Hymn Blog - December 27, 2009

December 27, 2009 – Christmas Sunday

VU 35 – Good Christian Friends, Rejoice. The text is John Mason Neale’s paraphrase of a fourteenth century German-Latin carol, and was first published in his “Carols for Christmas-tide” (1853). A few textual alterations have been made for inclusivity. The tune, IN DULCE JUBILO, is a German folk melody first matched with the text in Joseph Klug’s “Geistliche Lieder” (1533). The harmonization is by Gary Alan Smith and comes from the United Methodist Hymnal (1989).

VU 54 – Unto Us a Boy Is Born. Words and music are from a fifteenth century German manuscript. The translation is by Percy Dearmer, made for the Oxford Book of Carols (1928), with the exception of the second stanza, which was translated by George Ratcliffe Woodward for the Cowley Carol Book (1902).

VU 64 – O Little Town of Bethlehem. The text was written in 1868 by Phillips Brooks, rector of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, as a gift to the children of the Sunday School. The text had been inspired by his previous Christmas week journey on horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Today we sing it to FOREST GREEN, an English traditional melody harmonized by Ralph Vaughan Williams. This tune has always been associated with this text in Great Britain since the publication of “The English Hymnal” (1906) of which Vaughan Williams was music editor. Eric Routley, a giant in the field of hymnology, ridiculed ST. LOUIS, the fune more commonly used in North America, as “broken-backed and paralytic”, while Canadia hymnologist Stanley Osborne judged the tune to have “nothing of the craftsmanship one associates with great music; [and] the added misfortune of being undeservedly popular.”

VU 55 – In the Bleak Midwinter. The text, by Christina Rossetti, imagines Jesus’ birth in the cold and snow of a British winter, incorporating the nativity tradition that it snowed at the birth of Christ to cover the fallen world with a pure whiteness. The poem was first published in 1872, and first appeared as a hymn in “The English Hymnal” (1906). Methodist theologian Fred D. Gealy has written “’In the Bleak Midwinter’ is not a prayer; it is not a ‘song with praise to God’ (pace Augustine); it is a proclamation, a declaration, a witness to the amazing mystery of what the church when it spoke Latin called ‘incarnation,’ The Word becoming flesh, God becoming man, yet so that God remains God and man remains man.” Gustav Holst composed the tune, CRANHAM, for the text. Cranham is a village near the composer’s birthplace.

VU 92 – In the Darkness Shine the Splendour. Author Bernadette Gasslein was born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. For the past 14 years, she has been the editor of Celebrate!, Canada's award-winning liturgy magazine published by Novalis. For the past 36 years she has been engaged in various liturgical and catechetical ministries, including four years as a Project Specialist with the National Office of Religious Education of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. She is Coordinator of Liturgical Life at St. Charles Parish in Edmonton, AB, where she and her husband Gordon live. The familiar tune IRBY(named after a town in Lincolnshire) was composed by Henry J. Gauntlett in 1849 as a setting for the text “Once in Royal David’s City.”