In , they published Around the World with Christmas. A Christmas Exercise , a kind of Christmas play. A nice story neatly captures something of the character of Kirkpatrick and his world. He would often attend large Methodist meetings, organizing and leading the music. On one occasion he noticed that the soloist he had engaged to lead the hymns was getting into the habit of leaving before the sermon. Kirkpatrick handed the young man his new lyric. James Ramsey Murray, composer of our other tune, also served as an army musician in the Civil War period, studied the art of hymn writing with leading practitioners including the great Lowell Mason, worked in publishing and as a schoolteacher, and wrote a great many hymns.
The residual German associations of this one, surface in his version. In its short career, this little carol has gone through many of the life experiences of many of its older and wiser brethren. It has lost track of some of its parents, has picked up several more and less suitable partners, and spawned a number of offspring and variants. Like folk song, many of its tunes sound like variations of each other, perhaps because the placing of cadence and meter is almost a natural phenomenon, like similarities of word formation across different languages.
Brown, ed. The first lines of the four verses are:. If the number of musical settings is any judge of popularity, "Away In A Manger" must be one of the most popular of all Christmas carols. III, No. Hill gives a thorough analysis of the background of the carol, as known in , including laying to rest any claim that Luther wrote the song.
He lists the 41 musical settings that he was aware of, and discusses in some depth the four most popular settings. Not mentioned in Mr. Hills' article is "Cradle Hymn" by Harold Darke , composed in Although some believe this carol was penned by Martin Luther, German religious reformer and author of a number of beautiful hymns, it is almost certainly of lateth century American origin.
The tune given here is that most used in England, the 'Cradle song' by American Gospel song writer W. Kirkpatrick Another popular tune for it in the U. Murray, The Myrtle , Vol. File, Ronald M. Clancy, ed. This volume, and the three companion volumes in this series, are recommended reading.
Please visit Mr. Clancy's web site, Christmas Classics. Clancy is the creator of a great series of videos that trace the histories of numerous classic carols; see Christmas Classics Videos. Note that Christmas Classics Ltd. Standards for attribution were much less rigorous before the 20th century.
For example, in the 18th century, some works ascribed to J. Bach because of his stature were not written by the composer. Nineteenth-century shape-note tunebooks have vexed hymnologists for years as they have tried to discern authorship of specific tunes. What about the text itself? Some suggest that we may be singing heresy, or at least poor theology at some places.
If the suggestion in the hymn is that the baby was a kind of super infant whose divinity overshadowed his humanity, then we may be moving into the realm of Gnosticism, suggesting that even in infancy Jesus had special knowledge. Reflections: May13 Q4. Reflections: May14 Q5. Reflections: May15 Q6. Reflections: May16 Q7. Reflections: May17 Q8. Reflections: May18 Q9. Reflections: May19 R. Reflections: Jun. Reflections: June13 R4.
Reflections: June14 R5. Reflections: June15 R6. Reflections: June16 R7. Reflections: June17 R8. Reflections: June18 R9. Reflections: June19 S. Reflections: Jul. Reflections: Jul17 S8. Reflections: Jul18 S9.
0コメント