Hymn Tunes/Cantiques

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer and the co-author of Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian
Garden Writing.

In Volume 5 — another welcome addition to the bilingual Canadian Musical Heritage Series —Beckwith presents, in facsimile, more than three hundred hymn tunes from some sixty tune books and hymnaries published in Canada between 1801 and 1939, and reproduces the title pages of 39 of these books. The format, like that of many of the facsimiles, is the oblong-octavo “open-ender” or “longboy.”

This anthology is primarily of hymn tunes, not of hymn texts; so if the original gave only the first verse of the text — as was often the case with pre-Confederation tune books — additional verses must be sought elsewhere. To facilitate discussion and comparison of the hymn tunes, they are organized into seven groups: 1) European tunes in Canada; 2) adaptations; 3) fuguing tunes; 4) American tunes in Canada; 5) original tunes, 1801-65; 6) original tunes 1866-1900; and 7) original tunes 1901-39.

As the editor points out, the anthology reflects a repertoire which is largely protestant and anglophone. The inclusion of title pages and hymn tunes from books for Algonkian, French, and Ukranian-speaking congregations, plus a few Latin texts, greatly enhances the collection. (Are Mennonite tune books with German texts absent because none has been published in Canada? Comments on page viii indirectly suggest that this may be the case.)

Besides its rich offering of tunes, verses, musical notations, and typefaces, the anthology provides a valuable nine-page introductory essay, plus brief critical notes on each hymn tune, a bibliography, a checklist of sources, and a key to abbreviations. The collection is indexed by authors and translators, by first lines and by tune names.

The hymn books are from 23 libraries in Canada, 3 in the United States, and 1 in Scotland. Finding the name of the library, which has the book from which a particular tune is reproduced, is a three-step process; but this is a minor drawback to a generally well-conceived book. Editor John Beckwith is a musical scholar and composer known for his arrangements of old hymn tunes for modern performance and for his incorporation of hymn tunes into original works. With this volume, he and the editorial advisory committee of the Canadian Musical Heritage Society share with us still more of the variety in our nation’s musical past.