each foot containing the same number of syllables as the corresponding feet in other verses. While meter and emotional expression are essential to poetry, the meter must always be subordinate to the emotion. To inquire into the emotional fitness of certain meters among our hymns would lead us too far afield. Let one illustration suffice to mark the principle—the appropriateness of the more active threebeat rhythm to joyous themes. There are but few poems in the Hymnal using the three-beat rhythm. The twenty hymns whose meter is composed of the various combinations of 6s and 4s are all reducible to triple rhythm, such as "America" and "More love to thee, O Christ." About one third of the remaining hymns of this rhythm are to be found in the group of hymns expressing the joy of Christmas time, as "There's a song in the air," which sustains the triple beat throughout; "In the field with their flocks abiding"; and "Silent Night," which bears only a gentle suggestion of this rhythm. Nearly all of the other triple-beat hymns in the Hymnal express a joyous theme in this joyous rhythm, as "O how happy are they," "True-hearted, whole-hearted," "Lift your glad voices," "Come, let us anew our journey pursue," "O Thou, in whose presence my soul takes delight." Thus emotion and rhythm conspire to make beautiful the poetry of our Hymnal. CHAPTER VIII THE STORY OF THE TUNES AND THEIR EARLY MUSICAL HISTORY-CONTINENTAL COMPOSERS-BRITISH COMPOSERS-AMERICAN COMPOSERS-NEW TUNESRELATION OF SOME HYMN TUNES TO LARGER FORMS. THE story of the hymn tunes has not been told so fully as the story of the hymns, save as it has appeared incidental to the general history of music. Hymnology has called forth hundreds of volumes to tell its story, while the history of the tunes can claim but comparatively few. Nor is this to be marveled at, when it is considered that hymn-writing is ancient, but music and, consequently, hymn-tune writing in its developed form make distinctly a modern art. During many centuries in Europe the history of music was simply the history of church music. This was largely true also of early American music, which made its first progress through anthems and hymn tunes, just as our earliest government itself followed ecclesiastical principles. The Methodist Hymnal contains melodies from nearly every important period and school of hymn-tune writing, as we shall see in the illustrations that follow. Pope Gregory (A. D. 590) placed the imprint of his genius upon the crude musical system of his day by adding new scales or modes to those that had already been devised by Saint Ambrose, and by reducing the whole to a more logical system. As a result, the Gregorian tones have ever since been the foundation of the Roman Catholic Church music. Of this ancient Gregorian plain-song the Methodist Hymnal contains little else besides a chant drawn from one of the Gregorian tones, "Nunc Dimittis" (733) and a hymn tune "Olmutz" (227), arranged from the Gregorian by Lowell Mason. The old Latin melody (477), based upon five adjacent tones, was probably derived from the Gregorian music. These melodies, now clothed in modern harmony and rounded with a modern cadence, were originally sung only in unison, like all the music of this early homophonic era. The popular idea that the melody "Crusader's Hymn" belongs to this period is incorrect. By the innovations of Hucbald in the tenth century, and Guido of Arezzo a century later, both of them pious monks, sacred words came to be sung upon two notes at the same time, instead of only one as before, and from this the harmony developed through successive centuries into an elaborate polyphony (πoλú + pāvos, having "many tones"), until it was simplified and perfected by the genius of Palestrina (1524-94). The Palestrina mass is still the model of beauty in the worship of the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world. Until the Reformation, church music was entirely in the hands of the clergy and their trained musicians. It was left to Martin Luther, assisted by the musician Walther, to bring worship song to the people themselves by means of the German chorale, simple in |