WHEN I feel in regards to the styles of music which have moved me to tears, two kinds stand out. One is the grand orchestral piece, played by an excellent many musicians, perhaps alongside a big choir. The other lies at the other end of the spectrum, in the best hymn tune, with perhaps only 4 people singing. In that way, I remember being stopped in my tracks by J. S. Bach’s Christmas chorale “Uns ist ein Kindlein heut geborn” (“This day to us a toddler is born”).
I’m not alone in my reverence for hymn tunes. The sensible, maverick Canadian pianist Glenn Gould regarded the hymn tunes of the English composer Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) in that way, too. “Ever since my teenage years,” he wrote, “[Gibbons’ hymns (and anthems)] moved me more deeply than every other sound experience I can consider.” His favourite will probably be familiar to readers because the tune for “Forth in thy name, O Lord, I am going” (often called either Song 34, or Angels’ Song). Do not despise the common-or-garden hymn tune.
ALTHOUGH good enough on their very own terms, these tunes even have a life beyond the hymn book. There are anthems built on a hymn and its tune (“hymn anthems”), for example. There can be an unlimited repertoire for organ based on these tunes, often called a chorale prelude (if it deals with the tune once), or a chorale partita, or chorale variations (if it really works through the tune several times, in markedly alternative ways). One marvellous example is Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig”, as is Johann Pachelbel’s “Werde munter, mein Gemüte” — Pachelbel excelled on this musical form — which can be the hymn tune behind Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”.
Baroque cantatas and Passions were often punctuated by chorales, but these tunes also turn up in less expected places. Luther’s Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (“A mighty fortress is our God”) dominates Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony (often called the Reformation Symphony). Even when composers should not quoting hymn tunes, the majesty of the chorale, moving from one chord to a different, the notes stacked on top of one another, has turn out to be something of a mainstay in symphonies, including Mahler’s Fifth, and Bruckner’s Fifth and Ninth (the latter, dedicated “to the beloved God”, remaining incomplete on the composer’s death).
Igor Stravinsky closed his Symphonies of Wind Instruments with one other freely composed chorale, originally written and published in 1920, in memory of the composer Claude Debussy, who had died two years earlier.
Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (1935) is amongst essentially the most accessible and widely admired pieces written within the often difficult “serial” type of the twentieth century. It ends with variations on one other Lutheran chorale melody: Es ist genug! Herr, wenn es Dir gefällt (“It is enough! Lord, if it pleases you”). The American composer Virgil Thomson’s first symphony — Symphony on a Hymn Tune — makes substantial use of not one but two such tunes (those of “Jesus loves me, this I do know” and “How firm a foundation”).
The music of his compatriot Charles Ives abounds with real and imagined hymn tunes of that more revivalist variety. His 4 violin sonatas are good examples, while his Third Symphony, The Camp Meeting, draws on several more (Azmon, Erie, Cleansing Fountain, Happy Land, and Woodworth). Here, Ives often had a marching band in mind. Along these lines, the contemporary American songwriter Rufus Wainwright has a brass band wander on, playing “Immortal, invisible, God only smart”, during his song “Sally Ann”.
THIS story of hymn tunes, and the way they’ve featured in musical history, illustrates considered one of the things that a theologian might need to say about created things: that, in its finitude and humble particularity, all that God has made possesses an unfathomable depth. Just think how repeatedly composers have drawn out latest beauties and subtleties from tunes comparable to those that we sing to the words “O sacred head, sore wounded” (Passion Chorale) or “All those who on earth do dwell” (Old Hundredth). It is because these hymn tunes are so circumscribed — not too stuffed with detail — that they provide a lot. It would take a Ph.D. or more to gather and survey what has been done with any of many tunes of a Lutheran lineage, for example.
Hymn tunes play a robust part on the porous boundary between the Church and wider social identity. Even in much secularised society, the songs that individuals know communally, the songs they sing together outside the church, are predominantly hymns: “Jerusalem”, “Abide with me”, the National Anthem, “Guide me, O thou great redeemer”, “Amazing grace”.
Whereas people used to know a considerable body of people songs, comparable to those that my grandmothers used to sing to me once I was a toddler, that tradition is now largely gone, alas. Only the hymns remain, serving a folk function.
That relationship also runs in the opposite direction, nevertheless. Many of one of the best tunes in our hymn books have a folk origin, and were collected and harmonised (but in a roundabout way composed) by musicians comparable to Ralph Vaughan Williams, giving us Kingsfold for “I heard the voice of Jesus say”; Forest Green for “O little town of Bethlehem”; and Picardy for “Let all mortal flesh keep silence”).
Many tunes that we predict of today only in relation to some hymn or other also, if we return far enough, have folk roots, sometimes sacred, sometimes secular. Examples include the tunes for “Christ the Lord is risen again”, and “In dulci jubilo”.
WHILE I actually have mentioned things than can, and have been, done with these tunes, their glory doesn’t lie simply in being something to be built or embroidered upon. They have a perfection of their very own, just as they’re.
Gould testified to that, and so does the story of the tragic, attenuated days of the composer Robert Schumann. As he was dying in an asylum, it appears that evidently the last musical task that occupied his mind was to harmonise two easy chorale tunes. Only for the primary did he write out the words, starting “Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist”: “If the hour of my death is at hand, And I have to travel on my way, Accompany me, Lord Jesus Christ.”
The final verse ends “I am going then from here to Jesus Christ. I stretch out my arms, I go to sleep and rest well, No man can wake me, For Jesus Christ, God’s son, Will open heaven’s door And lead me to everlasting life.” I hope that Schumann present in that hymn tune the kind of consolation that I actually have often present in this music.
The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity within the University of Oxford and a Canon Residentiary of Christ Church.
