This and 864 are like 858 and 859; one member of each pair is just a slightly modified set of lyrics of the other, to be less sexist in referring to God. There's no need to reprint the music because it follows immediately from the other version. Again, I choose to believe the committee sat around and argued about this for way too long. "Well which one gets to go with the music? If we give the sexist one priority, you owe me a veto over some weird old-timey verse in another section." And so on.

Some of the changes are quite minor: "Praise him for his..."/"God be praised for..." And if you're going to rhyme "bring" and "sing" as in verse one, you might as well throw in "King," although "ring" in the alternate text flows fine as well.

I mentioned last time that the revised text has "adoration"/'creation." This version has "adore him" and "before him" in the corresponding spots. I like the change because if you're going to talk about the sun and moon, you might as well include "all creation!"

Also, this version's verse three is completely different from 864's, which was about flowers that "flourish" and "perish." This one is about how Jesus "spares us"/"bears us" in his arms. I guess the use of "he"/"his" was repetitive enough that the editor of 864 got sick of it, but I feel like this could have been tweaked slightly along the lines of the other verses.

This is one of those that could be updated to sound more 21st-century-y without losing much of anything in the way of rhyme or meter, but here we are. Frederick Faber also wrote "Faith of Our Fathers," so credit to this one for contrasting God with both earthly fathers and mothers--although "mother" is linked with "so mild," which is kind of cliche.

Sometimes when we sang songs with a lot of verses (this is more a back-in-the-day thing), there would be something like "verses 1 and 5 all, verse 2 choir, verse 3 women, verse 4 men." An interesting blog series would be comparing/contrasting the lyrics of "women verses" versus "men verses" to see if there are any stereotypes/patterns. But this practice may already have gone out of style.

This is the home stretch! We've finished all the other sections, so we'll be going straight through with Praise/Thanksgiving to the end. (Except I will probably do a proofread or two to see if I've missed anything that I need to loop back to.)

Very big tenor/bass gaps; the entire "left hand" range is an octave plus a sixth, and there are a couple places where they're almost that entire distance (an octave plus a fifth) apart.

Lots of Jesus=Proper Nouns, with an extended metaphor of God the Creator as Singer and Jesus as incarnate Song. And a literal translation of "Emmanuel" as "God-is-with-us" (one word, hyphens theirs). The music motif is a cool concept, but it doesn't quite stick the landing for me, in part because of rhymes like "Song"/"began."

This is the less-sexist translation of 858. A lot of it is much the same: "King" gets swapped with "God" in the first line, but that doesn't throw anything else off. But there are several places where the original was "adore him"/"before him", "[if...] he befriend you," so that all has to get changed slightly to "adoring," "soaring," "befriends you." We do get a couple specific images that the first version lacks, like "dulcimer, harp" joining in praise, "showers of mercy" and "infinite Love."

Okay, we finally get an incontrovertible case of "praise genre but good"! This is the kind of thing you'd sing at a campfire at church camp in a guitar-friendly key. I think it has corresponding hand motions ("heaven," "lift," "sky,") but maybe I'm just remembering other examples of the type. I think there might also be a harmony/echo part in some of the campfire arrangements, but not here. Anyway. It's good.

One of my internet buddies from back in the day was a Catholic blogger who had opinions about this song. Her take was "the heavenly anthem does not drown all music but its own, God's style is to harmonize with everything and make room for every possible kind of music, not just blare over everything." Which I think is an excellent point!

It's still a fun song, even if over-the-top in several places. "crimson trophies"--Jesus' wounds, I think? Maybe represented as gems? "the root whence mercy ever flows" okay..."potentate of time" rhyming with "ineffably sublime," it's a lot.

Verse four was written by a different composer and placed between three and five, I guess you can tell because it's slightly less over-the-top. (Okay, you can't tell.) When my choir sung this, the sopranos had a very high descant part for that verse, fortunately I did not have to try that because I'm pretty sure the results would have been unpleasant.

I think I've mentioned this before but sometimes you just come across a word or phrase that sounds very secular/out-of-context in a hymnal. Like, it should be a puzzle to make a list where half are words from a hymn, half are not, and you have to find them. This time it's "curfew." As in, whether it's the morning, or the evening, we're praising Jesus. But that just seems like a strange translation.

Then on the other hand, you find words that are pretty much only used in a liturgical context, like "antiphon" to rhyme with "known."

This is the combination of an awesome text with an awesome tune. "When in our music God is glorif-woawoahWAHAHwoah!" Double awesomeness. So it's a little weird that the less impressive 850 tune comes first and that one gets the "awesome texts" tag, but oh well, it's a good problem to have.

The Spanish text is fairly repetitive, and the translation fairly literal. Every verse ends with a trailing "Amen, amen," and apparently these four syllables are enough of a "line" to be listed in the meter (unlike yesterday's entry). This is one of the ones where only the first verse of the Spanish is printed next to the music, alongside the English; the other Spanish verses are relegated to the text-only part at the bottom. And so those repeat the "Amén, amén" every time. Maybe to make sure we don't forget the accent?

Earlier in this section we had two different versions of "Now Thank We All Our God," one a chorale, one more of a dance tune, but same melody. Both of them have the same hymn tune name, "Nun Danket Alle Gott," which is basically the first line of that song, but in German. So far so good. The tune name for this song is "Nun Danket All," and it's by the same musician. But the meters aren't that similar. Did he just write a different melody for a similar German hymn that got reused for this instead?

(The musician in question is Johann Crüger, who we just saw this past week, and the lyricist is Isaac Watts, who we saw twice this past week. To be fair, he is very prolific.)

Tenor/bass gaps are large.