Because for most of the year I’m not including Saturdays, today is day two of this project to sing through the hymn book (see the pinned introductory post for details). It’s the second Sunday of Christmas, the one nearest to the Epiphany when we celebrate God’s presence in Jesus being revealed to the world through the visit of the magi. The hymn I have selected is a modern one, “Bring to God your new, best songs”. It doesn’t have a tune of its own but of the available tunes that fit it, I sing it to the tune of an older hymn, “King of glory, King of peace”.
The words are an adaptation by an acquaintance of mine, Martin Leckebusch, of Psalm 96. This psalm has a long history of being adapted to sung worship. In the Book of Common Prayer it is known as the Venite (from the first word of the Latin version – Come!), and is still set as one of the canticles to be read or chanted at Morning Prayer. God is praised as the creator of all the world and its peoples. Some verses of it also inspired the Epiphany hymn sung in many churches on this day, “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, bow down before him, his glory proclaim!”
Whichever version of the psalm you prefer, the common themes are that after Epiphany the whole world, not just the people of Bethlehem, get to hear about the birth of Jesus, the presence of God among us. And that there is no longer any excuse for idolatry – in Martin’s words, “Earth and heaven, revere the Lord your Creator: Why exalt some other god? He is greater!”
At the end of the twelve days of Christmas, the challenge is to do as the magi did, return home with a message of good new to tell the world. We can’t do that much in person at present, but this song calls us to “Bring to God our new songs” – we have other ways of communicating these days. In your phone calls, video conferences, tweets and other online interactions, how can you tell of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ?
I very much admire Martin Leckebusch’s abilities to paraphrase Psalms metrically, and I think this one works well as a true reflection of the sentiments of the Psalm. Of course the initial instruction “Sing to the Lord a NEW song” is almost impossible to fulfil: once you’ve sung the song once, it isn’t new any more – and while you’re writing it you will have sung over in your head various drafts and ideas, so even by the time the ink is dry on the paper (or the computer printer has stopped whirring) the song is no longer brand spanking new! But I thought these words worked well, and I appreciated being reminded of the hymn (I sang it at a conference a number of years ago).
There are a couple of points about the Psalm that are worth noting, though. It (i) has a series of repeated triplets in its structure: “Sing to the Lord” comes 3 times in v1-2, likewise “Ascribe to the Lord” in v7-8 (I’m using bible verse numbers not Prayer Book ones) and “Let the ” in v11-12; and it isn’t hard to see triplets of sentiment in v4-6 and v10. Could these be worked into a hymn version? And (ii) in the NIV at any rate it has a fairly clear paragraph structure, which seems to say that it should be a 5-verse hymn (at least, the first three verses are clearly delineated) if translated into English.
About the tune, the problem with using Gwachmai (“King of glory, king of peace”) or Redland or Upton Cheyney is that all these 7.4.7.4.D tunes expect that the 7-syllable lines will be part of rhyme-structure of the words: the tunes all expect an ABABCDCD scheme as in George Herbert’s famous lines, whereas Martin has (I’d guess deliberately) declined to conform to this, and instead written xAxAxBxB. Trying to sing the words at the same time as I was playing the tune on the piano I found singularly difficult: anyone who has tried doing this will know that one’s eyes have to flip repeatedly from the words to the music and back, and one relies on memorising short verbal phrases for singing whilst looking at the notes (it’s a kind of phonic loop technique). I didn’t know my phonic memory for hymns relied so much on there being expected rhymes! Eventually I decided to sit down and write an 11.11.11.11 tune instead, where the lines would carry straight on from the 7s to the 4s, destroying the expectation of a rhyme – and I found that worked much better (at least, for me it did) with these words, even though Martin has obviously written some of the lines with natural breaks (like the one “Why exalt some other ‘god’? He is greater!” which Stephen highlighted.
Thanks for the challenge of singing these hymns, Stephen! Yours – JOHN HARTLEY.