In March, I started working through Georg Phillip Telemann's Fast allgemeines Evangelisch-Musicalisches Lieder-Buch, a collection of some four hundred hymn tunes (more details here). A few months ago, I learned his arrangement of "Allein Gott in der Höh'." Although the text that was originally paired with this tune is "All Glory Be to God on High" (LSB #947), I found myself thinking about "Across the Sky the Shades of Night" (LSB #899), which is sung to the same tune, and I noticed a small feature.
Here's the first phrase:
The first line is, of course, "Across the sky the shades of night." The phrase "across the sky" is sung to a group of notes that spans a fifth (G to D), and this musical distance provides a sense of the breadth of that "across." That each note is a different pitch furthers this sense.
