About

In late 2012 while walking down the hallway at university, I heard someone practicing "Savior of the Nations Come" on organ in the chapel.  When I got back to my dorm room, I pulled out my mandolin and figured out the tune by ear, but then I decided that I should learn to play it "properly" while reading the notation.  For the next few years, I recorded a hymn tune every week in order to relearn how to read notation and then to maintain that skill.

I took a break from that for about a year, and in 2016 I restarted the project with an additional component:  looking at hymns and sacred classical music from a musicological perspective.  Originally, I was doing this on tumblr, but that didn't seem to be the best place for such a project.  When the church year started over at the end of 2016, I moved the project here, and I started yet an-other sub-project.  I'd grown curious about the Biblical citations listed for each hymn in The Lutheran Service Book, so I started going through the hymnal hymn by hymn, looking up the Biblical texts and seeing how they informed the hymn text.

About mid-way through 2017, I decided to go through The Lutheran Hymnal and record those hymn tunes (occasionally skipping some) because TLH was before my time and I'm not as familiar with it as I'd like to be.

Here's a schedule of when I post what:

• Sunday: recordings of hymn tunes from TLH
• Monday: musicological commentary on sacred classical music
• Wednesday: breakdown of Biblical texts used in LSB hymns
• Friday: musicological commentary on hymns