"Come, Ye Thankful People, Come"

I've written about small features in "Come, Ye Thankful People, Come" twice before, but I found an-other one when I was looking at the hymn a couple months ago.  The third verse begins with the lines "For the Lord, our God, shall come / And shall take His harvest home, / From His field shall in that day / All offenses purge away."  The third and fourth lines are sung to these musical phrases from the tune "St. George's, Windsor":

The phrase "all offenses" is sung to notes of all different pitches (spanning a fifth:  A B C F), providing a sense of this entirety.  Since one of these notes is an accidental (a B natural in F major), there's an even greater sense of totality or, alternatively, a sense of the meaning of "offenses."

"Come, Ye Thankful People, Come"

In his sermon on Worship Anew a couple weeks ago, Pastor Jonker alluded to Mark 4:28:  "'The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.'"  The day after I watched the program, I was thinking about "Come, Ye Thankful People, Come," in which Mark 4:28 is paraphrased in the second verse:  "First the blade and then the ear, / Then the full corn shall appear."  These lines are sung to these musical phrases from the tune "St. George's, Windsor":

I realized that because the melody generally ascends, there's a musical representation of the plant's growth.

"St. George's, Windsor"

In both The Lutheran Hymnal and The Lutheran Service Book, every instance of this tune has the same arrangement (the two hymnals have different arrangements, though), but there are two different arrangements in Lutheran Worship (#88 and #495).  Also, it occurred to me that I should record the arrangements in reverse chronological order so that the arrangement from TLH comes last and I can go straight from that into the accompanying Amen cadence.

This is LSB #394, LW #88, LW #495, TLH #134.  I should note that in TLH, the tune is called just "St. George," not "St. George's, Windsor."

"Come, Ye Thankful People, Come"

Back in May last year, one of the hymns on Worship Anew (for the Sixth Sunday after Easter) was "Come, Ye Thankful People Come."  I noticed a small feature about it.

The hymn is sung to the tune "St. George's, Windsor."  Here's the last phrase:

The first verse ends with the line "Raise the song of harvest home," and the fourth verse (and the hymn as a whole) ends with the line "Raise the glorious harvest home."  For both of these, "home" is sung to the tonic note (F), and since the tonic note is the musical "home" of the tune, there's a musical representation of those "home"s.

"St. George's, Windsor"

I recently wrote about a feature that "Songs of Thankfulness and Praise" has when sung to "St. George's, Windsor," so I thought I should record that for this week's tune.  As usual, it's one verse of the Lutheran Worship arrangement (#88) and one verse of the Lutheran Service Book arrangement (#394), although I think they're the same except for the last two lines.

"Songs of Thankfulness and Praise"

Earlier this week, I transcribed "Songs of Thankfulness and Praise" (I'm a lot further along in transcribing the hymns than I am in writing about their Biblical referents), and I noticed something about the second line:

The end of the line "Jesus, Lord, to Thee we raise" ascends (when sung to the tune "St. George's, Windsor," at least), so there's a musical representation of the (metaphorical) "rais[ing]."

Those first two lines are inverted so that the direct objects ("Songs of thankfulness and praise") actually come first.  The musical representation of raising becomes even more interesting because what is being raised are "songs," like the hymn itself.  It's a bit self-referential; with an ascending melody, the hymn describes raising songs.