Discovering the Songs of Christmas

Just in time for Christmas!

The hymn writer's useful mediocrity

There is a style and manner suited to the composition of hymns, which may be more successfully, or at least more easily attained by a versifier, than by a poet. They should be Hymns, not Odes, if designed for public worship, and for the use of plain people. Perspicuity, simplicity and ease, should be chiefly attended to; and the imagery and coloring of poetry, if admitted at all, should be indulged very sparingly and with great judgment. The late Dr. Watts, many of whose hymns are admirable patterns in this species of writing, might, as a poet, have a right to say, That it cost him some labor to restrain his fire, and to accommodate himself to the capacities of common readers. But it would not become me to make such a declaration. It behoved me to do my best. But though I would not offend readers of taste by a wilful coarseness, and negligence, I do not write professedly for them. If the LORD whom I serve, has been pleased to favor me with that mediocrity of talent, which may qualify me for usefulness to the weak and the poor of his flock, without quite disgusting persons of superior discernment, I have reason to be satisfied.--John Newton, Olney Hymns

Hymn book

Early Christian Latin Poets, by Carolinne White, surveys the earliest Latin-lanuage hymn writers of Christianity.

Hymn books online

One of the great joys of the modern age is the amount of information available free, online.

I've spent hours in the Mullen Library at Catholic University looking through books just like these. Comfy as libraries can be, it's wonderful that a virtual library like this is available anywhere you can get a wireless signal.

Once when my office was located above a library, I would run downstairs to look at this on my lunch hour. Now, I just go to the sidebar of my blog, click on Dictionary of Hymnology vol. I, and enjoy!

The Style of the Age, and the Artist

"The reason why the style of a group and the style of an age may sometimes be legitimately confused is that a group-style often appears to realize the imperfectly formed aspirations of the age. A style may be described figuratively as a way of exploiting and focusing a language, which then becomes a dialect or language in its own right, and it is this focus which makes possible what might be called the personal style or manner of the artist, as Mozart worked against the background of the general style of his age, yet with a more specific relation to Haydn and to Johann Christian Bach. But analogies with language break down because a style is finally itself treated as a work of art, and judged as an individual work is judged and by much the same standards: coherence, power, and richness of allusion. In current changes of fashion and revivals of interest in one past style after another--Pre-Raphaelite painting, Baroque music--each successive style is almost a solid object, a piece of period furniture to be possessed and enjoyed. Yet such treatment of a period style as itself an objet d'art suggests one possible elucidation of the style of a group. More convincingly than the "anonymous" style of an age, the style of a group represents a synthesis like a work of art, a reconciliation of the conflicting forces of the period into one harmony. It is almost as much an expression itself as a system of expression."

Charles Rosen
The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
pp. 20-21

The Historical Significance of the Figured Bass, or, Why We Hear Music in Four-Bar Phrases

"[The figured bass accompaniment] blurs the independence both of the three contrapuntal voices which it theoretically contains and of the chordal or homophonic harmony which it supposedly illustrates. It breaks down the isolation of the voices by integrating them into one line, and of the chords by integrating them into a continuous movement. Linear form is essentially the isolation of the elements of music, and the history of music, until our day, may be seen as a gradual breakdown of all the various isolating forces of the art--contrapuntal independence of voices, homophonic progression, closed and framed forms, and diatonic clarity.

The attack upon the tendency to isolate comes paradoxically from within by means of the isolating forces themselves--just as, in painting, Impressionism went beyond Delacroix in its attempt to avoid isolating the larger forms, and yet its method was a doctrinaire isolation and equalization of each brush stroke. In music, the classical style attacked the horizontal independence of the voices and the vertical independence of the harmony by isolating the phrase and articulating the structure. Late eighteenth-century phrasing is emphaticallyperiodic, and comes in clearly defined groups of three, four, or five measures, generally four. Imposing this new periodic system upon the musical flow and blurring the inner progression of that flow by the new accompaniment figures meant that the linear sense of the classical style was transferred to a higher level, and had to be perceived as the continuity of the whole work, and not as the linear continuity of the individual elements.

The vehicle of the new style was a texture called the sonata."

Charles Rosen

The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven

Music Education in Seminaries

Immoderate discusses Paul Jones' Singing and Making Music: Issues in Church Music Today. At issue is the use of praise songs in seminary hymnology courses at the expense of traditional hymnody. Interesting stuff!

The Musicianship of the Recording Engineer

"Electric performances are the result of teamwork. Not only the musician but also the engineer contributes to the execution of a musical score. It is hardly necessary to explain why the result of the broadcast or the record rendition depends on the "close harmony" of their performance. The performing musician is somewhat at the mercy of the engineer at the control board. No matter how delicate the touch of the Chopin player or the harmonics of the violinist, a rough handling by the controlling engineer would nullify these effects.

...Heretofore the man at the control board has been too much the mechainc and not enough the musician. A new type of performer, however, is in the making: the musical sound engineer, a technician who will be fully versed in musicl discipline and score reading, whose technical and artistic qualities will supplement those of the musical performer. The ideal sound engineer, as collaborator in interpretation of the score, would rehearse with the performer, note for note, bar for bar. His sound-control machinery would supplement the performance as an accompanist supplements a soloist. In such a case, the performing musician would have the full sympathy and understanding of the accompanying engineer. Thus, electric performance will bring forth a type of performance that will be demoncratic not only in the technical sense but also in its ideology of co-operation. Neither of the two--the musical sound engineer nor the performing musician--can alone reach the ultimate goal."

In 1941, Frederick Dorian wrote these words in his very informative and interesting book, The History of Music in Performance: The Art of Musical Interpretation from the Renaissance to Our Day. His prediction turned out to be very true. In 1941 the career of a young recording engineer was just beginning.

His name was Tom Dowd, and his star would rise with that of his employer, Atlantic Records. He pioneered technology, and worked, as Dorian predicted, in musical tandem with the musicans whose work he recorded, from Arethra Franklin to Eric Clapton, Ray Charles and the Allman Brothers. Without restricting the free movement of the artists, he orchestrated their work for the purpose of optimally recording their sound.

Among his many achievements in recording and pioneering and integrating the use of new technology, I find it marvelous that Dowd was the first to record in stereo

In the movie Ray, Tom Dowd was played by Ray Gomez. Dowd died in 2002, shortly before the release of the award-winning documentary on his life's work, Tom Dowd and the Language of Music. Here's a nice tribute page to this remarkable 20th-century musician.

In Duple Proportion Jesus Christ Made Two Natures One

"But after the fullness of time in which the greatest of musicians, Jesus Christ, in whom is our peace, in duple proportion made two natures one, there have flourished in His church many wonderful musicians, as Gregory, Ambrose, Augustine Hilary, Boethius, Martianus, Guido, and Jean de Muris, of whom some estalished the usage of singing in the salutary church itself others composed numerous hymns and canticles for that purpose, others bequeathed to posterity the divinity, others the theory, others the practice of this art, in manuscripts now everywhere dispersed."

Joannes Tinctoris

Dedication to Prince Ferdinand of Proportionale musices (ca. 1476)

in Source Readings in Music History:The Renaissance (Norton)

The Organist-of-All-Trades

"The objectivist movement in organ performance in this country is most significant, because the United States is definitely a land of organists. Here organ playing outside of church walls is more popular than anywhere else in the world. The baroque "queen of instruments" has for the past generation been serving a useful purpose: it has acquainted music-loving people with the wide scope of nineteenth-century music, at a time when orchestra concerts could be heard in only a few cities, and of course only by those with ability to pay. Here the organist stepped in. In the days prior to records and broadcasts, his playing substituted for orchestral performance. Free recitals promoted knowledge of the literature, forcing the average organist to undergo a metamorphosis from church musician to jack-of-all-trades. Thus it became the organist's task to play not only music written specifically for his instrument, but also, in arrangements, anything in the whole range of music, ecclesiastical or secular, orchestral compositions or vocal scores. It is an open secret that not all organists (among whom are many fine scholars) are wholeheartedly in sympathy with such a practice. But the musical mores of bygone days still compel them to imitate the brass fanfare of the Light Cavalry and the sighing strings of the Liebestod in an effort to emulate as much as possible the multicolors of the orchestra palate."

Frederick Dorian, The History of Music in Performance (Norton)

In a Dorian Mode

I'm finishing up a very helpful book, Frederick Dorian's The History of Music in Performance.

I've gotten a lot out of it. One of my weaknesses, frankly, is history. I would never sit down and memorize the people and places of historical events. People who do have really gained a framework, a kind of matrix from which to make comparisons and trace influences. But lazy people like me need to hear the stories over and over until we realize that Bach was the proto-Classical composer, for example, the genius choirmaster, undiscovered in his time, who while never stepping out of the baroque was definitely stepping forward into something new.

One of Dorian's thematic arguments has to do with the development of the written score as a binding controlling device for all performances of a musical work. In the old days, there wasn't too much written down, in terms of dynamic markings, etc. The composer ordinarily conducted his own work, and thus the interpretation would be defined, not by written symbols, but by performance. But it was more than that. There was a kind of fluid understanding about the music that could be made from the score. The written instrumentation might be only a suggestion--other combinations of instruments might be possible. He maintains that the concerns with the coloration of the sound are later concerns, of Berlioz, for example.

Another fun comparison has to do with different composers' use of rubato. Mozart's idea was that all the slowing occurred in the right hand, "and the left hand knows nothing about it."

It's a good book, learned but gossipy, opinionated but well-annotated. I recommend it.

The Very Model of a Modern Choral Terrorist

James Day wrote a fine musical biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams for The Master Musician's Series.

It's a biography of the old style: no character assassination!! Like a painter, Day fills in a character stroke by stroke.

I'm halfway through the book. Vaughan Williams has died at 85: "The time he required had been exactly allotted him, and he had not wasted it" (p. 72.) Now I must make my way through the tougher but potentially more rewarding half: the analysis of the music.

As I read, I will be asking myself a question. Vaughan Williams was widely known as a populist. He borrowed folk melodies--the truest kind of popular song--and built symphonies with them. And yet when it comes to the hymnal, his harmonies and even some melodies (notably Down Ampney) are among the least accessible to a congregation. So I will wonder: when he wrote Five Mystical Songs, did he mean them to be sung as anthems by the choir? What about Down Ampney? And, where do we go from here?