Calm on the Listening Ear of Night
After a personal record 42 completed hymns in 2020 (thanks COVID), 2021-2022 have been somewhat fallow years for me as a hymnist. Nearly all of my compositional energy has gone to another (much, much larger) sacred project, my long-anticipated oratorio Redeemed from the Fall (which is going through finishing touches this holiday break).
However, last Sunday I came across the text "Calm on the Listening Ear of Night" in one of my favorite hymnals, the oversize and gloriously illustrated A Treasury of Hymns (1953).
In that hymnal, as apparently in many hymnals (see the pie chart at that link), it is sung to the tune ST. AGNES, which is far more commonly used as the tune for "Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee."
While there are a couple of other serviceable tunes out there for this text, I'm always on the lookout for a text in need of its own home/tune and so a day's labor at the piano later and I present to you my own humble (and probably still work-in-progress) tune for "Calm on the Listening Ear of Night."
The tune name is UKHO. As with nearly all of my hymn tune names, this is a transliterated Russian word from the text, in this case the word for 'ear.' The meter is CMD or Common Meter Doubled, eight lines alternating 8 and 6 syllables, meaning that indeed this tune would work for "Jesus the Very Thought of Thee" or any other text with a similar hymn meter.
That said, I do feel I've achieved something of that elusive 'Christmasy' feel in the music appropriate to this text. I wanted to try for a bit of a lullaby feel in the first part and more of a choral sound in the second half. I hewed a bit more closely to the traditional voice leading rules in the four part writing than I normally do, but to paraphrase another worn-out author, "And now if there be [a voice leading] fault, it be the mistake of [a tired] m[a]n."
I did alter the penultimate line of text, which originally called for the inelegant contraction of Bethlehem into two syllables. (Bethl'hem?) Originally the final two lines read:
And bright on Bethlehem's joyous plains
Breaks the first Christmas morn.
I decided to go with:
And bright with joy o'er Bethlehem
Breaks the first Christmas morn.
Another advantage of this alteration is that it eliminates the duplicated reference to a 'plain' within the text. In line with this reasoning, I also altered the word 'hills' to 'vales' in the final verse:
Instead of:
Light on thy hills, Jerusalem!
I have put:
Light on thy vales, Jerusalem!
The text had already mentioned the hills of Palestine, and in a text so compact as a three-verse hymn I figured it could stand to be changed if I could find the right monosyllabic word. I quickly rejected the synonym "mounts." I considered "walls" since that is a feature I associate with Jerusalem, but it isn't a natural feature and the theme of the text seemed to be the repose of nature in the Holy Land, from the "silver-mantled plains" of Judea to "hills of Palestine" to the "blue depths of Galilee" to the waving palms of Sharon. So the poetic "vales" (short for valleys) seemed like a good inverse of hills and appropriate to the topography of the city and the heightened Victorian language of the poem.
So, I apologize, Edmund H. Sears (1810-1876)! If folks want to sing it your way they can! But here is another tune to maybe bring a bit more shelf life to your text, which has less often been included in hymnals since the 1940s. It will surely never rival the fame of your "It Came upon the Midnight Clear," but I am always happy to put a New Song into people's mouths whether or not it gets any traction across all Christendom. Hopefully it is enough that in sharing this tune I may wish everyone a Merry Christmas 2022!
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