Hymns

This page is entitled “Hymns,” although it should probably be more accurately titled “Hymn.”  There’s only one of them that I have written, and it really isn’t that groundbreaking.

This was written in 2001, as I was trying to piece together just how music worked.  I thought that perhaps the best way to improve my ability to listen to music was to attempt to write music, and so I turned to the genus I had the most exposure to:  hymns.  This was probably a bad choice, as hymns have various quirks that are not typical of most other genera, but it did serve as an introduction to music theory.  The melody was easy to write; I just played around on a recorder until I had a melody I was happy with.  Creating the harmony was interesting and I had a lot of help from my wife, who (in this case) taught me just how the harmony interacts with the melody and how I had to change my melody to conform to what the harmony wanted to do.

In choosing the lyrics for the melody, I went with “I Sing the Mighty Power of God.”  Even though those lyrics have a perfectly fine melody already associated with them, they were the ones that best fit the melody I had come up with, and I didn’t really feel like coming up with my own lyrics.  I believe that these lyrics are in the public domain, and so they have been included here as such.

I Sing the Mighty Power of God