Monday 4 January 2010

Music and Worship: Words and Music

What makes a good fit between the words of a hymn and its music? A good answer might be: when people can sing the words to the given tune easily, and when the tune in some way underlines the character and meaning of the words (or at least does not work against them).

One of the finest poems in English is ‘When I survey the wondrous Cross’ by Isaac Watts (1674–1748). It neither sentimentalises the Crucifixion nor indulges in extended graphic and gory description. It focuses on the individual worshipper’s response (not merely on a generalised or collective response), and ends by asserting that ‘Love so amazing, so divine / Demands my soul, my life, my all’. ‘Rockingham’ by Edward Miller (1731–1807) is a good tune: it fits the words easily, and is never fussy or awkward. It is not, however, as remarkable musically as the words are remarkable poetically, and might appropriately fit other hymns in long metre. So the match is good, but perhaps not outstandingly good.

In ‘I am the Bread of Life’ Suzanne Toolan’s words closely paraphrase various biblical verses (how many can you identify?). In order to keep as close as possible to scripture, she isn’t concerned to make each stanza scan as verse. This is all well and good, but it’s not until the refrain that there is the easy unity between voice and verse which we take for granted in ‘When I survey’. Congregations sometimes struggle to fit Toolan’s words to her own fine, vigorous tune – for example, the first bar of the melody carries five syllables in verse 1, only two in verse 3 – and something of the power of the words can be lost in the process.

Graham Kendrick has shown that ‘modern’ tunes and words can go together to create something greater than the sum of the parts. Congregations rarely fail to get a lift from ‘Shine, Jesus, shine’, for example. Sometimes the combination of new words and an old tune works brilliantly (look in Mission Praise at Timothy Dudley-Smith’s ‘Jesus, Prince and Saviour’, which is paired with Sir Arthur Sullivan’s ‘St Gertrude’, familiar as the tune for ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’).

If you want to hear how a modern composer can enhance a wonderful old hymn, listen out for Ken Naylor’s ‘Coe Fen’, which goes to ‘How shall I sing that majesty’ by John Mason (c. 1645–1694). The words are full of wonderful imagery, and Naylor has clothed them with a melody that is easily picked up yet has a great sense of life, liberty and adventure.

Here is Mason’s stirring final stanza:

How great a being, Lord, is thine,
Which doth all beings keep!
Thy knowledge is the only line
To sound so vast a deep.
Thou art a sea without a shore,
A sun without a sphere;
Thy time is now and evermore,
Thy place is everywhere.

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