Hymn

I

Introduction

Hymn, song with a text usually praising a deity or expressing thoughts of religious meditation or worship. The earliest hymns for which the music has been preserved are two Greek hymns to Apollo discovered at Delphi and dating from the 2nd century bc. Other ancient civilizations left records of hymn singing (but not the music itself), including Assyria, China, Egypt, and India.

II

Origins

Hymn singing within the Western religions, Judaism and Christianity, dates from at least the time of the biblical Book of Psalms, the Hebrew name for which, Tehillim, means “Praise Songs.” The Eastern Christian churches at Antioch and Constantinople (present-day İstanbul) were the centers of the hymn-writing movement in the early church. The first collection of Christian hymn texts, the Gnostic Psalter, contained paraphrases of the Psalms. The success of this work led the Syrian monk St. Ephrem of Edessa to write hymns in Syriac in order to spread the Christian faith.

In the 3rd and 4th centuries ad, hymn texts were written in Greek by such writers as Methodius, the bishop of Olympus; Synesius, the bishop of Ptolemaïs in Cyrenaica; and the Eastern Church prelate St. Gregory of Nazianzus. The music to which these hymns were sung was chant. Only a few ancient Christian chant melodies survive, the earliest dating from about ad300.

III

Early Christian Hymns

The first writer of Christian hymns in Latin was the 4th-century French prelate St. Hilary. Soon after his death, the prelate Saint Ambrose and others established the regular use of hymns and psalms in the Western Christian liturgy. Ambrose himself wrote many hymn texts and perhaps some of the dozen chant melodies for them that survive. His hymns and those of succeeding authors and composers were written for use in the Divine Office, liturgical services held at various hours during the day.

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Until the 10th century hymns were rarely sung during the celebration of the Mass. During the 10th century words of praise to God were sometimes added to the long passages of chant that were sung on the word alleluia. The praise texts replaced the prolonged syllable a at the end of the word. The passages of chant and praise text were called sequences, from sequi (Latin, “to follow”), meaning that the hymn immediately followed the word alleluia. The invention of sequences is often attributed to the German monk Notker Balbulus, but they probably existed before his time.

Most composers during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance made polyphonic arrangements of chant hymns. In all cases medieval hymns and sequences were sung by priests and choirs, never by the congregation. It was not until the 16th century that the hymn became a congregational song. This development was one of the reforms introduced by Martin Luther.

IV

Protestant Hymns

A hymn of the German Protestant church is usually called a chorale. The earliest Lutheran chorales were selected from sacred and secular sources (including Gregorian chants) or newly composed by Luther and his colleagues. These clergymen and musicians also selected or wrote the hymn texts, using German rather than Latin. Their goal was to provide worshipers with good, sturdy melodies that untrained singers could perform.

In France, the poet Clement Marot and the theologian and Protestant reformer Theodore Beza translated the Psalms into French metrical verse. The translations were introduced by the French religious reformer John Calvin into his system of worship and were adopted by the Reformed churches in France and Switzerland. The melodies used with these translations were selected or composed by the French musician Louis Bourgeois. Two other 17th-century French musicians, Claude Goudimel and Claude Le Jeune, composed four-voice settings of the Bourgeois melodies.

English translations of the Psalms were published in 1562 by the English writers Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. In 1612 a similar Psalter was published in Holland by the English Separatist clergyman Henry Ainsworth. The Ainsworth Psalter was brought to America by the Pilgrims in 1620.

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