Fold to thy heart thy brother

[venta]

Over on someone else's LJ, I've just been reading a comment about someone's school hymn. Which has just reminded me to muse what a bloody odd choice my school made.

At the end of every term, and on various high days and holidays, we would churn out O Brother Man, which always struck me as a singularly odd choice for a girls school.

Worse, we didn't sing it to any kind of regular hymn tune; oh no. The middle verse went to a different tune from the first and third, both were full of weird runs and unsingable intervals, and the whole was rounded off with a vaguely apocalyptic piano accompaniment.

(Yikes. A brief quest on youtube to see if I could find a recording of it revealed this, which is bloody odd. Wrong tune, of course, but it's basically hymn-karaoke. Ah well, each to their own.)

A quick test has just revealed that I do actually still know all the words (and I bet marjory does too). I have a vague idea it was dinned into us so we could sing it at school functions without the tiresome intervention of hymnbooks. My rendering of the tune was very poor, mind. Did I mention? Really quite a difficult tune.

(Anyone hugely curious can find the words here: http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/o/b/obrother.htm. We missed out the second verse they give altogether. That site will play (the wrong) audio at you, be warned. In fact, I mainly include the link so people can marvel at what a fabulous URL cyberhymnal.org is. Cyberhymnal! Isn't that a brilliant word?)

On the plus side, the sheer unwieldiness of the school tune means that no one else uses it. I'm extremely unlikely to bump into it anywhere else, and thus I avoid the pitfalls of being mentally displaced back to bottle-green-clad adolescence without warning.

The junior school (which I didn't attend) attached to my secondary school lucked out and got the jolly Lord of All Hopefulness instead. My junior school didn't go in for such exotica as a school hymn, as far as I can remember. In fact, I've no idea how common the concept of a school hymn is. Did you have one? Can you remember it?

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

We had a school hymn, which I can still sing & will reproduce in its entirety here without looking it up (honest!):

"Our Father, by whose servant this house was built of old,
Whose hand hath crowned her children with blessings manifold,
For thine unfailing mercy, far strewn along our way,
With all who passed before us we praise thy name today.

Four hundred years enduring[*] from age to following age,
A hundred generations have built our heritage.
Their names are long forgotten, long spent their hopes and fears,
Safe rest they in thy keeping, who changest not with years.

They reap not where they laboured, we reap what they have sown,
Our harvest may be garnered by ages yet unknown.
The days of old have dowered us with gifts beyond all praise;
Our Father, make us faithful to serve the coming days.

Before us and beside us, still holden in thine hand
A cloud unseen of witness our elder comrades stand.
One family unbroken we join with one acclaim,
One heart, one voice uplifted to glorify thy name."

It was a Victorian-ish hymn tune (maybe a bit unpredictable in places but fine once you got the hang of it), & the same for each verse, but with a nice descant on the last verse (the choir sang the descant at prizegivings and stuff). I was (and am) quite fond of our school hymn, & I confess I got very weepy when singing it at my last ever assembly. Thinking of it now I can almost feel those itchy grey school socks. :-D

Your description of your complicated school hymn with the difficult tune reminds me of the very rare occasions at school when we would sing ST PATRICK'S BREASTPLATE ("I bind unto myself today / the power of the Trinity..."), which is probably the most awesome hymn I know, but it is a bit of a complicated tune & then there's a bit in the middle where it goes into a different key and time-signature and nobody ever knows how it goes. Someone I knew had it at their wedding, & that was a disaster. :-}

Sorry for rambling on, but, hymns! I could talk forever about hymns. They are great.

[*] when our brother-school had its quincentenary they changed this line to "five hundred years enduring"[**], but it was "four hundred years" for my first 5 years or so at the school, so that's what I know best.

[**] the girls' school was nowhere near as old, but both high schools and the junior school that fed into them all had the same school hymn.

[venta.livejournal.com]

The beauty of the predictability of hymntune meter means it doesn't matter I don't know that one - the words fit perfectly well to the tune of Onward, Christian Soldiers in my head :)

I have a near-incurable habit of making hymns rhyme; Victorian hymns bring out the words in me because their homonyms were often quite approximate. I'd have had to sing "have built our herit-age" to make it rhyme with age. Possibly also "Trinitay" in your St Patrick example, though without the rest of the words that might be just a red herring.

I still maintain that you can always spot choir-trained singers of hymns, because they take notice of all the commans and little brackety ellision things which most people ignore. "Where meek souls will receive him, still" is a good one to catch at Christmas time.

There's a similar one I can't right now call to mind in a popular wedding hymn - several of us (who didn't know each other) bonded over it a wedding a few years back while those who hadn't been harangued on the topic by choirmasters at an impressionable age looked vaguely baffled by the whole business :)

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'd have had to sing "have built our herit-age" to make it rhyme with age.

Yep, that's how we sang it (the nature of the tune meant that you did sort of land quite heavily on the '-age' of 'heritage' anyway so it was a bit unavoidable).

Possibly also "Trinitay" in your St Patrick example, though without the rest of the words that might be just a red herring.

Ah no, it it rhymes with "three" further on. Words here (and I think that page plays audio at you if you haven't bvggered up your plugins like wot I have). The "Christ be with me, Christ within me" bit is the bit that gets a completely different tune.

Totally know what you mean about the commas and things in hymns. There's another one that always irks me when people get it wrong, but I can't remember it, may well be the same one you're thinking of. :) When I say "people get it wrong" I generally mean "people look at me funny when I sing through the bit where they're all taking a big breath".

"Where meek souls will receive him, still" is a good one to catch at Christmas time.

And it is nearly Christmas time for singing purposes!! :) We have already started work on the Christmas stuff in choir, but I always want to do more carols, I just can't get enough.

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

... provided you then sing "still the dear Christ enters in" all on one breathand, yes J4, you do get funny looks.