An extract from A Joyful Noise: Some Hymnwriters, their Times and their Hymns:
‘It’s a long way to Tipperary/ It’s a long way to go’, sung by filthy, tired men, some wounded, marching to or from the noise of battle… A crowd in Wembley Stadium at a Rugby League Cup Final in a swelling chorus of ‘Abide with me, fast falls the eventide’… An elderly widow, singing her heart out to Arthur Sullivan’s grand march for Sabine Baring Gould’s ‘Onward Christian soldiers’…
Those men statistically had a chance of dying very soon. Few would have known where Tipperary lay, let alone have left their hearts there. The Final crowd is not thinking about death; but H. F. Lyte was, when he wrote that hymn on his deathbed . ‘Onward Christian soldiers’ – really? Old Mrs X in that hat, worn since the time when hats were fashionable? Is she really thinking of Ephesians VI as Sullivan sets her spirits high? In all these cases words are merely scaffolding on which rests the communal euphoria driven by singing together. Interestingly, a recently discovered video of the Beatles in the Abbey Road Studio working on a song, shows John Lennon saying, ‘Forget about the words, get the music right.’
An army may march on its stomach, but often sings when it does so. For singing, together, is a very important human activity – and how we missed it, having been deprived of it during the Locust Years that Covid hath eaten! Singing together makes you temporarily invincible, despite all evidence to the contrary. Singing together can cement an ideology, for good or, indeed, ill: during the Nazi era Goebbels’ propaganda machine constructed the myth of Horst Wessel complete with a catchy tune in 4/4 time to go with it, a second National (Socialist) Anthem. Singing together enhances individuality of contribution and smooths it into communality, a common spirit. It is about bonding, about a sense of shared belonging, where each individual becomes caught up in something, like a dance, which can only be made by many people together. When we join in praise and worship, the ‘I’ or ‘We’ of a people or congregation becomes other-centred, not self-centred. I suspect that one way music works its mysterious power, especially in worship, is to insist that reality is much more than what we can know or understand at the moment.
Words enhanced by tune and rhythm can become ingrained in the mind. C. S. Lewis remarked in his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955) that in the horrors of the Flanders trenches men would remember lines from hymns that they had sung at home, never really having thought about what those words meant before the world went mad. Fat lot of comfort ‘We have a king who rides on a donkey’, repeated three times then ‘And his name is Jesus’, to the tune of ‘What shall we do with a drunken sailor?’, – I jest not! – would be in those circumstances!
For when words are well crafted, seriously designed to say something, they can work in the mind like leaven in dough, even if they are hardly noticed first, or fifth, or tenth time round. A skilled writer can pack much doctrine or spiritual insight into a well-constructed hymn – as witness Charles Wesley, or Isaac Watts, or St Thomas Aquinas’ hymns for Corpus Christi, or Prudentius’ for the Nativity.
But, first, we need to consider the traditions they inherited and to which they responded. I’ll try to be succinct…
Copyright: Charles Moseley 2024