"The Night Will Soon Be Ending"

Since the church year recently started over, I'm starting something new: rather than continue on in my long list of things to write about, I'm going to try to have the hymns I write about in these musicological types of posts correspond to the current season.

A couple months ago, I watched the One LSB Hymn a Week video for "The Night Will Soon Be Ending":

The tune is "Llangloffan."  I found quite a bit to write about, so I'm going to go phrase by phrase.

The first phrase:

The last word in each line sung to this phrase is sung with a melisma.  The third verse begins with "The earth in sure rotation," with "rotation" sung to four syllables rather than the three it's spoken with.  This articulation provides some sense of that movement.

The third phrase:

In the first verse, the line here is "Let songs of praise ascending."  "Ascending" is sung to a rising group of notes, so there's a musical representation of the text.  "Ascending" is even sung with an extra syllable (four rather than three), which emphasizes the effect.

The fourth phrase contains the first of two cross inscriptions in the melody, which could actually been seen with two different groups of notes:

There seems to be only one connection between this cross inscription and the hymn's text.  In the second verse, the line here describes how God "Bears all [that] our sins deserve," and Christ bore our sins on the cross.

The second cross inscription (which is actually the same as the first) is in the eight phrase (the final phrase):

Again, there seems to be only one connection between this inscription and the hymn's text.  The last two lines of the fourth verse are "God comes for our redeeming / From sin's oppressive might."  Christ freed us from sin by taking it upon Himself on the cross.

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At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post about the Biblical sources for "The Night Will Soon Be Ending."   I found a text that I missed, which I knew was bound to happen eventually in this project.  The beginning of the fifth verse is "God dwells with us in darkness / And makes the night as day."  This bears some resemblance to a part of Psalm 139: "11 If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,' 12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you."