Unless stated otherwise, my source for hymn texts and tunes is The Lutheran Service Book.

Friday, April 28, 2017

"O Sacred Head, Now Wounded"

A couple weeks ago (when it was actually still Lent), I transcribed "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" and noticed a small connection between the text and the tune to which it's sung ("Herzlich tut mich verlangen").

The second phrase of the tune descends:


and in the first verse, the text sung to that melody mentions a descent:  the sacred Head is "With grief and shame weighed down."

There are two different versions of "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" in the Lutheran Service Book.  The tune is basically the same, but the rhythms are different.  One (#449) is specified as "isorhythmic" where the other (#450) is "rhythmic."  For the notation above, I used the tune from #450, but the tune for #449 has a comparable feature.