Fold to thy heart thy brother
Oct. 6th, 2010 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaOver 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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?
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?
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Date: 2010-10-06 01:12 pm (UTC)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.