Posted on 11/23/2005 1:42:04 PM PST by afraidfortherepublic
Every year, my family joins hands round our dinner table and sings this before sitting down to our Thanksgiving dinner.
I agree that contemporary hymns are puerile, vapid, trite junk. The lyrics are so pedestrian and uninspiring. As one of the dissenters in my church referring to the tunesput it to me--"This church has become a 7-11. They sing seven words eleven times."
bump
Agreed again!
Thank you all for posting the words and music to this great old classic. Ninenot, I was disappointed because my (Catholic) church did NOT sing this one yesterday, despite the fact that it is included in the Missalette and designated as appropriate for the occasion.
Nine, I appreciate your sentiments, but I don't think that the unjustified prejudices of yesteryear should influence the church music of today -- especially shen so many of the other hymns that are currently sung and simply awful.
This is a good one that most everyone knows.
The most interesting part of this article (to me) was the background of the prohibitions that some Protestant sects have against singing with accompanying instruments. I asked my priest about that once, and he did not know the reason. Just last week someone from the Vatican pronounced that only "certain" insturments were to be used in church -- namely traditional ones -- not guitars.
Where would he draw the line? The early Christians did NOT have pipe organs! (Praise him with psalter and harp!" What is a psalter, anyway?)
The Book of Psalms is a psalter.
Basically a collections of hymns
Late ping!
Sorry! I've been very busy with holidays and new business ventures!
Classical Music Ping List ping!
Thanks for the ping - as a person who has studied music history, this article was very informative. As a Methodist, I grew up singing this hymn in church every year, and, as the article mentions, I see the Methodists are responsible for its "break-through" in the 1930's by publishing it in the hymnal.
Good luck in your new ventures!
Thanks!
We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing
Please look down upon the Roseannadanna household
Bring peace to our fathers, good health to our mothers
And please don't make me sweat like Dr. Joyce Brothers! ...
Ummmnnnhhh...first off, the Dutch Orange comment was tongue-in-cheek.
Your analysis of the Vatican's pronouncement is based on some very dicey grounds: namely, the "back to the original" stuff. Early Christians did not have basilicas or reliable indoor heating, either.
The voice, pipes (flutes), harp, (zither) and horn were traditional for the Jews, and used to one extent or another in Temple/synagogue worship.
However, when the piped organ became available, the Church favored it for a number of reasons--not the least because it was able to 'mimic' most of the other instruments reasonably well--but also because it, and it alone, produces a glorious sound which is simply unmatched by any other instrument.
Thus, until Pius XII issued his "Christmas gift" to church musicians in 1955 (?) or 1956, allowing symphonic accompaniment AND women to sing in church choirs (yup, you can check this out) ONLY the pipe (or reed) organ was allowed.
The piano is still NOT officially allowed, by the way.
It is very useful to recall that LATIN was to be retained, per Vatican II documents (except, perhaps, for reading the Epistle and Gospel.)
Change for the sake of "new/improved" or for change's sake is simply not a good idea.
I sang it in a school play. I was on the 3rd grade. 1963.
Please add me to the music ping list. Thanks.
Will do!
Dear tom h,
Actually, you're already on my ping list, which is the Classical Music Ping List. Did you get pinged to this thread?
Thanks,
sitetest
Thanks for the retrospective on the evolution of Catholic liturgical music. Since I did not becpme a Catholic until 1959, most of that was before my time. I know that the hardest thing to get used to in the Catholic church was the DEARTH of music at low Mass. (Remember when Masses were designated "low" and "high"?)
Masses were largely silent in the late '50s and early 60's. Occasionally the priest would sing part of it. At Newman Hall at UC Berkeley we did use what was called the "Congregational High Mass" and (as the name indicates) the Congregation sang the Mass sort of like a Gregorian chant. It was beautiful, but I have never heard it used anyplace except Newman Hall. Of course the words did not fit the music after everything was translated into the vernacular.
Having come from a Protestant background (and former choir member)I really missed the music. On occasion when we would sing a hymn, it was unfamiliar and in Latin. All the great old Protestant favorites were not allowed -- probably because many of them were written by Martin Luther -- at least that is what I was told.
Even after Vat. 2, it was a long time before music made its way back into the church, except for Christmas and Easter. That is when all the "modern" hymns seem to be written. I remember our surprise when a visiting priest from Malta played the violin at Easter services in the late 60s, early 70s.
In fact, in the mid 70s my daughter got her start as a Pastoral Musician by being drafted to play an old pump organ because our church had no one to play and no music. I used to drive her to the church on Saturdays to practice. At the time she had only a piano background, and she taught herself to play the creaky old organ. Pretty soon she was playing for weddings -- long before she was old enough to drive! Then she discovered her beautiful soprano voice and she became a soloist and had to find someone else to accompany her.
But other musical instruments besides the organ were used in the church before. Wasn't Josef Gruber a Catholic priest? Isn't the story true that the reason he wrote Silent Night is that the bellows on the organ sprang a leak and spoiled the planned Christmas cantata? I believe Silent Night was first performed to the accompaniment of a guitar because of the broken organ.
I did know that the Jews used ancient instruments and their voices in worship. Sometimes I wish that there were written records of the tunes that they sung in the 1st century! I would love to know what church music sounded like before the 1500s (a date which represents the oldest hymns listed in our hymnal.)
RE: piano in church. I had NEVER heard the piano used in a Catholic church -- except for practice -- until recently. When my daughter took her Bachelor's in Music Performance and Pedagogy at Baylor U (class of '82)she brought home the surprising news that ALL of the Baptist churches were using both the piano and the organ in their sanctuaries. (She had to perform regulary with various Baylor ensembles so she visited a lot of Baptist churches all over the South.) We both thought use of the piano in church odd at the time because they didn't use it in the Congregational or Presbyterian churches I had attended as a child. By the time she got her Master's in Choral Conducting, all the Catholic Churches where she worked were using pianos -- partly because they couldn't find skilled organists. So, I think it is a fairly recent phenom.
Yah--you missed a great deal.
I'm sorry that your exposure to RC music was so impoverished--here in Mke we had High Masses with music galore. The 'hymn' stuff really began after VatII, and before that hymns which were not specifically Catholic in text were simply NOT used. Now--who cares? Anything goes.
The historians tell us that Jewish Temple music was used for psalmody in the early Church, and that generally the psalm-tones of Chant are based on Jewish chant. Similarly, some of the oldest Gregorian chant (not psalmody) is 'borrowed' from Jewish chant.
If you want to know what church music was like before 1500AD, then get a CD of Chant. It served from about 30AD through 1250+, after which some polyphony was written and used.
By polyphony, do you mean parts -- as in 4 part harmony? Sorry, I am not as schooled in music and musical terms as you -- I just love it. God made performers and God also made audiences.
Yes, I did miss a great deal in Catholic music -- but my experience is not singular. During and after my conversion and until Vat. 2, I attended church in 3 states and multiple cities and found it to be similar in all -- low Mass, mostly silent from the pews and mumbled so fast I could barely keep up. I used to think that if I could read the translation in the Missalette and wind up at the same place at the same time as the priest that I would have finally "arrived"! LOL. Never happened!
Being a traditionalist, I thought that English was "dumbing down" the Mass, but I got used to it pretty quickly. When my Parish in Oakland, CA -- St. Leo's -- reintroduced Latin Mass once a month in the late 60s/early 70s I brought the family enthusiastically. We quickly abandodned that Mass, however, because I suddenly remembered how difficult it had been; and the children were just confused. Since then I have heard Mass in many languages -- Gaelic was the hardest to follow.
I do have some recordings of Gregorian chant, but I never thought of them as being indicative of the earliest church music. I just never made that connection. Is there a set form, or pattern, to chant? Or is it more free-form, subject to the whim of the cantor?
When my husband and I were young, heused to like to fish ina pond that was on the grounds of St. Mary's College/Seminary in Orinda, CA. Sometimes he would take me and our first born (15 mos.) with him and we would relax quietly in a shady glade while the sounds of the young men singing Vespers inthe chapel would drift across the lawns. It was simply beautiful. Perhaps that is why she grew up to be a Pastoral Musician.
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