Real Music

A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church

Anthony Esolen

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781618907042
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Real Music by Anthony Esolen is a comprehensive and fascinating guide, in print and song, to the great hymns of the Church. It shows that, unlike much of what is sung in too many Catholic churches today, good music, "Real Music", combines great poetry with doctrinally sound lyrics and beautiful melody. With noted Catholic author Anthony Esolen as your guide, join the Catholic Musical Renaissance which is truly a recovery of the best that has been sung and prayed down through the ages. You'll be glad you did. Real Music is arranged by events in the life of our Lord and the seasons and Sacraments of the Church. This book will teach you much about poetry, music, and the Catholic Faith itself. What better way to learn your Faith than through beautiful music! Whether at home in your favorite easy chair, or among friends in an informal class at your parish, Real Music will bring you deep into the lyrics and melodies of the great hymns that so magnificently offer praise and honor to God.

Chapter One

The Psalms

THE psalms are the foundational poems of Christian praise. Roman Catholics say or sing verses of one of the psalms at every Mass. Monks pray the psalms all the way through every few days. Protestant congregations have given us such splendid collections as the Scottish Psalter. So it is not idle to ask, “Why do we need hymns at all, when we already have the Psalms?” Inspired by a wish to return to the source of Christian hymnody, lyricists in the 1970s simply set the psalms to English free-verse, without rhyme or meter, as if that were more genuine than the older renderings into formal poetry. Many even employed the Anglicized “Yahweh,” the holy name of the Lord that faithful Jews do not utter. They thus reduced the mysterious name-and-no-name, the great I AM, to an ordinary tag, like Zeus or Apollo.

The result was neither flesh nor fowl, neither the psalm itself, sung or chanted straightforwardly, nor a work of theology in verse. But the assumption behind it—the less art, the better—was incorrect. It betrays a misunderstanding of the psalms themselves.

The psalms are Hebrew poems, and they reflect the peculiarities of the Hebrew language. Think of a language in the way that a painter thinks of the tools and the stuff of his art. There are things that you might do with oil on canvas that you would not do with watercolor on paper, or with egg tempera on wood, or with earthen paints on wet plaster. Some languages, like Italian, rhyme easily, because there are not so many combinations of consonants at the end of a word, and few vowel sounds that will go along with any one combination. An Italian orders pasta, and the a before the consonants is a short ah, and that is it. But an Englishman can say past, with a short a, or paste, with a “long” a, and they don’t rhyme. It is harder to rhyme in English because of the hundreds of ways in which an English word can end. But it is easier in English to write poetry with strongly stressed syllables, since we hammer them out, as do our cousins the Germans. Speakers of other languages make their vowels long by, well, making them long—they stretch them out. We in English don’t really do that. We make our vowels lax or tense, and that’s what accounts for the difference between past and paste. But the ancient Greeks really did stretch their vowels, so that they heard different kinds of syllables, long ones and short ones, and crafted their poetry accordingly, by fixed patterns of long and short.

What, then, did the ancient Hebrew poets do? Hebrew is remarkably terse, its words placed beside one another like massive blocks of meaning. There are very few “operator” words to show relationships. The words themselves are terse, too, built upon a root of three consonants, with internal vowels varying to show changes of meaning. It’s hard to “hear” syllables in Hebrew, because of a frequent breath between two consonants, a breath that isn’t quite a vowel. So, for example, we have b’nai b’rith, “sons of the covenant,” and it’s hard to tell whether we should count that as two syllables or four. Rhymes, however, are common—too common, too easy. If you want to say my son in Hebrew, you put a little pronoun-suffix after the noun: beni. That will rhyme with “my father,” abi, and “my God,” Eli, and my everything else. The same sort of thing can be seen in Hebrew verbs.

So Hebrew poets do not count syllables strictly, nor do they rhyme systematically. Instead they take full advantage of the terseness of the language. The poets commonly set two or three words on one side of the line against two or three words on the other side, in a parallel structure, with the second half of the line explaining or amplifying the first half, or providing a result or a contrast. Here’s a typical example, the first verse of Psalm 118:

Hodu l’Adonai ki tov,		ki le‘olam chasdo.
[Give] thanks to-[the]-Lord for [He is] good,		for forever his-mercy.
O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: because his mercy endureth for ever.

Notice the balance. The everlasting mercy of the Lord (right) is a special instance of his goodness (left). Notice also the impressive concentration in the Hebrew poem. Four words on one side, including the operator ki, “because,” and four on the other side, with ki repeated. Notice also that the name of God (unpronounceable, and so Adonai, “Lord,” is uttered as a substitute) is set in balance across from the adverb le‘olam, by the introductory l’, “to, unto.” Thus to the Lord alliterates with to all ages, for ever. The form of the words teaches us that the Lord is eternal, and that nothing lasts forever unless by the power of the Lord.

That is straightforward and powerful. It’s not the sort of thing that survives translation into English prose, which in the worthy King James Version spins eight words out into sixteen, and thirteen syllables into twenty-two. So what should the English poet do? If the poetry of the psalm is to be honored, we must avail ourselves of the possibilities of English lyric. We must allow rhyme and meter to do some of the work in English that parallelism and balance did in Hebrew.

English poets have understood the point. Great poets such as Philip Sidney and John Milton translated many of the psalms into English verse, often employing the meter of popular ballads. Best known of all is, or used to be, the work of Isaac Watts, who wrought the whole psalter into English. Watts has twenty entries in The Hymnbook of the Presbyterian churches in America (1955), fourteen in the Episcopalian Hymnal (1940). We will be encountering Dr. Watts later in this work. For now, let us look at an “ordinary” English rendering of the straight-forward Psalm 100, attributed to William Kethe (1561). Here is Psalm 100 in the King James prose:

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.

Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing.

Know ye that the Lord he is God; it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting: and his truth endureth to all generations.

Now in Kethe’s English:

All people that on earth do dwell,

Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;

Him serve with mirth, His praise forth tell,

Come ye before Him and rejoice.

Know that the Lord is God indeed;

Without our aid He did us make;

We are His folk, He doth us feed,

And for His sheep He doth us take.

O enter then His gates with praise,

Approach with joy His courts unto;

Praise, laud, and bless His name always,

For it is seemly so to do.

For why? the Lord our God is good,

His mercy is forever sure;

His truth at all times firmly stood,

And shall from age to age endure.

Read them over again, one after the other. As a translation this is really very fine. Not one motif in the original is left out. But it is an impressive poem in its own right. Kethe employs the simple four-line stanza, with four strong beats in a line, rhyming on alternate lines, to bind together in English the thoughts and images of the Hebrew.

Each stanza marks a clear progression. The first, translating the first two Hebrew verses, is a call for praise. The second gives us the principal reason for that praise: We owe our very existence to God, and our welfare. The clearly delineated syllabic lines, and the alternating rhymes, place the ideas in balance with one another. The Lord is God indeed. Why? Well, for one thing, without our aid He did us make. Not only did He make us: He feeds us. We are His folk, His sheep. The far-flung nations of the first two lines—All people that on earth do dwell—are brought into one universal church, one common fold.

The third stanza draws a conclusion from the second, and deepens the idea of approaching God that is present in the first. Because God has so blessed us, we should not only praise Him but enter His gates and approach His courts. Here the pilgrims sojourn toward a specific place, the courts of God, the heavenly Jerusalem. Kethe inserts the adverb always into the stanza: We should never cease to bless the holy name of God. It is seemly so to do, he adds, giving himself the opportunity to bind the third stanza to the fourth, and all the stanzas together in one.

Why is it seemly to bless the name of God always? Because the mercy and the truth of God are always. Our faithful praise is the just response to God’s everlasting faithfulness to us. His mercy is sure, and His truth stands firm: It will endure. The rhymes are exactly right. I cannot imagine a more powerful and more sensitive poetic translation. Sung to the unadorned and mighty melody Old Hundredth (note the loving way the melody was remembered by generations of English churchgoers and choristers), the poem sets down deep roots into the heart and mind and soul.

So far I’ve discussed only a few formal features of the Hebrew psalms. But when we turn to the content, the psalms stand out as unique in ancient literature. They are holy songs that meditate upon the holy deeds of the Lord in the lived experience of the Hebrews, and upon the holy words of the Lord, already possessed in various books, and also in oral traditions. We take that combination of deeds and words for granted, but we shouldn’t.

The Greeks had their religious traditions regarding the beginning of the world. The early poet Hesiod sang of them in his Theogony, literally The Generation of the Gods. It’s from Hesiod that we learn about the wicked god Cronus who devoured his children whole, till his wife tricked him one day, giving him a stone wrapped up in a blanket instead and spiriting their small boy into hiding—the boy who was named Zeus, and who would overthrow his father. Hesiod gives to the sophisticated Greek an allegory about how the world, both the divine world and the human world, works; but it isn’t meant to be “historical,” and we don’t have Greek prophets revealing to mankind the everlasting commandments of Zeus. The Greeks did have their historical writers, long after Hesiod, like the shrewd Thucydides, who wrote against his native city, Athens, in his history of the Peloponnesian War. But Thucydides is not...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Author’s Note
• Publisher’s Note
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Psalms
• Chapter Two: Who Is Jesus?
• Chapter Three: Who Is Christ?
• Chapter Four: The Nativity
• Chapter Five: The Cross and the Resurrection
• Chapter Six: Our Love for Jesus
• Chapter Seven: The Holy Eucharist
• Chapter Eight: The Holy Spirit
• Chapter Nine: Penitence and Supplication
• Chapter Ten: The Church Militant
• Chapter Eleven: Consolation
• Chapter Twelve: The Glory of God
• List of Hymns Referenced
• Track Listing