Hymns! Finally a subject about which I can speak with some authority. I don’t think I’ve written before here about my churchy past, but in fact my very earliest memory is of being in church, while my only memory of looking at words before being able to read them is of trying to follow along with The Baptist Hymn Book. I remember being able to find the hymns by reading the number off the board at the front of the church, but once I’d found them the actual words would make no sense. On second thoughts, is this even plausible? Does a child learn to read numbers—three-digit numbers!—before learning to read words? In any case, I’m pretty sure that one of the reasons I became a precocious reader was so that I could join in the hymn singing without being half a second behind. Not that I think I ever really took in the words; you don’t, with hymns, do you? They’re just strings of eighteenth-century devotional boilerplate for the most part; their purpose is to get you feeling a bit pious while you stretch your legs and belt out a good tune. Mind you, some of the words did have an undeniable camp charm; check out this popular number from my Baptist days (warning: this link will play you the hymn as well as show you the words): “Let angels prostrate fall” indeed! It sounds even funnier when you sing it. This was a much-loved hymn in my church when I was growing up, even though the tune “Diadem” had in fact been excised from the most recent edition of the Baptist Hymn Book, presumably for being too fun to sing (you’ll have to take my word for it; that MIDI file doesn’t really do it justice); church organists and pianists always had a copy taped in at the back of their hymn books, and this was the tune they always played, rather than the officially sanctioned one. (Despite its samizdat status, this is a quintessential “low church”, Baptist-type hymn, with its bouncy melody and its sense of harmonic progression. “High” Anglican hymns tend to be much more sober and static musically, evoking plainchant: think “Once in Royal David’s City” or “All Creatures That On Earth Do Dwell”.)
This business with tunes is one of the interesting formal things about hymns: theoretically, the words and the tunes are completely separate things. The tunes have their own names—like dancehall riddims!—and every hymn book comes with an index of tunes by metre, so that in principle a hymn can be sung to any tune with the correct metre (an example of a hymn metre is 8.6.8.6, aka “Common Metre”, the one familiar from much of Emily Dickinson’s poetry; the numbers refer to the syllables per line). Lots of hymns come listed with two different tunes; some are conventionally sung to a completely different tune located elsewhere in the book that as a musician you are just supposed to know. In fact, when later in life I started playing piano for church services, I often didn’t know which tune was the “right” one, and people ended up having to pick up melodies on the fly when I was playing. Not that anyone ever complained; Christians (or at any rate Baptists) are polite that way.
Anthony says that hymns are the only example he can bring to mind of “music that is not pop cult, that has not been excorporated,” so naturally one looks for exceptions. Firstly, what about classical music, especially twentieth-century classical music? Obviously some of this has been “excorporated” by advertising and the like, but perhaps not, say, the Second Viennese School, or Boulez. As for hymns, well, of course hymns have been part of popular culture in the older sense in which it was thought to be distinct from “mass culture” (the former being a product of “the people”, the second of the “culture industry”; of course there are problems with this distinction but it used to at least seem plausible). One thinks of the annexation of “Abide With Me” by English football fans, or the way that (so I’m told) Methodist hymns used to be fodder for pub singalongs in Wales. There was also the whole nineteenth-century continuum of political radicalism with evangelical revivalism; there’s a reason after all that the likes of “The Internationale” are essentially hymn tunes. This is the tradition Matthew Herbert is drawing on for the track “Hymnformation” from the Doctor Rockit Indoor Fireworks album (although this has a middle eight and a key change so it can’t really be a hymn!); and am I imagining things or hasn’t Billy Bragg done something similar? (Speaking of whom, Billy Bragg’s “Sexuality” must be a candidate for the worst records of all time list!) As for the culture industry, well I’m pretty sure I’ve heard “I Vow to Thee, My Country” in at least one advertising campaign, but then, that tune’s nicked in the first place from Holst’s “Jupiter” (from The Planets).
Anthony also refers to the difference between hymns and Christian pop music. There’s something to be written about how the latter has actually been feeding back into mainstream popular culture of late, especially through the reality pop shows where, in Australia at least, an extraordinary number of the contestants (including the winner of Australian Idol) come from a church background, generally from the big, auditorium-style Pentecostal churches where there is a full backing band and solo performance (with applause!) is a regular part of the service. At my Baptist church there was none of this showbiz, but efforts to appeal to “the youth” did see the replacement of hymns in some services by “choruses,” which were actually not very rock-and-roll at all apart from the fact that they were playable on guitars. It’s hard to describe exactly what they sounded like; the nearest equivalent I can think of is the early 70s Broadway quasi-folk of Godspell or even Hair. In any case, they were absolutely hideous, but partly because they generally used well-known words straight out of the bible, instead of the second-degree theological fustian of trad hymns, they were more suited to the style of worship that lots of “young people” of my acquaintance embraced: intense, emotional and almost at times trance-like. Don’t blame us, we didn’t even have acid house back then!