Ah, Blackhawk, welcome to the world of traditional hymnody! In traditional hymns, the “hymn” is the text, the words. The “tune” is the melody. The two, traditionally, are rather seperate beasts, floating somewhat indepentantly. The tunes have their own titles which have nothing to do with the hymns sung to them. The tunes have their own index, usually called Index of Tune Names, at the back of hymnals.
Hymnals also have a Metrical Index. Each tune, and each hymn (set of words), has a meter, the number of syllables per line and number of lines. So a choir director, when picking out what the choir will sing at a particular service, would pick a hymn, then see what meter that text is by checking the Metrical Index, then pick a tune with the same meter. Therefore, the same text could theoretically be sung with any of the tunes sharing the same meter. The most common meter is abbreviated “CM” in hymals.
So, Amazing Grace, for example, might be listed:
Amazing Grace NEW BRITAIN CM
where Amazing Grace is the text, New Britain is the tune, and CM is the meter. There are dozens of other CM tunes in many hymnals and Amazing Grace could be sung to any of them. Following 911 the choir of the USMC sung Amazing Grace to a melody other than the usual New Britain (I can’t remember which).
Anyhow you may be surprised to discover that Amazing Grace, though widely heard, actually appears if fewer hymnals than many another hymn. I did a year of research into hymns while writing a book of hymn tune arrangements for the Highland pipes, in which I gathered the hymnals of every major (and many minor) US Christian faiths convering around 97% of US Christians. Amazing Grace shows up is about half.
The most widespread tune (remember, I was researching tunes, not texts) was Hyfrydol, which occurs in every hymnal I collected.
Sung to this tune are:
Alleluia Sing To Jesus
Love Divine All Loves Excelling
Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus
Our Great Savior
Jesus What A Friend For Sinners
In Humility Our Savior
God The Spirit Guide And Guardian
I Will Sing Of My Redeemer
Call Jehovah Your Salvation
Praise The Lord Ye Heavens Adore Him
Holy Ghost Dispel Our Sadness
I Will Sing The Wondrous Story
Thou Whose Purpose Is To Kindle
Other tunes which have a large number of hymns sung to them are:
Saint Agnes
Nettleton
Azmon
Kingsfold
Hymn Of Joy
Wareham
Ellacombe
Forest Green
Saint Thomas
Regent Square
Beach Spring
Finlandia
Duke Street
Lasst Uns Erfreuen
Saint Peter
Which, between them, have several hundred hymns sung to them, often ten to fifteen each.
By the way, the tune of Morning Has Broken is called Bunessan, to which also is sung:
Baptized In Water
This Day God Gives Me
Child In The Manger
Praise And Thanksgiving
Love Is The Sunlight
While the tune to Be Thou My Vision is called Slane, to which is also sung:
Lord Of All Hopefullness
Lord Of Creation
Bridegroom And Bride
People who only know the texts used in their particular denomination will use titles perhaps unknown to people in a different denomination, therefore organists, choir directors, etc will often use the tune names to avoid confusion.
Wow … that’s a great post, pancelticpiper! Lots of information … some I knew, most I didn’t. Thanks!
Yes that is from the hymnal of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The hymnal (minus copyrighted songs) is available online at:
http://www.lds.org/cm/catalogsearchalpha/1,17929,4782-1-1,00.html
The song itself is at:
The cool thing about this online hymnal is that you can transpose the song to whatever key you want and print it out. It will even play it for you. There are MP3’s there as well.
Enjoy.
I would suggest two other Instrumental pieces I like to play if I perform in church services :
Planxty Irwin and St.Patrick’s Cathedral
Slow airs should fit as well I think.
Julian
That’s a beautiful song, IdaWhoa. Thanks for the link.
Wow, great post!! Man, what a wealth of knowledge you have of this subject! Thanks for sharing, Piper!
Thank you!
This is an old Scots-Irish carol that we used to sing at Christmas. It’s in old Presbyterian hymnals from Appalachia. I’ve been told that someone has done a modern adaptation.
Gorgeous melody --would be a great slow air.
Which one are you referring to?
What about Mack Hoover’s Whistle and Squeak?
http://www.geocities.com/whistleandsqueak/
When I first started I always picked tunes from there.
Now I have enough whistles and a modicum of experience and play pretty much everything that our hymnals throw at us each Sunday.
Let me suggest The Iona Abbey Music Book - Songs from the Iona Abbey Worship Book(Wild Goose Publications) uses a lot of traditional Irish tunes (and some new ones) with some great lyrics on faith, justice, etc.
Others have shared their list - here are just a few of the many that I think are cool on the whistle
As the Deer
Canticle of the Turning
Holy Ground
Jesus, Name above all Names
Seek Ye First
The Summons
We are Called.
Ancient of Days
Be Thou My Vision
Beautiful Savior
Amazing Grace
Blessed Assurance
Great is Thy Faithfulness
Healer of my Heart
Make me a Servant
More Precious than Silver
O the Deep, Deep, Love of Jesus
There is a Redeemer
The Lamb
What a Friend We Have in Jesus
You are my All in All
You Have Come Down to the Lakeshore
and many, many, more!
Blessings
Pastor Keith
Actually that’s Mark Bell’s site, I believe, although Mack’s name is mentioned there.
My bad - apologies to Mark - it has been a long day.
pastorkeith
Are you familiar with Robin Mark? http://www.robinmark.com/
He’s a worship leader in Belfast who has several cd’s out. I particularly enjoy “Come Heal this Land”, “Revival in Belfast” and “Revival in Belfast 2”. There are some traditional instruments used in the songs (whistles, fiddles, pipes and such) and a few strictly instrumental tracks that are pretty decent. One interesting track, for example - uses the Leitrim Fancy Jig (played as a reel) for a musical interlude.
We play songs from his CD’s pretty frequently at the church I attend. I’ve heard several other versions of the songs he plays, but I have to say that I’ve enjoyed listening to his version the most. Anyway, I enjoy most of his arrangements so I would recommend taking a look.
~Steffi
That was a great post pancelticpiper with good info - thank you. Would you be prepared to share your “list” of tunes for GHB of hymns. I know it is not strictly whistle related so a pm is always good. I did a similar look with my limited resources a while back (only for a couple days - not anywhere near a year) and would be interested in what you found.
Ian
Really, church hymnals are a great soure for whistle music, much of which IS of Celtic origin. One thing that may help in this, and to whistlers in general who like to play with written scores, it Notepad by Fanale (perhaps I didn’t spell that right).
Notepad is free, and lets you key in scores, and then transpose them at will. It is a somewhat large program and take a bit of space on a hard drive if you have limited space.
If the tune is in E flat, no problem. Key it in as is, and transpose it to D. And if D doesn’t seem to work right, then try it in G. And then, you might just try to transpose some sections up or down an octave to make things work better on the whistle.
AND . . . you can print the thing out, and it looks good. (Oh, yes, I will also play back the music over speakers after entry–a good check to see if you keyed it in right). Notepad is free (or at least it was last year) and it is a partial program that is designed to hook you to buy a more expensive program. It’s major drawback is that if you would like to key in lyrics, you can only key in one verse. Since I wanted for other purposes (mainly adaptining hymns for the guitar), I wanted all the verses, so I sprung to buy the upgrade.
But, for whistlers, I don’t see anything that Notepad lacks. And it will help getting church music for whistle.
I’ll second that “Revival In Belfast” recommendation. That’s a great CD. A local church does a service about once a year where all the music is from that CD, and I’m brought in to play uilleann pipes and whistles.
About my book of GHB arrangements, I was very systematic about the tunes. There are a lot of books of hymns arranged for pipes, but they are always written by someone in one narrow denomination and use the hymn (text) name, so that the titles are often unfamiliar to people of other denominations even though the tunes themselves might be quite familiar to them. Another problem these books suffer it that they feature “favourite” hymns. Well, what’s a favourite in one church might not be in another, even in the same denomination. And the favourites vary tremendously from denomination to denomination as well.
For a piper (uilleann or highland) playing at a wedding, church service, or funeral, the text is irrelevant, as it’s the tune only that you’re playing. So, I gathered all the hymnals, looked in the indices of “tunes by tune names”, and found which were the most widespread TUNES. I then arranged the most widespread 150 TUNES (to which at least 700 different hymns are sung). As I said above, the most widespread tune is Hyfrydol. I’ve not encountered a hymnal that didn’t have that tune. I have several that don’t have Amazing Grace, Old Rugged Cross, or other supposed favourites.
i ran across finale before i ran across the whistle. www.finalemusic.com. it’s still free. there is a version of finale that costs money that allows you to scan a piece of sheet music into your computer and finale will recognize it and then you can transpose and do all kinds of things with it. i’ve not seen this work in person but i have had folks who have done this say it works.
I’ve been playing with “Jesus Like a Shepherd Lead Us.” Especially good when played on a lower whistle, like a Bb.
Thanks very much for posting that!
There are some unique ideas on these Celtic Christian CDs for spiritual music:
On that second disc is the melody to She Moved Through the Fair played on a low whistle with some reading Rev. 5:6-14 over it. Really different. And haunting.
My pleasure. I see that you’ve joined up. Cool!
There are some unique ideas on these Celtic Christian CDs for spiritual music:
On that second disc is the melody to She Moved Through the Fair played on a low whistle with some reading Rev. 5:6-14 over it. Really different. And haunting.
I love those CDs! I wish they’d come out with more of the same kind of thing.