- |
User Links
My Starred Hymns
My FlexScores
My Hymnals
My Purchased FilesOLD HUNDREDTH BOURGEOIS - last line variants
You are here
I recently acquired a copy of The Hymnal, PCUSA, 1943, and am enjoying leafing through it. The first hymn is "All people that on earth do dwell", set (predictably) to OLD HUNDREDTH. But there's a caveat I've never noticed before: the tune info is given as
OLD HUNDREDTH
Louis Bourgeois, 1551
(English form of final line)
What is the "English form" of the final line, and how does it differ from the (presumably Genevan) original form? I'm familiar with the "original rhythm" vs. "altered rhythm" treatments of this tune, which frequently motivates hymnal editors to include two settings of the "Doxology" ("Praise God, from whom all blessings flow") to OLD HUNDREDTH, and indeed this Hymnal is no exception; R-94 and R-95 are, respectively, original-rhythm and altered-rhythm doxologies, and the former also bears the "(English form of final line)" tag. Enlightenment?
Comments
Genevan form
The Genevan form of the tune has the first three lines "h q q q q h h h" (where half is half note, q is quarter note) and the last line "h h h q q h h h".
The early English form gives the last line the same note values as the first three lines.
Giardini and Teschner
Thanks, hutcheson.
Two other major, composed hymn tunes that I find in even more drastically divergent forms (contour variants in the melody line) are the tune by de Giardini variously called ITALIAN HYMN, MOSCOW, or TRINITY and the tune by Melchior Teschner called ST. THEODULPH or VALET WILL ICH DIR GEBEN. For the former variants compare the settings of "Come thou, almighty King" and "Thou whose almighty Word" in the 2006 Christian Life Hymnal (conveniently printed on facing pages); for the latter contrast the MIDI files linked at this page from my online Esperanto hymnal. The first one, stth_vwidg.mid, gives the five variants one after another. Sometimes these variants strike me as almost as distinct tunes as, say, HANOVER and LYONS.