lutheranhymns | Entries tagged with evening

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This is an arrangement of the Magnificat, which is season-wise an Advent song, but became associated with evening prayer over the centuries (and is still used as one in some modern-day liturgies like Holden Evening Prayer).

I would say even more impressive than the tenor/bass gaps is just how big the tenors' and basses' ranges are overall. The tenors get up to the F above the staff, the basses go down to the E-flat below it. That's more than two octaves if you were trying to sing both! (Which, granted, you shouldn't really be doing at the same time...but still. Talk about "get you a guy who can do both.")

Done with this section too!

The tune for this one is "Bozeman," which is a somewhat syncopated/contemporary minor melody. I don't know it at all, I think it only goes with this text and I'm not familiar with the text either. (Which is a bit cheesy--"little ones sleeping" and repetition of "caring" with "sharing." Yada yada.) What's funny is that it suggests an alternate tune, namely Bunessan, which is much more well known...for a hymn about morning. Any time of day works, I guess.

This is another case of translation by committee. I point this out not because the rhymes or the gender-neutral language are particularly bad, but because they're very committed to pointing out when they're changing the pronunciation to make it fit the meter by sacrificing a letter, even if it was obvious: "sov'reign," "fi'ry." Like, if you want to sing those as two syllables, just go ahead, we'll figure it out.

I think the first verse may have been published on its own as a lullaby, since it has nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with "it's nighttime," and is a fairly simple tune. The melody, in fact, is quite repetitive note-wise. The tenors have a very high part that climbs up to the ledger lines (crossing with the altos!) in the middle.

We once sang this on New Year's Eve and it occurred to me that this is probably the only hymn about time zones. Not in so many words, but like, "the sun, here having set, is waking your children under western skies." Just like the sun never sets on the British Empire, so too does the sun never set on God's kingdom because people are praying to God everywhere. It's kind of bizarre to find that level of specificity in a hymn, but then again, I think it's kind of charming to have something super-particular in its purview.

Two (slightly) interesting observations about this text:

-it mentions 'beds." Which is not super surprising because we're in the evening section, but it's also a more concrete, our-world image than most of the stuff we've seen so far, which is more generically about "Jesus is the light so even when it's dark we should praise God."

-verse 1 says "you, my heart, awaking." Not "my heart praises God just as much as it did in the morning" or "before my heart rests, it sings a song of praise," but "my heart is just now waking up at dusk time." What has your heart been doing the rest of the day??

How's the Shannon density?

It's...as high as any? There isn't a refrain, there aren't any lines repeated verse to verse, it seems to be pretty original that way.

I mean...um. Is the alto part pretty boring?

There is no alto part, it's unison chant.

Is the unison chant pretty boring? In the sense of "a lot of each line is just a repeated pitches with no specific time indicators?"

Pretty much. It's written as the "heads" of a bunch of pitches, but no "stems." So it just means "chant this as long as you want, probably the same length for every note except the end of the line can be long."

We actually see something similar in a bunch of the liturgy/service music things and some psalm arrangements; if the pastor/cantor/whoever is supposed to just "chant this entire line on one pitch," they'll indicate it with a "whole note," which here doesn't mean "four beats" but rather "just chant the entire line on one pitch." Generally hymns have more fixed time signatures, but this is old-school.

Hey, it's the one about Jesus comparing himself to a mother hen!

Is that normally linked to Maundy Thursday?

Not really? Like, that other text said "Jesus fed his friends, just like a mother feeds her children," but again, I think that image is fairly gender-neutral? This depiction of Jesus as a mother figure does seem a little more concrete/not out-of-the-blue.

What is that normally linked to then?

Well, I think he's pitying the people of Jerusalem...which is where he went and bemoaned the situation right before he died. So okay, they are kind of linked.

Final verse, same as the...previous song?

Following this from Thomas Ken, we have an evening song that ends with the same verse. This music is arranged by Thomas Tallis, and is (unsurprisingly) known as Tallis' Canon--a canon is a song that can be sung in a round.

Isn't that also a Madeleine L'Engle character?

He was named after this, several centuries later.

Is this version easier to sing in a round than the alternatives?

Apparently so! The labor union choir (yes, of course I was in a labor union choir a couple years ago, shouldn't come as a surprise) had this version:

Praise boss when morning work bells chime
Praise boss for bits of overtime
Praise boss, whose wars we love to fight
Praise boss, fat leech and parasite.

Classic. Meanwhile, I'm more familiar with another version, which is probably going to be one of the last hymns we get to if we ever get there, but apparently that did not work so well as a round. Granted it also wasn't good at having...a standard meter or measure system which is kind of a good starting point.

Should we dread the grave as little as our beds?

Um...I don't know about that. I guess it means "live righteously, so that you won't worry about going to hell," but I think this could lead to some unintended consequences if taken too far. Granted this was written in the 1600s so maybe people were more worried about dying of ..well the plague predates the 1600s. Colic maybe, per Wikipedia.

Is this the original text for this tune?

Mostly no.

Mostly?

The melody is a Welsh lullaby, "Ar Hyd Y Nos" (Welsh is pretty big into treating "and sometimes Y" as a vowel, also "and sometimes w."), which s usually translated as "all through the night." This is also the end of the first verse of this hymn, which is asking God to keep watch over us all through the night. But the text overall is slightly different, this is a more "adult"ish prayer.

Adultish how?

Not in a weird way, just like, the Welsh song (or at least its English adaptation, which might be fairly loose) is more about "the stars shine in the sky, go to sleep now."

How many lyricists are there for this one?

Three, which is pretty impressive considering there are only four verses. All of them got "alt" in some form, which could be anything from eliding some sexism to fitting the rhyme scheme.

What is the hymn tune?

St. Clement, and the composer's first name is Clement. I'm assuming this is just a homage to someone else rather than extreme self-aggrandizement, but you never know.

It'll also be used for an unrelated text in this same category.

How old is the text?

It's based on a fairly ancient Greek hymn dating back to the third century! Presumably with some alterations over the millennia.

Anything else noteworthy about it?

The first and second verses are all the same sentence, the first verse only ends with a colon :p

What is the time signature?

There is none. This is plainsong, which is fancy Latin-ish for "you just chant each note for about the same unit, and maybe the ones at the end of the line longer."

How can you tell the difference?

Well, the normal notes are filled-in ovals, and the longer ones are hollow ovals.

Isn't that also the difference between quarter notes and half notes in normal notation?

Yeah, but they have stems coming out of them, which means "actually there is a fixed length of time for these notes, thanks."

Where and why was this written?

This is one of the opening songs in "Holden Evening Prayer," which is a liturgy written by Marty Haugen (who we will run into frequently) when he was at Holden Village. That is a retreat in Washington State, I think run by Lutherans? with a lot of spiritual/social justice hippie kind of retreats. The liturgy has caught on and is often used for midweek services in Advent or Lent, at least at some of the larger churches I've gone to. I enjoy it! (And this song, it's good.) Preferably when there isn't a lot of silence/meditation time and/or homilies, if I wanted a long sermon and stuff I'd just go to normal church. :P

Is this the only Holden Evening Prayer song that made the leap to being an independent hymn in its own right?

I think so, yes.

But it's based on a 3rd century text?

...That I did not know, but apparently so, yes!

What is the time signature?

4.5/4.

You mean 9/8 right? If every measure consists of nine eighth notes, then you group them into groups of three, so you're really feeling three medium beats to every measure, each medium beat which consists of three small beats.

I'm aware of how that works, but these aren't grouped into dotted eighth notes. They're quarter notes and eighth notes adding up to 4.5 quarter notes every measure.

That's wild!

I know, right? But it works! Super cool.

So is that like some ancient music from a different culture?

Not really. I mean, the music was written in the 1980s, but the lyrics is based on a Mozarabic text from the 10th century.

Mozarabic?

Iberian Peninsula under Muslim leadership.

Did you look that up on Wikipedia?

Absolutely.