#488: Soul, Adorn Yourself with Gladness

[lutheranhymns]

This is one of those elaborate four-part chorales from the 1600s, although it's not as dark as the subgenre of "morbid Germans from the 1600s." The phrases are all the same duration musically, six half-notes, so it could be divided into measures nicely. They don't do that, instead they just do (evenly-spaced) breath marks. The reason this kind of matters is because in normal time-signature style, if a note is unexpectedly sharp or flat, by default further appearances of that note in the same measure are also sharp/flat, unless tagged with a natural sign. But if the note doesn't show up again until the next measure, it goes back to normal. In this case, however, it's not clear what the "next measure" is, so there are several cases of erring on the safe side to go "okay, this is sharp, now this next one is natural again, now this is sharp."

The narrator is amazed "that the bread of life is boundless though the souls it feeds are countless" (sort of a rhyme). I feel like this isn't a case where "though" is necessary? In order for anything to be miraculously capable of feeding generation upon generation, it pretty much has to be "boundless" in some way. I guess it's like how there were twelve baskets of leftovers after the five loaves and two fishes fed five thousand people; at that point you might as well go big!