How Hymns Work

This summer, we learned a new hymn tune (Abbot's Leigh) and two hymn texts to go with it (Lord, You Give the Great Commission and God is Love Let Heaven Adore Him).

Have you noticed that many tunes or melodies in our hymnal have more than one text? Think about Love Divine, All Loves Excelling and Alleluia Sing to Jesus. Or God of Day God of Darkness and Healing River of the Spirit. How does that work?

Metrical hymns are a kind of metered poetry. Just like a Haiku poem has a certain number of syllables per line, metrical hymns follow syllabic patterns.

For example, the new hymn tune we learned this summer is called Abbot's Leigh (the name of the melody, not the words.) The tune follows a pattern: 8 syllables in the first line, 7 syllables in the next line, then 8, then 7, then 8, then 7, then 8, then 7. This pattern is abbreviated 87 87 D (D for double). Following that 87 87 D pattern of the tune, an author can write a text to match. In our case, we have sung this tune with the texts Lord, You Give the Great Commission and God is Love, Let Heaven Adore Him.

So, one hymn tune can have multiple texts that match it. This is a practical way of expanding a congregation's repertoire-singing multiple texts to a well-known hymn tune. With me so far?

To make it even more interesting, 87 87 D is a fairly common hymn meter. The hymn tune that we know by the hymns God of Day and God of Darkness, Healing River of the Spirit, and Holy Wisdom Lamp of Learning? 87 87 D. Alleluia Sing to Jesus and Love Divine All Loves Excelling? Also 87 87 D. How about Beethoven's Ode to Joy from the 9th symphony that we sing as Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee and Sing With All the Saints in Glory? You guessed it, 87 87 D. Sing a New Church? God We Praise You? Blessed Feasts of Blessed Martyrs? There's a Wideness in God's Mercy? In fact, any of these texts can be sung to any of the others' tunes, since they all follow the same syllabic pattern. Try switching them around with one another, they all fit. Some may sound funny, putting the wrong emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle, but they still fit.

If you look at the fine print after a hymn in our hymnal, you can learn more about it. A hymn tune has its own name (Abbot's Leigh, Hyfrydol, Beach Spring in above examples) and a composer of the tune. The hymn text is usually written by a different author, sometimes centuries apart from the tune. Many tunes and texts have interesting stories behind them, easily found with a Google search.

By contrast, consider the other song we learned this summer, Gather the People. It's not a hymn since it doesn't follow any established metrical pattern. Dan Schutte wrote the melody and the text to go together, and neither the melody nor the text are meant to be used apart from the other. This allows a different kind of creative freedom, especially with its syncopated rhythms. Thus, it is a "liturgical song" but not technically a hymn.