In my last post, I wrote about an often sung Thanksgiving hymn. Today's hymn uses a traditional Welsh tune, AR HYD Y NOS (better known as "All through the night"), and newer words written by Fred Pratt Green copyright in 1970. You can read all the text by going here. When preparing for the service on October 10th, I checked to see what alternate harmonizations I had to enhance the service. I found a very nice setting by Martin Setchell in Last Verse Extravaganza for Organ (pub. by Kevin Mayhew Ltd. in 2001) that seemed to work well. I was a little puzzled by 2 discordant measures until I realized that the words in this part of verse 3 were: "for the truths that still confound us...thanks be to God." What great harmonic writing! And what an unusual thing to be thankful for - something that confounds us. Or is it so unusual? It is reassuring to me to know that I serve a God who is greater than I and that humans will never know or understand everything in our world.
Thanks be to God!
2 comments:
I love your reason for thanksgiving, AuntE! Yes, I too treasure that God is greater than I and that I will never fully understand Him or His ways.
And so I also appreciate your explanation for those discordant measures used in that Thanksgiving hymn. Thank you.
You're welcome! Thank you for reading Dorothy. It's nice to know someone is out there... :)
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