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#470: Draw Us in the Spirit's Tether
May. 7th, 2020 10:40 pmThe text has gone through an interesting culture war/second person editing process. The first verse has the nice feminine rhyme "tether/together." Cool. The second verse originally had "gather" and "Father," as in "God the Father." For one, this doesn't even rhyme, and for another, it's kinda sexist. So they swapped it to "gather/giver," which...rhymes even less well. ("Gather" could go with "tether" or "together" again!)
And then in the third verse, the masculine rhyme scheme was originally "thee, be, faithfully." "thee" had to get swapped to "you." "Be" was an easy fix, they just changed the word order from "...true disciples be" to "be disciples true." And then "thee faithfully" got swapped to "with faith anew." Still pretty decent by translation standards, just an odd journey.
Also, in the bass line, there are some small (optional?) notes--when the melody is holding a whole note, a couple times it looks like it's saying "you could hold this for only three beats and then drop an octave down." I assume that's just for piano rather than bass singers, because that feels pretty unnecessary.
And then in the third verse, the masculine rhyme scheme was originally "thee, be, faithfully." "thee" had to get swapped to "you." "Be" was an easy fix, they just changed the word order from "...true disciples be" to "be disciples true." And then "thee faithfully" got swapped to "with faith anew." Still pretty decent by translation standards, just an odd journey.
Also, in the bass line, there are some small (optional?) notes--when the melody is holding a whole note, a couple times it looks like it's saying "you could hold this for only three beats and then drop an octave down." I assume that's just for piano rather than bass singers, because that feels pretty unnecessary.
