In church today we sang one of my favorite hymns, Dickinson College. I'd always assumed it was the beautiful (if somewhat masochistic) words of St. Francis [but see here] that made it so moving, but there's another thing. I found this out two years ago when a colleague teaching a course called Politics of Music asked me to do a guest lecture on religious music. I told her I'd talk about hymns if that was OK with her (it was), and gave a three-part presentation starting with the importance of hymnals to the Reformation and ending with Evangelical controversies over love-song-to-Jesus like Praise & Worship music, by way of Bach's use of harmony in "Ein feste Burg" and his recycling of secular as sacred music and vice versa. But I also brought students copies of three hymns from the Episcopal Hymnal, including this one. "It's in 5:4," remarked my friend. It is indeed - 5:4, a great rarity in Western music, and unsettling or mysterious because so unfamiliar. In Dave Bruckeck's "Take 5," it's wonky. Here it gives such a sense of the interpenetration of movement and rest, of intimacy, of care, of overflowing feeling...
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Swingin'
In church today we sang one of my favorite hymns, Dickinson College. I'd always assumed it was the beautiful (if somewhat masochistic) words of St. Francis [but see here] that made it so moving, but there's another thing. I found this out two years ago when a colleague teaching a course called Politics of Music asked me to do a guest lecture on religious music. I told her I'd talk about hymns if that was OK with her (it was), and gave a three-part presentation starting with the importance of hymnals to the Reformation and ending with Evangelical controversies over love-song-to-Jesus like Praise & Worship music, by way of Bach's use of harmony in "Ein feste Burg" and his recycling of secular as sacred music and vice versa. But I also brought students copies of three hymns from the Episcopal Hymnal, including this one. "It's in 5:4," remarked my friend. It is indeed - 5:4, a great rarity in Western music, and unsettling or mysterious because so unfamiliar. In Dave Bruckeck's "Take 5," it's wonky. Here it gives such a sense of the interpenetration of movement and rest, of intimacy, of care, of overflowing feeling...
