Hymns are not concert music. Perhaps this should go without saying, but I’m starting here because one of the ways we increasingly evaluate hymns is by listening to them on recordings.
Hymn recordings have been made ever since the dawn of recording technology. Any complete recording or broadcast of a service would naturally include hymns too. But the balance has changed with the advent of online streaming of liturgies. More hymns are being recorded than ever before.
And I wonder if this reality is beginning to challenge our common sense about hymn singing and how it works. I suspect it has for me, and I need to guard against this.
In April, I had a chance to give a talk at Sewanee about the hymnody of Herbert Howells. One of his hymn tunes that I inadvertently neglected was the tune he wrote for Charles Wesley’s “Love divine, all loves excelling.”
This tune was unpublished during Howells’s lifetime (it was not published until 1999, when Oxford University Press included it in a collection of four 20th-century tunes called Love Divine), so I felt only a little guilty about ignoring it. The night before the lecture, I listened to the fine recording by the Choir of St. Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, just so I could be prepared to say something intelligent about how the tune goes.
I wasn’t much impressed by that nocturnal listening, and I said as much the next day. But I also realized that, despite having copies of the Love Divine collection in our choir library, we had never performed the eponymous tune. I resolved to fix this, and this summer, with its need for simpler, more straightforward choral music, seemed the right time to sing it.
Returning to the tune just this week, I can see that I underestimated the effect it would have on me and, I hope, the singers who are preparing it now. And this is perhaps because I decided to judge the tune by how it sounded (a secondary theology) rather than by the experience of singing it (a primary theology).
When one hears “Howells hymn tune,” most people think of his blockbuster tune “Michael” for the hymn “All my hope on God is founded.” But many of Howells’s other tunes are quite different, more reserved. That’s true of “Love divine.” And this is a good thing; it offers a real alternative to more familiar tunes for this text. “Hyfrydol” peaks early at “joy;” Blaenwern peaks later at “unbounded love.”
Howells’s tune, though, seems to have a different physiognomy altogether. You could point to little peaks and valleys, but they’re more like ebbs and flows. The hymn has a quieter, gentler energy. At the outset, the melody is quasi-pentatonic until it decidedly is not. The alternative harmonization that Howells writes for the final stanza turns up the intensity and gets the tune to near-smoldering, but still with a heart full of “tender mercies.”
Like all of Howells’s hymn tunes, “Love Divine” rewards study. But even more rewarding is to experience the tune as Howells or any composer actually intends: sing it.
Labels: Charles Wesley, Howells, Hymn 665, hymns
©MMXVII Sinden.org: a site for fun and prophet