In Fellowship

Hello! I happened to stop by Starr King Fellowship last week and saw the land cleared for our building expansion. How exciting! I am so proud of you for the years of work and dedication that have brought us to this moment.

All right, back to the hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition. Class, turn to page 661 in your books. There you will find the “Alphabetical Index of Tunes.” Hymns come in two parts: the hymn itself, which are the words, and the hymn tune, the music to which we sing the words. Some hymn writers also write their tunes. Carolyn McDade comes to mind as a modern example; she wrote the words and music to numbers 123, “Spirit of Life,” and 121, “We’ll Build a Land” among others. (Although I heard her say once at a workshop that she does not write her own harmonies, as you can see if you look at the attributions to those hymns.)

Hymn tunes have names, and this index allows you to find a hymn tune by its name. Suppose you loved the tune Hyferdol, and wondered what hymns had been set to it in this hymnal. This index allows you to see that “Hail the Glorious Golden City,” “Years are Coming,” and “Earth Was Given as a Garden” are all set to your favorite tune.

Moving backwards, starting on page 654 we find the “Index of Composers, Arrangers, Authors, Translaters, and Sources.” This is a straightforward author index as would be found in most anthologies. I feel it has some shortcomings, which I’ll save for the next post.

Happy Passover to all of you who will be celebrating it!

At the last sermon discussion I led before leaving on sabbatical, I was answering questions about my project to write an index for our hymnal which would cross-reference hymns and the references they make to the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Someone asked, “What are the indexes in the back of the hymnal?”

So here you go: if you have wondered what all that small type text at the end of the hymnal is but were too afraid to ask, I’m here to help. Class, open your hymnals to page 682. We’ll work backwards from there.

The last index in Singing the Living Tradition is the “Index of First Lines and Titles of Hymns.” SLT usually uses first lines for titles, so the hymn you may know as “Simple Gifts” is only listed under “`Tis a Gift to Be Simple.” A few are listed under titles, however, like the Starr King favorite “Chant for the Seasons.” This index is straightforward, allowing you to find the number of that hymn you have stuck in your head.

Before that, starting on page 669, is the “Topical Index of Hymns.” This arranges hymns by likely topics, so that worship leaders and preachers can find hymns to match their service or sermon topics. This index also points to sections of the hymnal. For instance, under the entry “Beauty,” you’ll find a reference to the “Beauty, Truth, and Goodness” section of the hymnal, hymns 326-332.

Continue moving backwards in the hymnal. The next index starts on page 664, the “Metrical Index of Tunes.” This is a great index for musicians, and an index like this is in almost every hymnal I’ve seen. The meter of a hymn is found by counting the number of syllables in each line. So the meter for “Amazing Grace” (205) is 8.6.8.6. (A-maz-ing-grace-how-sweet-the-sound/That-saved-a-wretch-like-me.) This particular meter is also known as Common Meter, because so many hymns are written in this meter. If you wanted to sing the words to “Amazing Grace” but to a different tune, you would turn to the Metrical Index to find other tunes that fit common meter hymns. There you would find that you can sing it to the tune of “Joy to the World.” (Try this. It sounds very strange.) For a better explanation of hymn tune meters, see this Wikipedia article.

More tomorrow!