What's the Meter with You?
By: Rob Lynch, Director of Traditional Music
With the recent technical difficulties of our projectors in the sanctuary, the 11 o’clock churchgoers have returned to a simpler time of picking up our hymnals and singing from the book. Perhaps during this time, you’ve taken a glance at the bottom of the page and wondered what’s hiding in all of that fine print. Take, for example, hymn number 117, O God, Our Help in Ages Past. Beneath the music, you’ll notice:
WORDS: Isaac Watts, 1779 (Ps. 90)
MUSIC: attr. to William Croft, 1708; harm. by W. H. Monk, 1861
ST. ANNE
CM
The words and music attributions tell us, first, who wrote the hymn (the word “hymn” refers to the poem-text, not the accompanying music, but we’ll get to that in a moment). MUSIC gives credit to the hymn tune writer, in this case, William Croft. "Harm." (short for harmonization) tells us who wrote the accompaniment to the melody. William Henry Monk, who composed the hymn tunes for Abide with Me (#700) and All Things Bright and Beautiful (#147), wrote all the notes you’d hear played on the piano or sung by a choir on Sunday morning.
In all caps, you'll see the name of the "hymn tune," and CM, short for Common Meter, is the meter of the tune. Meter is defined as the pattern of syllables in each line of a hymn text. The most common meters (no pun intended) are:
Common Meter (CM) – 8.6.8.6 (#57 O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing)
Long Meter (LM) – 8.8.8.8 (#298 When I Survey the Wondrous Cross)
Short Meter (SM) – 6.6.8.6 (#732 Come, We That Love the Lord)
The numbers correspond with the number of syllables in each line of poetry we sing. From the example above, we can see that O God, Our Help in Ages Past is in Common Meter—just like another favorite from this past weekend, Amazing Grace:
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound (8)
That saved a wretch like me! (6)
I once was lost, but now am found; (8)
Was blind, but now I see. (6)
What can you do with this? All kinds of things! You could sing the text of any hymn in a given meter to the tune of another hymn with the same meter. Try singing the words of Amazing Grace to the tune of O God, Our Help in Ages Past. Or vice versa. In the back of our hymnals, you can find a Metrical Index of Hymns that organizes the entire hymnal by meter, allowing you to swap and change any like-metered hymn tunes with another. This is especially helpful when planning worship if there’s a text that is just perfect for the readings of the day, but it’s set to an unfamiliar tune. We can still worship with that hymn text and set it to a tune we’ve sung before. Likewise, you can take a familiar text and set it to a new tune, breathing new life into a beloved hymn. Keep your eyes and ears peeled, this just might happen over the next few weeks!