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This tune was unpublished during Howells’s lifetime (it was not published until 1999, when Oxford University Press included it in a collection of four 20th-century tunes called Love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 “faithful 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
The descant is a high line for the trebles of the choir that soars above the melody of a hymn – a melody that everyone has already sung three, four, five, or even seven times in a row already.
In writing a descant, sometimes you need to leave a word or two out for the music to flow. The work of the descant is done by the notes, and the words can be an unnecessary encumbrance. If you do use words, you might not necessarily use all of them. Or you might use just "alleluia", or even "ah".
So it is no surprise that the great composer Herbert Howells takes some liberties with texting his own descant to his glorious hymn tune MICHAEL.
Here is a spectacular recording of this hymn sung by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge. It's an arrangement brass, percussion, and organ by Christopher Palmer, but the harmonization and descant are Howells's own. Hear the whole thing below, or just go straight to the final stanza to hear Howells's descant.
It's really lovely, I think. And not every church musician seems to be aware that this is out there!
A couple points: the descant seems especially strong because it begins as a modified canon at the fourth. It's a highly effective way to draw the ear, and it staggers the descant away from the beginning of the melody. It's almost a surprise when it comes in. As in, "Oh, a descant too!". This technique is probably not used often enough in our hymn singing.
Furthermore, Howells does something rather interesting with the words. The descant is initially texted with the first stanza of Robert Bridges poem:
All my hope on God is founded; he doth still my trust renew, me through change and chance he guideth, only good and only true. God unknown, he alone calls my heart to be his own.
While the choir and congregation have progressed to the final stanza:
Still from man to God eternal sacrifice of praise be done, high above all praises praising for the gift of Christ, his Son. Christ doth call one and all: ye who follow shall not fall.
But it should be said that the descanters sing only an abbreviated version of the first stanza. After the first two verses they skip to the fifth and then to the first part of the seventh for the peculiar turn of phrase: "God unknown calls my heart."
This really jumped out at me this last time I read it. I suppose it's not all that strange given that the only missing phrase here is "he alone". But it got me thinking about our unknown God.
What is it to say that God is "unknown"? We know him to a degree in the person of Jesus Christ. And so isn't it fascinating that these words about "God unknown" are paired with praise "for the gift of Christ his son"?
And the arrival of the descanters to the words of the final stanza pack a particular punch as they pivot on the word "call".
In the first stanza God "calls my heart to be his own". In the final, "Christ doth call" – and it should be noted that it is the same Christ for whom we praise the unknown God.
The cascading spirals of ascending praise are already rapturous at this point, and Howells's text setting makes them even more so.
But does it help us know God any better? Are we supposed to? Or is the person of God to be mysterious, and known, as his Christ, by his "call"?
We also often sing of "love unknown", as it is in the beginning of the anonymous 18th century hymn "Come, thou almighty king":
Come, thou almighty King, help us thy Name to sing, help us to praise. Father whose love unknown all things created own, build in our hearts thy throne, Ancient of Days.
And in the famous Samuel Crossman hymn that bears the phrase in the first line:
My song is love unknown, my Savior's love to me, love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.
"Pop" Music Tangent: See also: Coldplay: "A Message" - relation to "My Song is Love Unknown"
And again in Charlotte Elliott's beautiful hymn "Just as I am, without one plea"
Just as I am, thy love unknown has broken every barrier down; now to be thine, yea, thine alone, O Lamb of God, I come.
But one of the most fascinating "unknowns" in Christian hymnody is that of the unknown Traveler. Charles Wesley's hymn picks up on the anonymity of Jacob's wrestling partner in the hymn he called "Wrestling Jacob".
Come, O thou Traveler unknown, whom still I hold, but cannot see; my company before is gone, and I am left alone with thee. With thee all night I mean to stay, and wrestle till the break of day.
And so it is that Jacob does engage in a prolonged stalemate with the Traveler, despite injury, and then the sun rises on the scene. It is the Traveler who asks to be let go in the story from Genesis, "for day is breaking". (I suppose that the rising sun would "shine too much light" on this conflict!)
And then there is the great ordeal of naming and identity. Jacob demands a blessing. The Traveler asks his name. Jacob gives it. The Traveler says, "now you shall be called Israel".
Then, in the Genesis story, remarkably, Jacob asks the Traveler's name. He seems to have forgotten for a moment that he really just wanted a blessing. Or, maybe he thinks knowing God in this way would be a greater blessing?
The Traveler responds, "why is it that you ask my name"?
In the story, we never get a name for the Traveler, but in Charles Wesley's hymn, there is a profound poetic resolution to all this wrestling.
... Speak, or thou never hence shalt move, and tell me if thy name is Love. 'Tis Love, 'tis Love! Thou diedst for me! I hear thy whisper in my heart: the morning breaks, the shadows flee. Pure Universal Love thou art; thy mercies never shall remove, thy nature and thy name is Love.
God may be "unknown", but we know enough.
"God is love", or even better, "Pure Universal Love".
And what about us, called by God? How are we known?
If the spiritual has it right, and we do too, "they'll know we are Christians by our love".
Labels: Charles Wesley, Charlotte Elliott, church music, Howells, hymns, Jacob, Robert Bridges, Samuel Crossman
From the storied Chapel of King's College, Cambridge, England, comes an argument for the primacy of the daily office: Matins (Morning Prayer) and Evensong (Evening Prayer).
[The services of Matins and Evensong] are made out of layers of tradition which are much older. The medieval services drew on the patterns and content of worship in Christian churches of the first centuries. They in turn drew on the worship of the Jewish synagogues, which themselves depended on the traditional Jewish scriptures which Christians call the Old Testament.Service Booklet. Introductory Note, p. 2. King's College Chapel, Cambridge, England.
Having placed the services in their historical context, the anonymous author of this introduction (could it possibly be Eric Milner-White?) then elucidates our place in this ancient pattern.
It follows that we need to do two things in order to enter into the spirit of these services. First we have to be patient and relaxed enough to allow a long tradition to have its say. Then we should allow our own thoughts and feelings to become closer to us than life outside admits. These two things are not separate. In the tradition there are, along with what is strange, strong expressions of our basic feelings about ourselves and God. And it is precisely the cool and ancient order of the services which gives a space and frame, as well as cues, for reflections on our regrets and hopes and gratitudes. The best analogy of it is in a relation of love. There, as here, we find ourselves by attending to another. So we may learn here a little of what we need and enjoy everywhere.Service Booklet. Introductory Note, p. 2. King's College Chapel, Cambridge, England. Emphasis added.
It's not surprising to find "a relation of love" when we consider the Matins and Evensong liturgies, or really any liturgy of the church. Beauty is both intrinsic to and the goal of liturgy.
John O'Donohue, quoted on this blog earlier this month in Evensong - the surrender to, remarks on the human soul's hunger for beauty. "In the experience of beauty we awaken and surrender in the same act."
This brings immediately to mind these words of Thomas Merton's No Man is an Island: "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." And do we not find and lose ourselves in the experience of love?
O'Donohue goes on to say that at its essence, beauty is love. (And not just any shade of love either, but Eros!)
To awaken and surrender. To find and lose. When we surrender and lose ourselves in the historic, authentic liturgy of the church, we awaken to love. One needs only to look to Christian hymnody to see what a archetypal spiritual image this is.
Perhaps the most famous words in this vein are those by John Newton
Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.
A lesser-known hymn by Elizabeth Cosnett (b. 1936) gets at the contradiction in trying to "find" God.
Can we by searching find out God or formulate his ways? Can numbers measure what he is or words contain his praise? Although his being is too bright for human eyes to scan, his meaning lights our shadowed world through Christ, the Son of Man. Our boastfulness is turned to shame, our profit counts as loss, when earthly values stand beside the manger and the cross. We may there recognize his light, may kindle in its rays, find there the source of penitence, the starting-point of praise. There God breaks in upon our search, makes birth and death his own; he speaks to us in human terms to make his glory known.
An anonymous 19th century hymn also gets at the paradox of finding the One who finds
I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me; it was not I that found, O Savior true; no, I was found of thee.
And in one of the grandest lines of hymnody, by the great Charles Wesley, we see that the goal of all this spiritual hide and seek is really so that we can lose ourselves in the beauty that is the subject and object of our worship.
Finish then thy new creation; pure and spotless let us be; let us see thy great salvation perfectly restored in thee: changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise.
And so it is with Evensong. If we attend to Evensong "in a relation of love", the great tradition of beauty which permeates this service will awaken us and cause us to surrender in the same act.
Evensong, in a noisy, demanding world, offers something rare. Our churches should offer it, and our congregations should be encouraged to cherish it.
Evensong should be loved.
Labels: Charles Wesley, Elizabeth Cosnett, Evensong, John Newton, John O'Donohue, King's College (Cambridge), liturgy, Thomas Merton
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