an official national HYMN?

[Vance R. Koven]

At 3:42 PM -0500 11/21/01, Will Linden wrote:
>  In nearly every hymnal I have examined since childhood, "God of Our
>Fathers, whose almighty hand..." (with "trumpet" refrain") is tagged as
>"National Hymn". Do the legislators propose to retroactively "unhappen"
>this?

That "National Hymn," which happens to be the title of the piece, has as
much to do with the official United States as National Cash Register or
Federal Express.

It isn't often on this list that I get to wear my composer's hat, but for
purposes of general edification I can clarify that a "hymn" comprises the
words and "hymn tune" the music (which is why they often have different
titles). A hymn, in the religious usage, is text intended for
congregational singing, whereas an anthem, as Jim Maule intuits, is for the
choir (I won't get into the fine distinctions between Protestant anthems
and Catholic motets, or for that matter the more general question of how it
is then that We The People are the ones who sing the "national anthem").

Moreover, although commonly understood as a religious text, a hymn doesn't
have to be. It can be any poetic text with a "praise" theme (how one
distinguishes it from a paean I don't know). One famous musical work,
Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Hymnen," takes its material exclusively from
national texts and melodies. Charles Ives's work that today is best known
as "Variations on 'America'" was originally titled "Variations etc. on a
National Hymn."

Perhaps the greatest irony of the proposed Congressional designation is
that God Bless America, if it's the song I'm thinking of, as in Kate Smith,
was a show tune written by Irving Berlin, rather unlike anything I would
have considered a hymn (or hymn tune!). The text does, of course, meet the
criteria for a hymn in either the religious or national sense (although it
is America that is being praised, rather than God; perhaps that's too fine
a quibble?).



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