Known as ‘the Poet of Methodism’, Wesley completed more than 5,000 examples and almost single-handedly raised the profile of the hymn in England, and eventually, worldwide. Just as Northern Germany had Martin Luther to clearly define its hymnody as a congregational practice, so England had Charles Wesley to spark a new revival. With a single song and its text in mind the congregation becomes as one. Everybody present is intimately involved with the performance. The thread that binds these forms and styles, straddling thousands of years, whether performed by a solo celebrant, voice and guitar, Lutheran choir or an electric band, is the congregational nature of the hymn. The hymn continues to avoid absolute pigeon-holing, even in the last century, by taking on different guises-from negro spirituals and Gospel choirs to so-called ‘charismatic’ songs and the contemporary rock-based sound. The hymn has therefore known an ever-changing myriad of music and textual sources from simple church chants (plainsong) through polyphonic settings and Lutheran chorales to the great English Wesleyan revival. In terms of hymns as we now regard them, the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican and Methodist churches have each enriched the tradition by contributing a mass of texts, melodies and arrangements. In the Old Testament, King David organized the singers and musicians in the Temple to ‘sing and play joyful music’, while in the New Testament St Mark tells us that Jesus Christ and his disciples sang together at the last supper before going out into the night.
Songs and hymns of praise that explicitly employ words or ideas from what we now know as Biblical sources date back well over two millennia to the Hebrews and early Christians.
Akhenaten’s Great Hymn to the Ahten from around 1400 BC is one of the few surviving examples from ancient Egypt, while the Greeks are well known to have propitiated the Gods and honoured heroes with hymns, dance, libation and sacrifice. The Hindu Vedas, a huge collection of religious texts, contain thousands of mantras and hymns praising a pantheon of gods. The earliest known individual who may be called an author, Enheduana, was writing hymns around 2300 BC. The modern hymn text can boast a lineage that harks back to some of humanity’s most ancient surviving documents. Hymns have been around in one form or another for as long as people have gathered together in a formal manner to worship, praise, marry or mourn.
0 kommentar(er)
