Church Music

Since beginning to write the Church Music column about eight years ago, I have enjoyed support to range widely from editors Jane Hines and now Janet Hilley. This latitude has been challenging and spiritually rewarding for me and, apparently, for readers who from time to write me c/o the VOICE.

After a recent column on "Amazing Grace" composer John Newton I feel called to return to our Presbyterian Hymnal for a series of columns. Some of you may recall my former writings on Catherine Winkworth, an avid translator whose name is seen more often than any other in the hymnal index of composers, arrangers, and sources. Isaac Watts was a particularly fascinating story, as well, having gone by invitation to visit a friend for the weekend and stayed for 30 years, during which he did much writing.

To inaugurate a series on hymnal contributors I chose the life and work of English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

Ralph (pronounced "Rafe") Vaughan Williams composed, arranged or provided new music for 18 selections that are included in the 1990 (blue) Presbyterian Hymnal. He was a respected and influential English composer. Recurring influences on his compositions included English folk songs, Anglican Church music, and visionary religious literature.

The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society publishes a periodical of scholarly articles on his work. Members say he was arguably the greatest English composer. His ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey alongside England's greatest artists and poets, so there is likely some truth to the allegation.

He came to my attention for his arrangement of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" based on an old English folk melody. Our hymnal features two versions, and though both are in 4/4 time and feature the B-flat, his is more in the style of simple folk song, lacking the extensive sharps and natural-sharp notes of the more formally constructed traditional music

"For All The Saints" and "Come Down, O Love Divine" are two of his more celebrated hymn compositions. For the latter he adapted a translation of 500-year-old text to a folk melody called Down Ampney, coincidentally named for the village in the Cotswolds of the English countryside where he was born.

Vaughan Williams (today his compound last name would have been hyphenated) rounded out a top flight musical education by studying composition with Maurice Ravel in 1908, after which he composed in a remarkable number of long forms including symphonies, Masses, operas, chamber music, film scores, and one piece he answered a critic by promising to re-arrange for four tubas and a banjo. He also taught at the Royal Academy of Music.

Ralph Vaughan Williams had a wonderfully off-beat sense of humor.

One expects a hymnist to be pious, perhaps fervent, but at least a firm believer. A relative of Charles Darwin, he described himself as an agnostic and a freethinking humanist. And yet, Vaughan Williams was musical editor for the English Hymnal in its 1909 original and all subsequent editions until his death in 1958.

For the 1952 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Vaughan Williams was commissioned to compose an original piece for the Queen's communion.

For a man who eschewed the mystical elements of Christian faith, he composed and edited a lot of widely used religious music during his career, including The Oxford Book of Carols, and Songs of Praise. There was a ballet entitled "Job," plus one opera and two symphonies on William Blake's visionary book The Pilgrim's Progress.

But all this seems to have begun with his original commission in 1904 to be musical editor of the English Hymnal. It was an assignment he didn't seek and wasn't sure he wanted. He was offered a trifling honorarium for what he was promised would be at most two months' effort.

His patrons underestimated the job. It took two years.

In searching for the story of his association with the English Hymnal, I happened upon a snippit of a BBC Radio recording from near the end of the man's life in the 1950s. In it Vaughan Williams recounted with wicked dry wit how it came to be, more than 100 years ago.

As you read imagine the thick, quirky professorial cant of an elderly English gentleman reared in the Victorian Age. Imagine him with tousled white hair, a heavy chain stitch sweater, a cat in his lap and a twinkle in his eye.

"It must have been in Nineteen Hundred and Four that I was sitting in my study in Barton Street, Westminster, when a hansom drew up to the door — this was before the day of taxis — and a Mr. Deermuth was announced."

"I just knew his name vaguely, as a parson who invited tramps to sleep in his drawing room, and I wondered if he were going to ask me to do the same."

"But he had not come to me about tramps, and he went straight to the point and asked me to edit the musical hymn book."

"I protested that I knew very little about hymns: you see, I had been an organist."

That wicked dig at Anglican Church musicians flew right over the parson's head.

"He said, all the same, that my name had been recommended to him."

And the rest, as they say, is history.