Hymns Alive! Meter

By Dr. Craig Westendorf, Director of Music

All modern hymnals contain a host of historical information.  When we have direct reproductions from Evangelical Lutheran Worship in the service bulletin, the author and composer are listed, often with the first date of publication.  The topic for this week is the encyclopedic listing of meters found in any English language hymnal.

If you go to the rear of the hymnal, you will find at the very end a listing of first lines of hymns.  You are probably most familiar with this index when you are finding a beloved hymn or carol.  As you move forward from this index, the next one will be the Metrical Index of Tunes.  Suddenly you are confronted with a whole new vocabulary, like Common Meter, Long Meter, Common Meter Doubled, and so on.  This is nothing too mysterious, as all these patterns refer to how many lines each verse has, and how many syllables are in each successive line.  Common Meter means there are four lines alternating in patterns of 8 syllables, 6 syllables, 8 syllables, and 6 syllables.  All of these terms arose in England, when the church under Edward VI established a nationally mandated English liturgy.  Hymns and Psalms fell into the most used patterns of both of Classic and English poetry.  Two centuries later, Charles Wesley would expand this stock of poetic patterns by adapting the form of popular ballads.  The opening hymn on July 11, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, is a great example not only of Charles Wesley’s poetic and scriptural imagination, but a prime example of how the Methodists wanted to reach a larger population, using a very secular 8787 poetic structure.

German hymnody of the Reformation began with an entirely different aesthetic outlook—more later!