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We do not know how hymns were performed in early Christian times. The first clear sign of instrumental accompaniment was the introduction of organs to the liturgy in the 10th century. At first they probably duplicated the chant in unison. Their evident purpose was to hold the singers together and in tune, and to provide continuity, since (when properly blown or powered) the organ does not tire or pause for breath, and can maintain an unchanging dynamic level. These functions are still the...
The singing practices and repertoire of any Christian congregation offer a site of aesthetics and theology. The act of singing itself is always culturally embodied and embedded, thus revealing complex relations between the musical 'sounding' of the poetry and the received theology of texts. What we learn to sing together in public worship and in devotion is at once experiential and formative of belief. Hymns, psalms and spiritual songs are central to every congregation's faith experience over...
Alternation in the Latin liturgical hymn is intrinsic to the genre. Processional hymns frequently take a responsorial form: the refrain is announced by the cantor (or rulers of the choir), and is repeated immediately and after each stanza by the whole choir. No doubt this was originally a popular hymnic form, but many such hymns are adaptations to the responsorial form for processional purposes: a good example is 'Gloria, laus et honor'*, for Palm Sunday, still familiar in the translation 'All...
As the word amen means 'so be it', it is logically a response indicating the speaker's endorsement of what has just been said by someone else. It had that meaning in pre-Reformation times, when priests and choirs sang or chanted the liturgy and hymns, and the people indicated their approval by the word 'amen', as is still done with many prayers today. If sung it would be pitched to the final note of the chant. An organ would conveniently harmonize it with a plagal cadence, and this was...
American Bass Viol
Between 1785 and 1850, the main stringed instrument manufactured in America was the 'bass viol', also call the 'Yankee bass viol', and, in modern times, the 'church bass'. The instrument was essentially a violincello (Br. 'violoncello'), not to be confused with the bass viola da gamba or double bass, both having been played in Europe and American before the earliest dated American bass viol was made in 1788 by Benjamin Crehore (1765-1831): ...
The Psalms of David have been recited in a musical form since they were written, the word 'psalm' deriving from the Greek word for 'a song sung to a harp'. In temple worship, the psalms would have been recited by a solo cantor with a congregational refrain. This form developed into simple melodies or tones that characterise plainsong, which itself was the musical form for psalmody adopted in the early and medieval Church. This was especially so in the monastic foundations which observed the...
Antiphons are short chants with prose texts and generally simple melodies. They were sung by a soloist or the choir before and after the psalms of the medieval daily Office, which were sung by the ecclesiastical community. The medieval repertoire of antiphons is huge; most medieval Antiphoners contain in the region of 1500. The choral portions of the Introit chants of the Mass are also known as antiphons, and they alternate with a solo psalm verse (antiphon-psalm verse-antiphon).
Psalms can be...
Barrel organs that could play without the use of keys have been the subject of much controversy. When these organs were frequent in churches there were sharp differences in opinion as to their musical value, and more recently historians have argued about when they became frequent and whether or not they displaced West Gallery bands (see 'West Gallery music'*).
Mechanical organs playing from pinned barrels had been built for several centuries before their introduction into British churches in...
Braille hymns and hymnals, USA. The St Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book (Philadelphia, 1922), compiled and edited by Nichola Montani (1880-1948, distinguished and controversial composer, conductor, and former liturgical music editor for G. Schirmer, New York) was published in 1926 as the first braille hymnal. Today, many Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant hymnals are available in two electronic platforms, Braille Ready Format (BRF) and American Standard Code for Information Exchange...
Singing is a natural activity for children, and one of the most certain ways of passing on doctrine and history of faith is through hymn singing. Because of its ability to draw people into community while teaching doctrine, singing hymns strengthens the fostering of religious values. There is evidence that the teaching of hymnody happened with boys in monasteries as early as the fifth century, and after 1200 there is evidence of girls taking part in monastic liturgical singing. Though we may...
Chinese Christian hymnody
Introduction: the Beginnings
The earliest Christian missionaries to China were Nestorians, who were active during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Their version of Christianity (so-called Jieng Jiao, Luminous Religion) was received warmly by Emperor Taizong (唐太宗,599-649) and flourished throughout China. One hymn from this period, 'Wushang zhu tian shen jing tan' ('All heaven worships in great awe'), was probably composed by Nestorian missionaries and thought to have been...
Choirs and Hymns, USA
The European settlers in what is now the USA brought with them their hymns, hymnals and Psalters, depending upon their European religious traditions and practices. In early America, hymn singing was an activity that often occurred outside of worship as well as during worship. There was not much to do during what little leisure time was available and in Puritan New England the singing school became a popular pastime. Often led by itinerant musicians, among whom William...
In modern German 'choral' is the term used for a hymn tune, either the melody or its simple setting, in contradistinction to 'Kirchenlied' which is commonly used for both hymn text and its associated tune. In modern English usage 'chorale' can be used to denote a German hymn, both text and tune, though it is more frequently used for the tune alone, and commonly associated with simple harmonizations of German hymn tunes, such as 'Bach chorales', or 'four-part chorales'.
In the 16th century two...
Christian Congregational Music Conference: Local and Global Perspectives
The Christian Congregational Music Conference [CCMC] explores the varying cultural, social, and spiritual roles that church music plays in the life of Christian communities around the world. The first conference, convened in 2011 at Ripon College, was organized by Monique Ingalls (University of Cambridge), Carolyn Landau (King's College, London), Martyn Percy (Ripon College, Cuddesdon), Tom Wagner (Royal Holloway, London),...
Christian popular music, USA
Introduction and antecedents
Christian popular music (hereafter CPM) is an umbrella category for a sonically diverse repertoire of late 20th- and early 21st-century evangelical Protestant commercial popular music. It encompasses several distinct subcategories based on musical genre, industrial context, or function, including, but not limited to, Jesus Music, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), Praise & Worship music, and Christian rock. CPM is characterized by...
The modern idea of the author-composer relationship in hymn composition, derived from art music, is that the author writes a hymn and the composer invents a tune to suit it, also providing harmony to accompany the tune (although there are many cases where authors have written verses to go with existing tunes.)
Such a notion was slow to evolve, and can hardly be traced before the Reformation. Though we now sing many tunes of medieval origin, they are either anonymous or, if a name can be...
A hymn concertato is a hymn-based composition that brings together a variety of contrasting musical resources, vocal and instrumental, in which congregation, choir, individual voices, and various instruments (solo and concerted) contribute a variety of sounds which are heard both independently and combined together in a rich aural tapestry as each stanza is sung in sequence. In modern usage it is a development of the concept of the hymn-of-the-day, that is, a hymn that functions as a 'proper'...
Craft of Composing hymn tunes
Hymn tunes are little things that are not regarded as having much value. [Yet] they symbolize and relate deeply, however, to big things, well beyond the obvious musical ones . . . .(Paul Westermeyer, 2005)
Congregational song has the power to forge community identity, enliven the congregation, and provide an experiential encounter with the intangible character of God. It fulfills this task by its ability to transcend the cerebral to embody the emotive. To this...
Das deutsche Kirchenlied DKL Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Melodien (1975) is the title of a work in the RISM series (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, VIII). It deals with the music of German hymnbooks from the beginning to 1800. The publishers are Bärenreiter (Kassel, Basel, Tours, London). The editors are Konrad Ameln, Markus Jenny and Walter Lipphardt.
It is a catalogue of printed sources of German hymns, of all denominations, that contain at least one melody in musical...
Descant.
It is well known that a type of polyphony called 'discant' was common in Europe and Great Britain during medieval times. Less well known is the sudden emergence, more than three centuries after discant had fallen into disuse, of a new sort of 'melody above the melody', now called hymn tune descant, or simply descant.
The new kind of descant was described by Athelstan Riley* (1915) as 'a peculiar kind of faux-bourdon harmony [consisting] of a single part above the melody sung by boys'...
Dove Awards. These are awards given annually by the Gospel Music Association (GMA)* for outstanding achievement in the Christian music industry: i.e., that part of the commercial music industry that markets electronic and print mass-mediated products in popular musical styles to English-speaking Protestants worldwide, but especially in North America.
Modeled on the Emmy, the Oscar, and the Grammy, the Dove was established by GMA ca. 1969. The earliest awards ceremonies were held in Memphis,...
Greater Doxology
In Luke 2:14, the angels welcomed the birth of Jesus with a hymn, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill towards men'. This was the starting point for one of the oldest Greek hymns, 'Doxa en ipsistis theo'. This morning hymn of praise to the Trinity appears as the last of 14 Odes at the end of the Psalms in the Alexandrine Codex, copied in 5th-century Egypt (London, BL Royal I.D.VII), as well as in various other 5th- and 6th-century sources, mostly...
Fauxbourdon (or Faburden). Although this term has a number of distinct technical meanings in relation to polyphonic music of the Medieval and Renaissance eras, with regard to hymn-singing (particularly in the 17th century) it specifically implied a style of performance where the melody of the hymn was placed in the tenor as part of a four-part texture in which the treble provided a descant. One of the best known examples of this practice can be observed in John Dowland*'s two settings of the...
Fuging tune (or fuging psalm tune).
This is a species of country or parish church psalmody (see 'West Gallery music'*) featuring one or more sections in which different words are sung simultaneously. Intended to be sung strophically, the fuging tune normally begins like an ordinary psalm tune, with all voices singing the words together but, usually in the third phrase of a four-phrase melody, fuging is introduced. In the fuging section, the voices enter one at a time a measure apart,...
Gaelic Psalm singing
Gaelic-speaking congregations of the Presbyterian church confine their congregational praise to the singing of metrical Psalms. This dates from the Reformation in Scotland in 1560, when one of the requirements of reform was that ordinary people should not be deprived of participation in church worship, hitherto the prerogative of clergy and church choirs. For this purpose the Psalms of David, as part of Holy Scripture, were chosen as texts. The folk tunes of British and...
GRESFORD is the name of a British hymn tune without words, to be played (usually by a brass band) while the congregation are silent in memory of a tragic event. It was written in the north-east of England in 1936 to commemorate the name of Gresford colliery at Wrexham (Wrecsam), North Wales, where there was a mining disaster in September 1934, when 266 miners were killed in an underground explosion.
It was composed by Robert Saint (b. Hebburn, South Tyneside, 20 November 1905; d. 15 December...
HARP (as a title). As early as 1795, hymn collections with Harp or Harfe in the title were published in the USA, without music, and thereafter, a number of tunebooks were published with 'Harp' in the title.
The most widely-known Harp, as a collection of hymns, is The Sacred Harp*, by B. F. White* and Elisha J. King*. This usage of Harp probably started in connection with the Psalms of David, as in Dauids harpe ful of moost delectable armony, newely stringed and set in tune, by Theadore...
History of Hymns.
This is the name of a weekly print which became digital, a column containing commentary on hymns, hymn writers, composers, and hymn traditions and singing practices. The original 400-word weekly columns titled 'History of hymns', were written by Baptist hymnologist William J. Reynolds* and appeared in The Nashville Banner (Nashville, Tennessee) from 1979 until the closing of that newspaper in 1998, and were continued in The United Methodist Reporter from 1998 to 2003. David W....
The Hymn Tune Index (HTI) project began in the 1970s at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, Illinois (UIUC). It arose out of research towards Nicholas Temperley*'s 1979 book, The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, UK). He had been surprised to find how difficult it was to determine the origins and history of particular hymn tunes. Whenever a hymnal companion was being prepared, the editor had to carry out research in primary sources for each tune, and, even then,...
Hymnary.org
Hymnary.org is an online hymn and worship music database for worship leaders, hymnologists, and amateur hymn lovers. The site allows users to search or browse hymns by title, tune, meter, key, scripture reference, as well as advanced specialized queries.
In partnership with The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada* Hymnary.org houses the Dictionary of North American Hymnology*, adding over one million first lines of hymns, collected and organized by Leonard W. Ellinwood*...
Hymntune Index and Related Hymn Materials is a three-volume compilation by D. DeWitt Wasson*, published in 1998, and on CD-ROM in 2001 (Studies in Liturgical Musicology, no. 6, Michael Fry, technical advisor of the CR-ROM version, by Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland). Most of the tunes indexed were first published after 1810, so that there is relatively little overlap with Nicholas Temperley*'s Hymn Tune Index*.
Volume I includes a Foreword by Robin A. Leaver*, and a Compiler's Preface...
Indelible Grace Music
Indelible Grace Music (IGM) is a musical movement and website founded by Kevin Twit*, Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) minister and musician in Nashville. Their website is www.igracemusic.com, but they also maintain Indelible Grace Hymnbook site (https://ighymns.herokuapp.com/), a compilation of more than 170 retuned hymns and over 50 traditional tune hymns. 'Retuned hymns' are primarily 18th- and 19th-century texts set to new melodies, as Twit says, 'We want to...
Jazz is a unique type of 20th-century music created by African Americans characterized by melodic variation, the use of 'blue notes', syncopated rhythms, extended and altered harmonies, improvisation by the performers, and an open-sounding timbre. Initially, jazz was the music of the dance hall and club, but it gradually gained acceptance in the church. Jazz used in worship now includes keyboard, instrumental, and choral music, as well as accompaniments of sung liturgies and congregational...
Latin American hymnody
A new Christian hymnology has risen in Latin America and in many communities in the US, among Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. It has roots in Latin folk and popular music, and most of the time reflects the social realities of the southern continent, owing much to the secular movement called the 'newsong.' This new song is rooted in Latin folk and popular music of the 20th century which express the people's happiness (Raquel Gutiérrez-Achón*, in González, 1996,...
'Lining out' was the practice of having the minister or clerk sing a line of a psalm, which was then repeated by the congregation. It was a natural consequence of the seriousness attached to public worship by the Puritan element of the Church of England, which not only followed the precepts of Jean Calvin* in preferring psalms over hymns in divine service, but also tried to insist that the people sang them, line by line, and understood what they were singing. Following the execution of...
[note: 'French Canada' refers not only to the province of Quebec, but also to the pockets of French-speaking people in all parts of Canada]
Early history
Roman Catholic liturgical music was brought to New France in the 17th century by French missionaries and peasants. In the 1640s the Jesuit Relations (Relations des jésuites, Paris, 1632-72) referred to music sung by the peoples of the First Nations and French settlers. One of the songs that has survived and is sung at Christmas time in...
'Makwaya', coming from a Xhosa pronunciation of the English words 'my choir', represents a synthesis of African group singing styles and European choral music. John Knox Bokwe* (1855-1922), a Xhosa ordained in the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, had a strong interest in the music of Ntsikana* and was part of a rising nationalism concerned about cultural advancement among black South Africans. He developed 'makwaya' as a choral style that blended African music with choral singing as a way to...
Strictly speaking, a proper definition of verse metre includes the stress pattern as well as the number of feet or syllables. Thus 'iambic tetrameter' describes a verse in which each line contains four feet, and each foot is an iamb (weak-strong). So it has eight syllables in every line with stresses on the even-numbered syllables. A famous example of this metre is Thomas Ken*'s morning hymn:
Awake, my soul, and with the sun
Thy daily stage of duty run;
Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise
To...
Methodist Hymnody, USA
Hymns were used within the Methodist movement for teaching of doctrine, for evangelism (of the unsaved and to revive those who faith was lagging), for praise and confession. Important doctrines for the Wesleyan movement are Arminianism, the understanding that Christ died for everyone, not just the elect; the Christian journey as the way of salvation, on a continuum of God's prevenient grace (which comes before one is awakened to God's call), justifying and...
To the Greeks, 'metre' was a pattern to which the words could naturally be adapted, for there was a fairly clear distinction between long and short syllables in the language. So the Homeric epic could easily be couched in a series of long-short-short patterns (with occasional variations such as long-long), to make a hexameter. The Romans greatly admired Greek poetry, so Classical Latin writers aped this metrical system, despite Latin being less naturally dragooned into such a format....
Montreat Conferences on Worship and Music. The forming of the Montreat Conferences began in 1952 with James R. Sydnor*'s letter to the General Council of the Presbyterian Church, US, (PCUS) which in part reads:
we have not thus far as a denomination made any serious effort to discover the exact state of music in our Church, or to outline some sensible goals, or to map out a practical strategy for church-wide development of this important phase of the Church's life. Almost every other...
This is the name given to the chants for the liturgy composed during the 17th and 18th centuries in France, influenced by a desire in France to be more independent of Rome, and more clearly national. The supporters of the new liturgical movement advocated regularity in the metres of their Latin hymns, which could be sung to modern settings of plainchant, often with ornaments, to an organ accompaniment. In hymn texts the most important examples of the movement were the hymns of Charles Coffin*...
This is the traditional pattern in Britain and elsewhere for a Carol Service. The basic template was laid down at King's College, Cambridge, beginning in 1918. The Dean of King's, Eric Milner-White, had been a chaplain in the army during World War I, which had ended a month earlier, and was seeking for a Christmas service that would appeal to many people.
He based the service on one devised at Truro by Edward White Benson*, ca. 1880, which was the true beginning of the tradition. It was...
OLD HUNDREDTH. This is the most durable of all hymn tunes in the English-language repertory. Associated with William Kethe*'s version of Psalm 100 ('All people that on earth do dwell'*) from its first printing in the Anglo-Genevan psalter of 1560, it was taken from the French Genevan Psalter* of 1551 (see 'French Protestant psalms'*). Indeed, like all Kethe's psalm versions, this one was written to fit the French tune.
Loys Bourgeois* had originally provided the tune for Théodore de Bèze*'s...
The development of the organ as the primary vehicle for leading congregational song in churches of the USA proceeded initially from established English trajectories, although in subsequent centuries the organ's ecclesiastical role would parallel the development of the USA's musical, social, and liturgical priorities. The Anglican Church had maintained a complex and tenuous relationship with church music, its Calvinist concerns frequently commandeering the journey down the via media. Its noted...
Attitudes towards the use of organs to accompany the congregational singing of hymns and metrical psalms varied dramatically across the centuries and from place to place. Religious zealots denounced them as vainglorious ornaments, whilst musical reformers advocated their use to impose order on undisciplined singing. This makes an account of the subject problematic since almost any statement can be contradicted. It is important to realise that whereas organs were habitually to be found in the...
Plainchant, also known as plainsong. The term is taken from the Latin cantus planus, and is usually associated with the Latin chant of the Western Church. It has a wide stylistic remit, from simple psalm recitation sung by the whole monastic community to virtuosic solo and choral chants such as offertories. All plainchant is monophonic — that is, it consists of an unharmonized line of melody. 'Plainchant' also encompasses a wide chronological range, from the core repertory of Office and Mass...
The hymn was one of the most frequently set liturgical genres of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. It fits well into the style preferences of the period in its use of a version of the chant melody ordinarily associated with the text as the basis for the composition of one of the voices. Its brevity, four to six phrases corresponding to the lines of one stanza, allowed for ready production of a number of settings needed to provide for a polyphonic setting for Vespers* of every important...
In Classical Greek theory, 'rhythm' was an entity different, and almost opposed, to what was then called 'metre'. The latter was dependent on what was understood to be the inherent rhythm of the words, but rhythmos proper was an external pattern, such as might be taken over from an instrumental tune. Apparently quoting from some source ultimately dependent on Aristoxenus, Bede* (De arte metrica, XXIV) says that although rhythm is similar to metre, the verbal proportions of a rhythmic...
Ring shout is a sacred 'dance' practiced commonly during slavery times, and arguably the most significant African musical retention in the United States of America. It is performed in call and response fashion between a song leader (customarily a man) and a group of 'dancers' (often called 'shouters'). The leader--often referred to as a 'songster'—intones the opening phrase(s) and then alternates with the chorus (of singers and 'dancers') in a call and response manner. The leader sets the...
Set-Piece
A set piece (or set-piece) is, loosely speaking, a choral setting of sacred or secular metrical poetry performed with or without accompaniment, sometimes with the congregation, usually but not necessarily non-strophic—that is, usually but not necessarily through-composed. As it is not practical to formulate a precise definition based directly on musical and textual characteristics, in this article 'set-piece' is defined as a piece that has been designated a set piece by a composer,...
Shape-note hymnody
This is a tradition of rural American sacred music using unorthodox notations, associated with community singing schools and singings. Although the shape-note singing tradition of the 19th century flourished particularly in the South and Midwest, it spread to practically every section of the United States in the closing decades of the 20th century. Shape-note tunebooks contain introductory rudiments for reading the notation plus up to several hundred hymn tunes, fuging...
Sign language is a visual form of communication developed by and for Deaf people world-wide. (A general history of signing is included in Costello, 2009). Signed languages, which differ from region to region in the same way that spoken languages differ, consist of formal, standardized lexicons containing hand shapes, movements of hands, arms, and body and facial expression to convey meaning. A skilled interpreter takes words or phrases in the source language, in this case the written or spoken...
Singers Glen, Virginia, is a hamlet in the Shenandoah Valley about eight miles north-northwest of Harrisonburg. It was originally named Mountain Valley by its German-speaking Mennonite settler, Joseph Funk*, who is buried in Singers Glen. It was renamed Singers Glen in 1860 when a post office was established there, and after Funk's music business had become successful.
Its significance is twofold: (1) it was the original base of the music-publishing business (known variously as Joseph Funk...
General
Southern Gospel is one of the multiple vernacular Christian music traditions that developed within American (and to some extent British) Protestant cultures during the 19th and 20th centuries, and part of the gospel music phenomenon that has flourished in Anglophone Christendom since the 1870s. It is also part of the Christian, but especially Protestant, practice of recreational musicking with vernacular songs and hymns.
'Southern Gospel' refers to a music tradition that dates arguably...
Strengthen for Service. 100 Years of the English Hymnal, 1906-2006.
The English Hymnal was a landmark in Anglican worship. Looking back after 100 years provided an opportunity for a measured appraisal, both of its creation and of its effect on Church of England worship of the 20th century. Just as The First Fifty Years (1956) was a retrospective view of the book, with some remarkable reminiscences by Ralph Vaughan Williams*, the centenary was the justification for a more ambitious collection of...
Teaching hymnody: a survey
Human beings are born with the 'propensity to make and listen to music that was encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species' (Mithen, 2006, p. 1). Mark J. Tramo's (1956-) studies on the nature of brain functioning show 'all of us are born with the capacity to apprehend emotion and meaning in music' (Tramo 2001, pp. 54-56). Research by Barbara S. Kisilevsky, et al., indicates that by the final trimester of pregnancy, fetuses are...
Text and tune
'Music . . . the exaltation of poetry. Both of them may excel apart, but sure they are most excellent when they are joyn'd' (Henry Purcell).
The primary hallmark of excellence in vocal music, whether sacred or secular, is the depth of poetic unity between words and music. Arguably, it is the quality of the relationship between tune and text that is likely to be the most effective in quickening the emotions of both performer and listener and, in the case of sacred vocal...
This essay examines four ways the Internet has influenced the study, accessibility, proliferation and practice of congregational song: the digitization of materials in the public domain, the born-digital and twinned digital combined with print materials, making digital objects findable and visible, and the emerging pedagogies.
The main focus of this entry is on those resources that offer the full text or image of a hymn. Serious scholars should devote attention to The Hymn Tune Index*. See...
The system of learning the notes of the musical scale to syllables has a long history going back at least to Guido d'Arezzo in the 11th century (see 'Ut queant laxis'*), but the modern Curwen system originates in a meeting of friends of the Sunday School Movement in Hull in 1841. The Revd John Curwen (1816-1880) was urged to bring out a simple method of learning to read music. He based his system on that of Miss Sarah Ann Glover (1785-1867) whose work he had seen in Norwich and on that of John...
Unison hymn tune in Britain, 1861-1939.
1. Victorian hymn tunes in the late 19th Century.
One of the principal features that a student of 19th-century and early 20th-century music has learned about the hymnody of this period in Britain is its transformation from a legacy of the Old Version* and the New Version*. John Stainer* noted that the OV and NV tunes that were still in use at St Paul's Cathedral in the late 1840s were 'groaned through' with commensurate reluctance by choir and...
Psalmody in the 17th and 18th Centuries
The early settlers of the British North American colonies—including the Anglicans of Jamestown, the Pilgrims and Puritans of Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the French and Dutch of New Amsterdam—generally relied upon Genevan and/or English psalm tunes for the musical settings of their congregational singing. These tunes were mostly sung from memory, aided by the lining-out process (see Scottish Psalter* and Lining out* for a description of...
'West Gallery music' has become the accepted name for a distinctive kind of sacred music that developed in rural England and flourished in Britain and its colonies from ca. 1700 to the late 19th century. Unlike the music of cathedrals and collegiate churches, it was written for, and frequently by, people with no formal training in music, who followed local traditional practice and their own instincts in performance and composition. Because organs were rare (and harmoniums not invented), from...
YISRAEL V'ORAITA (TORAH SONG)
The earliest appearance in a hymnal of the tune YISRAEL V'ORAITA is probably as 'Song of Good News' in Orlando Schmidt's (1924-2002) Sing and Rejoice! (Scottsdale, Pennsylvania and Kitchener, Ontario, 1979), with copyright 1967 by Willard F. Jabusch*. Probably the copyright covers not only Jabusch's hymn ('Open your ears, O Christian people, Open your ears and hear good news!') but also the combination of the hymn and tune, which is printed as melody-only with...