Breaking (musical) rules

So you should go sing along with “’Tis Sweet to Sing the Matchless Love”. (It’s okay, i’ll wait.)

Now go and do it again, and pay close attention to the way you sing the bit that goes (in the first verse) For Jesus died on Calvary. Now do it again, but pay attention to the soprano notes.

Generally, we sing the melody of our congregational songs such that they match the soprano line (transposed an octave or so down for the males and contraltos among us). Oddly, though, i have never heard a Mormon congregation sing the melody of this line of this song such that it matches the soprano notes—they sing along with the alto line, but a few notes higher (i.e., in the normal soprano range for the song).

I find this really interesting, ’cause i don’t think that it’s something that ever gets overtly taught—people just learn to sing the melody this way by hearing other people sing the melody this way. I wonder where it started, you know?

Giving thanks

So in the spirit of the day,* a link to my favorite Thanksgiving song in the hymnal, even though it isn’t listed in the topical index as a song about giving thanks (and i may, in fact, be the only person who thinks that that’s what it’s about): Praise to the Lord, the Almighty.

(If you have a favorite song about giving thanks, whether from the hymnal or not, please feel free to mention it in the comments.)

* Today’s Thanksgiving Day in the United States.

Triumphant harmonies

I do have to say that i absolutely love the fact that even though the hymnal says to sing the chorus of “Called to Serve” in unison, congregations everywhere i’ve ever heard it sung still sing the line “as a triumph song we sing” in harmony—it sounds way cooler that way.

We do it, too!

The next time i’m in a priesthood or Sunday school class and someone makes some comment about how they went to a Roman Catholic mass and that it was just weird, what with all the sitting then standing then sitting then kneeling then standing then sitting and so on and how that feels so “not reverent” or somesuch (something that doesn’t get said very often, but that gets mentioned more than i’m comfortable with), i’m going to stop stopping myself and simply mention standing for intermediate hymns.

Workers, unite!

You know, the first verse of “Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel” wouldn’t be out of place at a meeting of a cell of your local Communist Party, right after the singing of “The Internationale”.

Watching movies

So this past weekend my family sat down and watched the movie The Singles Ward. (Jeanne and i had seen it before, but it was the first time any of our kids had seen it.) If you haven’t seen it before, it’s not world-shatteringly great but it’s also not a bad little movie, and you should watch it if for no other reasons than (a) it has a really fun soundtrack that would drive some of our more, um, intensely artistically conservative church members absolutely insane* and (b) the rest of this post assumes you’ve seen the movie and at least somewhat remember it.

Anyway, as i watched this movie for the first time in several years, i was struck by two things. One is that the Discman shown at the beginning and end of the movie certainly dates it, even though it’s only just over a decade old. The other is more substantial: The big important turning point of the movie involves the female lead becoming severely angry and hurt because the male lead makes jokes about Mormons in his stand-up routine.

This reminded me of what i thought was the really, really major flaw of the movie:** Was the female lead character really worth chasing after? I mean, anyone who would be offended by such mild jokes, well, i don’t think such a person is worth it, you know?† But no, she gets held up as this amazing ideal, and we’re supposed to feel empathy for her. Sorry, folks, but if someone can’t watch others poke fun (mildly, even!) at a group they’re a part of, they really need to grow a thicker skin before they’re such the ideal.††

* Seriously—find Rooster’s version of “Popcorn Popping” from the movie’s soundtrack and download it now. You will be happy.

** Also, in the same sequence, a minor flaw: The evil female character’s use of the verb “to play” in a way that i’m still trying to figure out—it almost but not quite matches any of the (slang) meanings i’ve ever heard, or that i can find even on Urban Dictionary.

† There’s an irony of sorts, too, in that one of the stock characters that the movie uses to make fun of singles ward folks is a woman who is offended by patently non-offensive things.

†† I think i’m going to use the rare “Mormon-oriented literature” tag on this one, just to annoy the kind of people who don’t think literature departments should teach courses in film.

Once there was a gadget

Has anybody else noticed that if you hum the tune to the Primary song “Once There Was a Snowman”,* it sounds really very much like the Inspector Gadget theme song?

* I would link to the tune here, but the entire lds.org domain seems to be down at the moment, so i can’t.

Songs you get wrong

Two things you probably didn’t know about church songs, or at least wouldn’t know if you listened to most Mormons sing them:

• The end of the chorus of “The Lord Is My Light” is not “He leads me, he leads me along”—there's only one instance of me in that line.
• In the primary song “‘Give,’ Said the Little Stream”, it is not the case that wherever the stream goes “the grass grows greener still”—rather, the fields grow greener.

That last one is so surprising, there’s even been some scholarly research on it—I was at a Deseret Language and Linguistics Society Symposium one year (2000? 2001?—sometime around then) where there was a presentation on that lyric and people’s misperception of it, even when they saw it printed in front of them.

Songs as you never expected them

Back when i was a full-time missionary, i lived in an apartment that held two companionships. One of the members of the other pair could sing the chorus of “Behold! A Royal Army” sounding just like a late eighties/early nineties highly filtered dance/house/techno singer.

The song works surprisingly well that way.

Enjoying a song

“How Gentle God’s Commands” is fun to sing—and both of the men’s parts move around in interesting ways, rather a rarity in Mormon hymnody.

The memes of my youth

One last thought from my trip to Oregon a few weeks ago:

So, upon finding out we were going to be singing the song “They, the Builders of the Nation”, what with being faced with the refrain “Blessed, honored Pioneer!” while being in Oregon, of all places—well, all i’m trying to say is that i couldn’t have been the only one whose brain kept looping the phrase “You have died of dysentery”.

That’s all.

One of these things is not like the other

Why do Mormon sacrament services tend to have oddly random choral exhibitions? Like, a service in which all the speakers talk about the covenants of the sacrament, but then we get a bunch of youth singing some modern fluff song with random scriptural quotes about bringing one soul to God? I mean, really.

Not quite as wonderful anymore

You know, i’m sure i can’t be the only one who misses the counterpoint Wonderful!s in the old (i.e., pre-1985 hymnal) version of “I Stand All Amazed”.

It makes special musical numbers bearable (almost)

Ever look at all the kids standing up in front of the congregation when the primary children sing and play “Guess which two of them have hit their adolescent growth spurts already?”

Fitting songs

Today for Mothers Day my ward didn’t sing “Love at Home”. Clearly, our bishop is now to the point of attempting outright heresy in order to get released.

p.s. Seriously, though, do we have a more grating song in our hymnal? It wouldn’t be so bad, i suppose, except that the musical setting lends itself to absolutely horrific congregational glissandos on the “love at home, love at home” lines. Maybe if we sang it as it was actually written it would be better—but i’m not entirely convinced of that.

Proper citations

So speaking of “If You Could Hie to Kolob”, i’ve been in sacrament meetings a few times now where we’ve been told that ward member X was going to play a solo instrumental rendition of that song.

Really? Wouldn’t it have been more accurate to say that she (and it’s always been a she, for whatever reason) was going to play Ralph Vaughan Williams’s arrangement of the Christmas carol “Dives and Lazarus”? I mean, it seems a bit presumptuous of us to claim Williams’s work as our own, as if putting our most space-doctrinish hymn to that piece of music meant we were the only ones that happened to recognize its existence and use it.

And who hies anymore, anyway?

So yesterday my ward sang “If You Could Hie to Kolob”.* It brought to mind something one of my missionary companions once mentioned when i was a full-time missionary in Germany. He said (paraphrasing from time-hazed but still strong memory)

You know, i hope they don’t ever translate “If You Could Hie to Kolob” into German—if they did, half the German LDS would leave the church. [pause] Well, and the other half would sing it every Sunday!

(It’s probably only amusing if you’ve spent much time around Mormons in Germany, but for those of us who have…)

Anyway, i haven’t gone through the 1996 Gesangbuch (the German hymnal) page by page to check on this (and they didn’t provide an index of authors, like they did in the English version), so i may be wrong, but as far as i can tell from a quick scan, a translation of the song isn’t to be found in there—so my companion’s prediction will have to wait a few more decades for testing, i suppose.

* Yes, my two oldest spontaneously sang “there is no end to this song” along with me in place of “there is no end to being” in the final verse. I feel that i can rest easy in the sure knowledge that i have raised them well.

What if most of us can’t sing all that well?

So musical numbers in sacrament meetings are supposed to be of the highest quality possible, and then we encourage everyone to participate in ward choirs. Doesn’t anyone else see a looming contradiction here?

That’s not the way it works

“Let Us All Press on in the work of the Lord,” goes the song, “that when life is o’er we may gain a reward”.

Um, no. Deity is not a vending machine. You don’t gain a reward ’cause you worked hard, you gain a reward because the grace of God is sufficient for your salvation. Sorry about that.

Another awkward song

“Sweet Is the Peace the Gospel Brings” is one of the more awkward musical settings for a song in our hymnal, and the whole problem actually comes from a single small flaw—it’s entirely the fault of the second and third notes in each verse. Throwing things like “is the”, “laws and”, and “we who” into eighth notes while everything else in in quarters (plus extended time for the end of each line)? No, not good at all.