"O Little Town of Bethlehem"

Shortly after I recorded "St. Louis" on recorders earlier this year, I was thinking about "O Little Town of Bethlehem," the text that's sung to it.  The first verse ends with the lines "The hopes and fears of all the years / Are met in thee tonight," sung to these phrases:

The pitches to which the phrase "all the years" is sung span nearly an octave (C Bb D).  Because of this breadth and because these are three different pitches, there's a sense of the entirety of that "all."

On a smaller scale, this feature is also present with the phrase "all the earth" (A G F) at the end of the second verse:  "And praises sing to God the king / And peace to all the earth!"

"St. Louis"

This tune is #361 in The Lutheran Service Book, #60 in Lutheran Worship, and #647 in The Lutheran Hymnal.  (That's the order of the arrangements in my recording.)  I had to transpose the TLH version from G major to F major to match the LSB and LW versions.

"O Little Town of Bethlehem"

I follow Roger McGuinn's Folk Den, a series of monthly recordings of folk songs.  For December, McGuinn recorded "O Little Town of Bethlehem," and while I'm not sure it's technically a folk song, I noticed a small thing to write about.

McGuinn's version is slightly different from what I'm used to (he uses the second half of the first verse as a refrain), but - as in The Lutheran Service Book - the second verse begins with the lines

For Christ is born of Mary,
And, gathered all above
While mortals sleep, the angels keep
Their watch of wond'ring love.

That second line is sung to this musical phrase (according to LSB, the tune is "St. Louis"):

There's a rather large interval between the two syllables of "above."  It spans a sixth, from C to A.  This alone gives a musical sense of "above," but so does the fact that that A note is the highest note in this phrase.

A very minor point: in the fourth verse, the line "Descend to us, we pray" is sung to this same musical phrase, so there's a very slight descent in the notes to which "descend" is sung (just a whole step: G to F).

While looking over the hymn in order to write this post, I found a second small thing to write about.  The second half of the second verse is

O morning stars, together
Proclaim the holy birth,
And praises sing to God the king
And peace to all the earth!

The last line is sung to this phrase:

The stars' "sing[ing]... peace to all the earth" is sung to a descending phrase, so there's a musical sense of the stars' "sing[ing]" down to earth.