"All Glory Be to God on High"

After my first post on "All Glory Be to God on High," I lookt at the hymn again and found an-other small feature to write about.  Both of those posts are about the version in The Lutheran Service Book.  I also lookt at the version in Lutheran Worship and discovered that it's a different translation (by Gilbert E. Doan) with slightly different connections between the music and the text.  (I waited to write this post so I didn't have so many on the same hymn so close together.)

The hymn is sung to the tune "Allein Gott in der Höh'."  All of the features I noticed are in either the second or fourth musical phrase, which are identical:

The second line of the first verse is "And thanks to him forever!" and the fourth line of the second verse is "We give you thanks forever."  For both of these, "forever" is sung with a melisma (A G F# G), musically giving a sense of duration.

The fourth line of the third verse (describing Jesus) is "And source of all true pleasure."  "All" and "pleasure" are sung with melismas (C B and G F# G, respectively), musically giving a sense of entirety.

"All Glory Be to God on High"

I wrote about "All Glory Be to God on High" last month, but when I lookt over the hymn again, I found an-other small feature to write about.

In the second verse, there are the lines "O Father, for Your rule is true / And just and changes never."  The second of those lines is sung to this phrase from the tune "Allein Gott in der Höh'":

"Changes" is sung with a melisma (Bb A G), so while it's negated, there's a musical sense of its meaning.

"All Glory Be to God on High"

One of the hymns in Worship Anew's 2,000th program a little over a year ago was "All Glory Be to God on High."  Only one verse was sung, but between listening to that and then looking at the hymn myself, I found a handful of things to write about.

The second line of the first verse is "And thanks for all His favor," sung to this phrase from the tune "Allein Gott in der Höh'."

Both "all" and "favor" are sung with melismas (Bb A and F E F respectively), musically giving a sense of amount.

In the second verse, the text here is "We give You thanks forever."  This is the first of three "forever"s in the hymn that are sung with a melisma to give a sense of duration.  Coincidentally, they're all sung to the notes G F E F.

The second melisma'd "forever" is in the lines "No harm can touch or terrify / A child of God forever" in the first verse.  The second of those two lines is sung to the same musical phrase as above (the second musical phrase is repeated as the fourth musical phrase).

The third is in the last line of the fourth verse (also the last line of the hymn):  "To this we hold forever" (the "this" is that Christ's "death upon a tree / Has rescued us from misery"), sung to this phrase:

In the second verse, the text here is "Lord, grant us ev'ry blessing!" and "blessing" is sung with a melisma (F E F), giving a sense of amount.