Wouldn’t it be fun to take the hymns and improve them according to our needs?
I follow suit since I’m in a minority of one, but I think that there is way too much respect for what’s in print. (Funny considering that at the same time, the same choir has no trouble making changes automatically to make the text more inclusive!)
But my “improvements” are almost never followed, because “we have to say what’s written”, or at least, that seems to be what the rest of the choir thinks. Similarly, if some word is giving us trouble (hard to articulate, at risk of being mistaken for something else embarrassing, a mouthful, awkwardly placed on the notes, or impossible for the people in the pews to understand as we sing it in spite of our best efforts), I often suggest a small variation that would solve the problem.
#The priests christmas songs free#
In my choir, if people have trouble finding room to breathe and stay at the right tempo, the director feels free to make a small change in the music, for example, shorten some notes by a half-beat to give us time to take a breath. They are of such fine stuff that they deserve not to be doctored up and/or given the lets-pretend-gender-doesn’t-exist treatment lest we offend those who go around with a gender chip on their shoulders. These texts are valued facets of our heritage of recent times. It isn’t as if we were expecting people to understand middle English or Anglo-Saxon. Such paste jobs as this practiced on perfectly understandable texts of our heritage are the work of hacks and amateurs (as the above examples do suggest) who have no business fashioning any texts for the use of the worshipping Church gives usĪgain, the editors of Gather, et al., cringed at that cruelly and burdonsomely obsolete ‘descendeth’ and gave us ‘descending’ in its place – again making nonsense of the sentence. They did the same in Stanza 3, in which Moultrie’s trans. This makes sense, but Catholoic versions could not countenance that nasty old archaic ‘descendeth’, so they changed it to ‘descending’ and made nonsense of the sentence. 1, the last half reads in Moultrie’s trans.:
#The priests christmas songs how to#
One does but with difficulty conclude that those responsible are either deficient in how to fashion an English sentence, or that they carelessly paste words together assuming no one will notice that they don’t make sense.Īnother notable example is the well known Hymn from the Liturgy of St James, ‘Let All Mortal Flesh’. Noun – pronoun disagreement is a common feature of reworked texts. Sorry, but this is all I can recall at the moment. Someone with a copy of Evangelical Lutheran Worship handy may wish to check to see whether the revised text now in Gather 3 and Worship 4 was previously used in that hymnal a few years ago. It was felt that placing the preposition “from” before “the earth” introduced a resurrection of the dead or even a “Rapture” theme which is not in Wesley’s “born to raise the sons of earth,” which the editors thought referred instead to the elevation of human nature or the redemption of humankind which Christ’s coming effected. Two or three years ago GIA’s text editors judged that the line from Worship 3 (and subsequent GIA hymnals) - “born to raise us from the earth” (the subject of this enquiry) - departed too much from the text above. From an online source, I see that The Hymnal 1982 and the 1990 Presbyterian Hymnal (and, I am sure, many other hymnals) use the text as it is found in Worship 3.Įarlier versions of the hymn often had this wording: I cannot say where the text in the 1986 Worship 3 is from many of those texts were from the Lutheran Book of Worship or the Hymnal 1982 at times, the editors of Worship 3 made other text alterations of their own. My notes from the meetings of GIA’s text editors who worked on the hymn texts for Gather 3 and Worship 4 are in Orlando, and I’m in Kansas City right now.
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