The lyricist's name is "Muus," which I think is pretty awesome. Double U's! Is it pronounced like "Moose"? If he were a baseball player, would people say they were yelling Muuuuuus instead of booing him?

Translation is by committee, so I'm not sure if the rhymes are as repetitive in Dutch. But the rhyme scheme is ABABA; the B's are feminine rhymes that turn out to be masculine-in-disguise, the A's are masculine. And they repeat between verses: we get stuff like "dead/head/bread," "bread/fed/dead," "dead/bread/dead." At this point it's so repetitive that it loops all the way around back to charming! That's why it's in the "awesome" category.

Meanwhile, on hymns in the wild, we had this hymn for Good Friday that's addressed in part not to Jesus or to our neighbors, but to the cross itself, as if praying for it to treat Jesus' body respectfully. On the one hand, this is bizarre timing-wise. (I have an uncle who has opinions about whether you can cheer for a sports game you're watching on tape delay, versus watching live on TV where your cheers won't be heard either way--but that's for hours, not millennia!) On the other, the miracle of Easter transcends space and time; not only does Christ's sacrifice change the entire universe, but maybe we can envision the cross itself as reaching beyond that physical moment so that we can address it "contemporaneously."

This is one of my favorites from when my kids' choir sang it. The repeated references to hope and freedom are great, they're phrased slightly differently but work in both languages. The translation is pretty good--you get weird phrasing like "new protocols [will need to be] declared" in English when I don't think the Spanish had anything as weird as "protocols" sounds to us. We also have the issues where "brothers" is more inclusive in Spanish than in English, so that has to be reworded, and you can tell it's from Spain because they use the -d vosotros commands!

The melody for the first three verses ends on the second note of the scale, which creates momentum and carries you forward into the next verse--it's not "resolved," so you want to push forward. But the last verse comes to a satisfying conclusion on the tonic with the "resolution" of "free"/"libertad," so the musical notation is "okay verses one through three go here and repeat, the last time through, jump to this slightly different measure."

This 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.

This is (very coincidentally) 100 off from 737, but it reminds me of that one in terms of its structure and vibrant images. 737 starts each verse with "He comes..." and uses creative metaphors to describe God, starting with "one unknown" but ending with "yet unseen, but not unknown." This one starts each verse with "Holy God, holy and..." and describes God's attributes (glory, power, etc.) and how they're revealed in sometimes paradoxical weakness--God's weakness is more powerful than human strength, etc. Another awesome text.

And yet another bragging rights connection; when I was in undergrad, one of the young adults at the student group was the lyricist's daughter! (It looks like that's one of those double-pastor families.)

Finishing this section is a hymn that's associated with Transfiguration/the lead-in to Lent. Lots of songs are written from the perspective of the speaker talking to God, and/or Jesus and/or the Holy Spirit. Many are written from the perspective of talking to the church community ("let's do this, let's be welcoming together.") A few are the speaker talking to themselves--this melody takes its name from the song "Praise, My Soul, The God of Heaven." And so on.

This song gets to be in the "awesome texts" category because it's the speaker singing about, and arguably to, a word; "Alleluia, you are sounding." "Alleluia, bring us to your jubilee." Because "Alleluia" is an expression of praise to God, and during Lent, we remove it from our liturgy entirely as we focus on repentance/fasting/somberness. And then bring it back in dramatic style for Easter. Sometimes we process a banner with Alleluias out of the church at the end of the service, or "bury" it for Lent. This was one of the "weird church rules" that I latched onto as a kid and who knows, maybe that's one source of my fascination with lipograms/constrained writing. (A very weak correlation, admittedly, but I think they still tickle the same part of my brain.)

Oh, and did I mention this is from the 11th century? So Christians in the west have been avoiding the "A-word" for a millennium. I love it.

It's not listed as an alternate tune here, but some versions list "Ode to Joy" as another potential melody for this text.

One of the former pastors at the church where I grew up really liked this text and in fact had it taped on his office door, so part of my "awesome text" tag is probably his opinion wearing off on me. The last verse is especially great--"Shout with joy, O deathless voices! Child of God, lift up your head!" Upon poking around, verse 3 as it stands is actually an abridged version of the original verses 3 and 4, the editors smushed them together to get rid of some of the more archaic language. I think it works this way, though.

How's the text?

Quite lovely, actually! There are great thematic images--God as creator, God as liberator (the Exodus story is often alluded to in the Easter narrative, although we don't want to appropriate Jewish scripture yada yada), bread and wine imagery in and beyond communion, and God in the person of Jesus. Good rhyming, good imagery.

Then why is this song not one of your favorites?

The melody is...not that good. There are times when "accidentals" (notes not expected, given the key you're in) break up monotony and make things interesting. Like, "Jerusalem," which we just did, had a couple of them, and that melody is a deserving classic. However, the accidental F natural in the third line seems very jarring to me, and hanging onto the C-sharp in the fourth line is also dissonant. So close and yet so far.

Why do people dislike this song?

I have no idea, but some people in my choir apparently do. Is it too cheesy? Too modern? Too specific in its references to 20th-century society? (No.)

Does it have a Biblical basis?

Actually yes! It's based on one of the later praise Psalms in which the Psalmists asks everything and everyone in creation to praise the Lord.

What was the occasion?

It was written for St. Olaf College in Minnesota (where my mom went!) and the references to snowstorms and stuff...explain a lot about St. Olaf, to be honest, as well as about this song.