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Today on hymns in the wild: we sang "Almighty God, Your Word Is Cast" (yesterday's blog post) during virtual quarantine service today. "Virtual quarantine service" being one of those phrases I did not expect to type when I started this blog but now is part of the normal parlance. It didn't have much to do with the text, today's reading was about Jesus walking on the water. Maybe that's the dew of heaven? ...Probably not.

Today's song is a melody that technically is only used for this one hymn. "Technically," because one of the many communion settings has a bunch of service music with melodies adapted from existing hymns (Ode to Joy, etc). and when you look it up in the index, these are also referenced. So this is one of the Gospel Acclamation options (an alternative is the sad Latvian melody).

Done with this section.

Okay, I am doing a tag for "title in weird position." Probably won't go back to add it in to everything retroactively, but this is a trend.

This is another nice text by Marty Haugen, combining imagery from communion and the diversity of people who make up the church (young and old, "the blind and the lame," but also "the rich and the haughty"). The one part I'm iffy on is the beginning of the last verse--"Not in the dark of buildings confining, not in some heaven, light years away--here in this place the new light is shining." The language of "the church is not a building, the church is people" is common, but the next part comes uncomfortably close to the "don't worry your little heads about the afterlife, that's for the bad Christians and we're not like them" ideology I'm pretty jaded by. And we were doing so well with the contemporary language of "light years"! Grr.

Not familiar with this, it appears to be a heavily-syncopated praise melody. "revel" is a pretty fun word choice for 1989, while "applaud"/"Lord" is a stretch rhyme.

This is a Japanese melody which uses its own version of the pentatonic scale, it doesn't really fit into either Western major or minor classifications. (Where major melodies end on the "one" note of the octave, and minors end on the "six," this ends on a "two.") The lyrics call back to Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life across the different verses, and then tie them together at the end. (Rhyming strife/life in two different verses is a slightly disappointing consequence of this approach.)

The composer has the excellent name of Patrick Matsikenyiri, and this is originally written in the Shona language (native to Zimbabwe and Mozambique). I think this blog post is already longer than the original text.

Another of those repetitive Taizé chants. As you can tell, I'm not a fan.

The Latin on which it's based doesn't really seem to be about hearts or peace. Apparently "quoniam" made it into English in a couple, uh, different ways. Good to keep in mind for Scrabble, I guess.

The attributed music is something that looks roughly like "German songbooks" and it definitely looks like a German dance tune adapted for hymns. Somewhat-syncopated 3/2, weird accidentals but not too weird.

The text is "attr." to Wilhelm II, which is already a sign that that might be somewhat spurious. If you search for the name of the song, you will eventually stumble across the Wikipedia page of William of Saxe-Weimar, which is apparently who they meant. He does not appear to be the second of anything. Wikipedia lists at least 6 Wilhelm IIs (including the Kaiser), and 46 William IIs (including some of the people on the previous list)...none of whom are this guy.

It's Abbot's Leigh again!

Do we also have Jesus=Proper Nouns?

Indeed. In verse 3 we get "the Shepherd" for Jesus, and also "the servants [us] of the Servant [Jesus]."

Isn't that also a Pope thing?

Yeah, technically the Pope is occasionally styled "servant of the servants of God." In this context it seems to pretty clearly refer to Jesus though.

Technically it's also "[Holy] Spirit"=Proper Nouns...

Yeah, well, the Spirit gets namedropped a lot, that's not as exciting.

What's the musical format?

It's a two-part round! And not like "we're chanting the same thing over and over again," it's two parts that blend into each other pretty well.

It's minor but kind of peppy--I don't think it quite qualifies as "praise genre," but it definitely could be, it's the kind of thing that would fit in well with church camp music and is a cut above most of it? I don't know, I feel like I'm not really summing up why it's good, but not only are the lyrics nice, the music is something that's different from a lot of stuff but doesn't sound too forced-"contemporary" (I guess the lyrics play into that as well). And it's originally Swedish!

I was at the churchwide assembly a decade ago (long story) and I'm pretty sure they sung it there as well. So even the establishment has good taste. ;)

Does the composer have an awesome name?

Huub Oosterhuis! Those Dutch double letters! <3

What is this place?

According to the composer just a building, but like, it's the people that make it God's community.

The Earth its floor?

Maybe the Dutch aren't big into tiling, I don't know.

Don't they have to not drown? They should really shore up their floors.

Actually I was at a church in the Netherlands a couple years ago, it's creatively known as "the old church." There isn't a lot of religiosity so the government has done a good job preserving it as a historical landmark/converting it into an artistic place, but I had to say the "installation" of a bunch of gold leaf representing boats made it hard to walk around.

How's the translation?

Pretty good. The rhymes are obviously better in the original Spanish, and that version is a little more commie ("compartiendo la propiedad" seems a little starker than "share ev'rything we have," but maybe it's different in context? I don't know.)

Anything else?

Generally I feel like English can say the same amount of "stuff" in fewer syllables than Spanish, so a lot of Spanish text has to be slurred together/words running into each other to fit the same meter. The first line of verse three is like that: "Dios nos manda a hacer de este mundo," but the h is silent anyway, and duplicate vowels are easy to merge, so it's really more like "Dios nos mandacer deste mundo." (The text as printed has little connector curves under the spaces to indicate this.) And it's not a case of the Spanish needing to squeeze into an originally-English song, the Spanish composer wrote the music too.

Does this allude to any other hymns?

I assume purposefully? The last phrase is "repeat the sounding joy," which I can't not associate with Joy to the World.

Is there a Trinity format?

It's a little subtle, but it's there. The three verses are addressed to God, Christ, and Gracious Spirit, in that order, but not always in the first line.

Are those the only Proper Nouns?

Not quite--we get capitals for Love twice (Love's victory, Love will welcome), which seems to be also making the point that God Is Love.

Who is the composer?

Christopher Wordsworth, nephew of William.

Is the song really addressed in praise of the day of the week?

Yes.

What is the "silver trumpet"?

Not sure. Unless it's like representing organs or some kind of church music, but that would be a weird phrasing.

Is the alto part pretty boring?

Let's just say there are a whole lot of E's repeated, especially in that third line.

(Took yesterday off for RL travels, may be similarly absent on other days in the coming weeks)!

What is the rhyme scheme like?

Well there are a bunch of feminine rhymes but really most of them are just altered masculine ones...

Whoa, whoa, this sounds a little un-PC. Back it up?

Sure.

So most rhyming words in English are like, one matching syllable at a time. HAT and CAT.

Sometimes, there will be only one syllable that rhymes, even though one or both words has more than one syllable. Like SAY and toDAY. The "rule" for rhyming is "the last stressed syllables, and everything afterwards, should match." So in this case, even though "today" has multiple syllables, the last stressed one is also the last syllable in general. So we only need to worry about checking the last one.

Both of these cases are called "masculine" rhymes. Not sure why, guessing it was a convention from Italian or French or something. Maybe it has to do with masculine nouns?

A "feminine" rhyme, in contrast, is something that features more than one rhyming syllable (the stressed one and everything after). In English, something like BABY and MAYBE is feminine.

How do you find feminine rhymes? Well, I just gave you one. But there are fewer words that fit this pattern and rhyme with another word that does than there are masculine pairs. That's not really a problem, since you can write lots of good rhyming songs/lyrics by just using masculine rhymes and never worrying about the feminine ones.

However, maybe there's a specific melody in mind that sounds better with feminine rhymes. Or you're adapting something from another language where it's easier, and you're out of words. One thing you can do is start with two masculine words that already rhyme, and then add matching suffixes or words after. So LIVE/GIVE becomes LIVING/GIVING. SHROUD/CLOUD becomes SHROUDED/UNCLOUDED. HEAR/NEAR becomes "HEAR YOU/NEAR YOU."

There are a bunch of feminine rhymes in this hymn, and at first that sounds impressive because they're harder to come by! But the vast majority of them are like this, which is...not so impressive.