No, this isn’t a new decision for me, I’ve been following Jesus for sometime now, but my arrangement of the HYMN “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus,” is becoming a track consideration for my new record.
As a worship leader I’ve always felt that we need to make an intense effort to keep great hymns of the Faith in front of new generations. At the same time, new arrangements of these hymns can make or break such efforts. Arrangers constantly, myself included, attempt re-contextualize hymn texts by placing it in a modern pop song form. Sometimes this works great, other times this turns out really, really, bad.
I’ve realized basic structure of the traditional church hymn’s harmonic motion happens on every beat of the melody; meaning usually a chord change per melody note. The modern song however chords change slower under the melody, every bar or every few bars even.
In 2010, I gave a lecture to worship leaders at the ACE Conference on the subject. Below is a brief summary from my notes:*
I) Song FORM –The Hymn
- Basic Structure of a Hymn
- 3 to 4 Stanzas,
- Four major phrases
- Refrains at the end
*Example (Come thou Fount)
- A Quick History Lesson: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
- As a professional baroque musician, J. S. Bach worked for the city, the court and the church and, privately, as a teacher of music and composition.
- The grandfather of music as we know it.
- Cool Cat
- 1723 –Bach harmonized most of his chorales
- While working for the Lutheran church Bach set himself the task of writing a “well-regulated” body of music for performance during church services, which sometimes went on for hours. About 200 church cantatas survive, along with many passions and organ pieces.
- Bach based much of his music on popular hymn tunes of the day, called chorales. Some of these chorale melodies were very ancient, some quite modern.
- Brought us standardized Harmonization and Chord Voicing (look familiar?)
*Example (Ach Gott, Vom Himmel Sied’ Derein)
Now, Compare Chorales example with “Come Thou Fount”
- The Basic Structure of a Worship tune Compare with:
*Example (How Great is our God –Chris Tomlin)
- Its in a Standard pop tune format. Verse 1, , Chorus, Vs2, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, Chorus.
- Can we keep the same melodic structure of a hymn and give it a modern arrangement?
II) CHORD Progression: Concept of Tonal Impression
- Hymns form chords one to two beat
- Worship tunes form chords two beats, per bar, or longer!
- A bar, or a section of song, can be played over one chord, when that harmonization changes, so does the “base chord.”
- Let’s compare the two songs:
- Notice on Come thou fount chords strike with each melodic note chord Progression
- Summary
- Hymn harmonies are vertical
- Worship tune harmonies are linear
- Compare “Come Thou Fount “to “How Great”
- In, “How great is our God”
- Notice the chords happen over two bars
III) Some Practical Arrangement tips:
- Spend at least a few weeks on an arrangement.
- I spend off-time singing the ideas to myself
- Make sure you can sing it,
- Hear it in your head, “outside of the workspace?”
- If you can remember it, then others can too. If you can’t remember it, it is too complex.
- Does the chord progression flow simply?
- When other instruments add in, a sparse “canvas of musical space is easier to play with”
- Is the original melody clearly recognizable?
- If you added a new part and/or lyrics to the song, are the lyrics in context with the hymn? not just added “hallelujahs…”
*note: due to copyrights, you can refer to the above musical examples from the Hymn books, or other databases that archive such manuscripts.
