hymns, usually
setting one of them to Robert Williams’ LLANFAIR.
The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want
has several variations as well, though these are less likely to be confused. The
words are from the 1650 Scottish Psalter. CRIMOND, probably composed by Jessie
Irvine though possibly by David Grant (the facts are lost in history), has been
for many years the most commonly sung tune, though not as far back as the early
19th century, where an appearance in Steven Knight’s 2023 adaptation for BBC of
Dickens’ Great Expectations would
have it: it didn’t make its first appearance in a hymn book until two years
after Dickens died, and then only in Scotland. CRIMOND became popular in the
rest of Britain through the singing of Hugh Roberton’s Glasgow Orpheus Choir
about 100 years ago. Prior to that, the blind one-armed composer Neil Dougall’s
pentatonic KILMARNOCK would have been the best known tune. James Leith Macbeth
Bain’s BROTHER JAMES’S AIR, with extended verses, is another well-known setting
of the same words. Stuart Townend’s worship song with the same first line has
been very popular now for 25 years or more, and there are no end of other
versions of Psalm 23 with similar beginnings.
Crown him with many crowns has a
complicated history. Matthew Bridges’ original hymn first appeared in a hymnal
in 1867. In 1871 it appeared in another hymnal, extensively revised. The reason
for these revisions became clear in 1874 when Godfrey Thring, dean of Wells
Cathedral, published a hymn beginning ‘Crown him with crowns of gold’. He
explained: There are many other worship songs
which use, or intersperse, older hymns, a very short selection including
Amazing grace (two different versions
by Chris Tomlin and Nathan Fellingham), Keith Getty’s
O for a closer walk with God and
Matthew West’s Blessed assurance (My King
is coming). In the end, the family of the deceased
decided to go with the earlier version of
God be with you, both words and tune, and having heard the YouTube version
they based their decision on, very movingly sung a cappella, I can see why they
did. It was sung well at the funeral with a small choir and provided a fitting
memorial. Contact:
paul.mcdowell@sky.com or
telephone 07790 061381 or 01733 350088 |