Singing Difficult Hymns
It is unfortunate that many of Luther’s hymns and other Lutheran chorales have fallen out of use in the typical Lutheran congregation. I have been told more than once that those old chorales are difficult to sing. My response: These hymns have to be taught to be appreciated. Otherwise we get in an endless circle of: we don’t sing those hymns because they are unknown/difficult and they are unknown and seem difficult because we never sing them.
Take for example this last Sunday – The Baptism of Our Lord. The “official” Hymn of the Day from Lutheran Service Book was Luther’s wonderful baptism / catechism hymn “To Jordan Came the Christ, Our Lord” (LSB 406/407). How many of our Lutheran congregations sang this hymn? My congregation didn’t, but they did get to hear an organ prelude by Zachau.
Lutheran Service Book has made an attempt to make some of these unsung hymns more accessible. In addition to the tune Christ, Unser Herr typically associated with “To Jordan Came the Christ, Our Lord,” LSB also has a new tune Elvet Banks. This last tune also happens to be paired with another of Luther’s hymns “May God Bestow on Us His Grace” (which happened to be the Office Hymn for Morning Prayer at Concordia Theological Seminary on 1/16/08). There are a number of other hymn texts in LSB that have been paired with “new” tunes in hopes they get sung more frequently.
Here’s my plea:
Dear Choir Directors and Choirs – Take the time to learn unfamiliar hymns and gradually share and teach them to your congregation. See my previous post on The Lutheran Choir.
Dear Organists and Instrumentalists – Take the time to learn chorale preludes on unfamiliar hymn tunes and introduce the tune over several weeks or months in different parts of the service. You are preparing the people.
Dear Pastors – Take the time to talk to your parish musicians about choosing hymns. Don’t shy away from a hymn because it is difficult or unfamiliar. Your musicians are valuable assets in introducing and leading the people’s song.
Dear People in the Pews (and Choir Directors, Choir, Parish Musicians, and Pastors) – Take the time to read and meditate on the hymns in the hymnal – at home and church. Deepen your familiarity with the church’s song by listening to CD’s that focus on this hymnody. For example:
- Martin Luther: Hymns, Ballads, Chants, Truth
- Concordia Theological Seminary Kantorei
- St. Paul’s Lutheran Church Children’s Choir
- Hymns for All Saints
- Paul Manz Hymn Improvisations
All of these resources should be available by contacting the Concordia Theological Seminary Bookstore at CPHBookstore@ctsfw.edu. Many are available by contacting Concordia Publishing House.
Blessings as you grow in your understanding of our rich hymnic heritage.
Related posts:
2 Responses to “Singing Difficult Hymns”
Comments
Read below or add a comment...
It’s really a semi-circular logic that stops at the notion that those hymns are too difficult, without progressing to complete the circle with the idea, ‘But not too difficult to learn.’
Choirs and organists are co-liturgists with the pastor, at least in a practical sense, and have a direct and a directly descendent responsibility to challenge themselves musically and liturgically, with the precise intent that they reduce the challenge of these hymns and unfamiliar elements of liturgy for the congregation. In dumbing-down their own standards, they dumb-down those of the people in the pews as well.
Also, choir directors should encourage among their singers that the hymnal is to be opened, read, digested more often than at choir practice sessions and during divine service, and pastors the same to their congregations. It can’t be said enough: confessional hymn texts are poetic renderings of the faith, only slightly lower than the Psalms themselves. They speak the truth, and the same truth as the confessional pastor’s sermons or the scriptures themselves.
Get rich. Get more than educated. Get illuminated. Get the hymnody.
Susan: The original point was, I think, about trying to keep the hymn texts alive in the living tradition of the liturgy. (And then, by extension, into our daily lives, as the hymn texts live with us through the week of work, school and play, with a tune of some sort to serve them.)
The living tradition evolves to become incarnate in its contemporary world. Would we want the church in a totally different culture (Chile, Palestine, China, Japan) to sing our Western hymns to our Western tunes in our Western manners? I hope not. Rather, I hope we would want them to sing their hymns to their tunes in their way. (It would, of course, be good if there were at least some overlap when we met. And if we could borrow and adopt from each other.)
So how do we, the 21st century English speaking, car-driving, centrally-heated, Internet-enabled culture, inherit the treasures of 500 year old German texts?
Looking just at the text (ignoring the tune) “May God bestow”…
The text has already been translated away from the original… from German to English. And then re-translated again between The Lutheran Hymnal and Lutheran Worship. So even before LSB, the one text has three different forms. Should we (English speakers) sing the text in the original German? Is any English translation itself a “dumbing down”? Who sets the criteria for “dumbing down”? And to what criteria?
I presume that we all agree that it is right that we (English speakers) should sing it in an English translation. But that very act (German to English translation) is an implicit acknowledgement that it is right to make the text “culturally relevant”.
So (turning towards the tune) given that we wish to keep the text in a culturally relevant translation, how then do we sing it to music in a culturally relevant manner? (This question is left as an exercise for the reader…)
We all agree on your “Get rich. Get more than educated. Get illuminated. Get the hymnody”! We are simply exploring the “how” in today’s world.
P.S. Regarding the tune “Elvet Banks”, I ought (in British Parliamentary tradition) to “declare an interest”…