#841: Lift Every Voice and Sing
Jan. 11th, 2021 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lutheranhymnsThis song has a lot going on. In a good way!
Melody: it has a range of an octave plus a fourth, from low B to high E as written. That's a somewhat large range. Then again, it's the same range as "Silent Night." If you can sing Silent Night, you can sing this melody. (This will be important later.) It is also one of very few hymns in this volume to use a fermata, a sign that means "hold this note extra long," not at the end, just in the middle, for "brought us."
Harmony: there are some parts in the middle where it's in unison/an octave a part. "Sing a song..." until "brought us" where it goes into the fermata (see above), and at that point, the tenors cross paths with the altos! The last couple chords split into three parts for the women instead of two. And then there are parts where the basses have moving sixteenth notes and nobody else does, lots of intricate accidentals, and so on. We get both the very simple and the very complex here in the same piece.
Composers: The lyricist, James W. Johnson was a writer, civil rights activist, diplomat, and professor. He wrote "God's Trombones," which includes "The Creation" poem about "I'm lonely--I'll make me a world." This hymn might be better known than that text, I'm not sure, but they're both great. The music composer was his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson!
Text: Also very good. "Stony the road we trod," "days when hope unborn had died," "the blood of the slaughtered," "the wine of the world," great images, excellent rhyme scheme, compelling theology of God's presence in society in hard times and good. It was not obvious at first, but then once it clicked that this was written specifically about the African American experience, it's like...oh, this makes a lot of sense, the work for liberation on a group-wide level! I think it works as a universal Christian text (and to be clear, I am pro-universalism in this setting), but once you make that connection, it's especially fitting for like Martin Luther King Day when that's observed on Sunday, etc.
Now, during the last few months in the US, there's been a lot of efforts from corporations and institutions to be seen as racially diverse and progressive. Some of these are actually good efforts, some are empty signalling. One of the things the NFL did was to have this song performed along with "The Star-Spangled Banner" for the first week. One of my acquaintances from a gaming site, who is Black, criticized this as an empty gesture and not the kind of thing anyone was actually asking for. And I didn't argue because he is probably more attuned to matters of racial justice (and football) than I am. But what I wanted to say was "even in better circumstances, this is a far better anthem than 'The Star-Spangled Banner' anyway!! For one, its text is good! For another, its range isn't an octave and a fifth like the freaking Star-Spangled Banner! At least let's appreciate having an actually good song."
Anyway.
Melody: it has a range of an octave plus a fourth, from low B to high E as written. That's a somewhat large range. Then again, it's the same range as "Silent Night." If you can sing Silent Night, you can sing this melody. (This will be important later.) It is also one of very few hymns in this volume to use a fermata, a sign that means "hold this note extra long," not at the end, just in the middle, for "brought us."
Harmony: there are some parts in the middle where it's in unison/an octave a part. "Sing a song..." until "brought us" where it goes into the fermata (see above), and at that point, the tenors cross paths with the altos! The last couple chords split into three parts for the women instead of two. And then there are parts where the basses have moving sixteenth notes and nobody else does, lots of intricate accidentals, and so on. We get both the very simple and the very complex here in the same piece.
Composers: The lyricist, James W. Johnson was a writer, civil rights activist, diplomat, and professor. He wrote "God's Trombones," which includes "The Creation" poem about "I'm lonely--I'll make me a world." This hymn might be better known than that text, I'm not sure, but they're both great. The music composer was his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson!
Text: Also very good. "Stony the road we trod," "days when hope unborn had died," "the blood of the slaughtered," "the wine of the world," great images, excellent rhyme scheme, compelling theology of God's presence in society in hard times and good. It was not obvious at first, but then once it clicked that this was written specifically about the African American experience, it's like...oh, this makes a lot of sense, the work for liberation on a group-wide level! I think it works as a universal Christian text (and to be clear, I am pro-universalism in this setting), but once you make that connection, it's especially fitting for like Martin Luther King Day when that's observed on Sunday, etc.
Now, during the last few months in the US, there's been a lot of efforts from corporations and institutions to be seen as racially diverse and progressive. Some of these are actually good efforts, some are empty signalling. One of the things the NFL did was to have this song performed along with "The Star-Spangled Banner" for the first week. One of my acquaintances from a gaming site, who is Black, criticized this as an empty gesture and not the kind of thing anyone was actually asking for. And I didn't argue because he is probably more attuned to matters of racial justice (and football) than I am. But what I wanted to say was "even in better circumstances, this is a far better anthem than 'The Star-Spangled Banner' anyway!! For one, its text is good! For another, its range isn't an octave and a fifth like the freaking Star-Spangled Banner! At least let's appreciate having an actually good song."
Anyway.
