hymn

hymn, (from Greek hymnos, “song of praise”), strictly, a song used in Christian worship, usually sung by the congregation and characteristically having a metrical, strophic (stanzaic), nonbiblical text. Similar songs, also generally termed hymns, exist in all civilizations; examples survive, for instance, from ancient Sumer and Greece.

Christian hymnody derives from the singing of psalms in the Hebrew Temple. The earliest fully preserved text (c. 200 ce or earlier) is the Greek “Phos hilarion” (“Go, Gladsome Light,” translated by the 19th-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). Hymnody developed systematically, however, only after the emperor Constantine legalized Christianity (313 ce), and it flourished earliest in Syria, where the practice was possibly taken over from the singing by gnostics and Manichaeans of hymns imitating the psalms. The Byzantine church adopted the practice, and in its liturgy hymns maintained a much more prominent place than in the Latin liturgy. Byzantine hymnody developed complex types such as the kanōn and kontakion (see also Byzantine chant). St. Ephraem—a 4th-century Mesopotamian deacon, poet, and hymnist—has been called the “father of Christian hymnody.”

In the West, St. Hilary of Poitiers composed a book of hymn texts about 360. Not much later St. Ambrose of Milan instituted the congregational singing of psalms and hymns, partly as a counter to the hymns of the Arians, who were in doctrinal conflict with orthodox Christianity. In poetic form (iambic octosyllables in four-line stanzas), those early hymns—apparently sung to simple, possibly folk melodies—were derived from Christian Latin poetry of the period. By the late Middle Ages trained choirs had supplanted the congregation in the singing of hymns. Although new, often more ornate melodies were composed and many earlier melodies were elaborated, one syllable of text per note was usual. Some polyphonic hymn settings were used, usually in alternation with plainchants, and were particularly important in organ music.

Britannica Quiz

Sound Check: Musical Vocabulary Quiz

Congregational singing in the liturgy was reestablished only during the Reformation, by the Lutheran Church in Germany. The early chorale, or German hymn melody, was unharmonized and sung unaccompanied, although harmonized versions, used by varying combinations of choir, organ, and congregation, appeared later. Some were newly composed, but many drew upon plainsong, vernacular devotional song, and secular song. The pattern of secular lyrics also influenced the hymn texts of Martin Luther and his contemporaries. Important early collections were those of Luther and Johann Walther (1524) and of Georg Rhau (1544). Pietism brought a new lyrical and subjective note into German hymnody in the 17th and 18th centuries, among both Lutherans and other groups, such as the Moravian Church.

Swiss and, later, French, English, and Scottish Calvinism promoted the singing of metrical translations of the psalter (see psalmody), austerely set for unaccompanied unison singing. English and Scottish Protestantism admitted only the singing of psalms. English metrical psalms were set to tunes adapted from the French and Genevan psalters. Those were fairly complex melodies written on French metres. The English psalter used only a few metres, and the custom of singing each psalm to its “proper” tune was soon replaced by the use of a few common tunes. The common metre 8, 6, 8, 6 (the numbers give the number of syllables in each line), a form of English ballad metre, remains the archetypal English hymn metre.

The principal impetus to English hymnody came in the late 17th century from the Independent (Congregationalist) hymn writer Isaac Watts (Hymns and Spiritual Songs; 1705–19). The evangelical revival of the mid-18th century under John and Charles Wesley, founders of Methodism, finally established hymnody in England and America. Charles Wesley’s many poems use a variety of experimental metres, and John Wesley’s translations introduced many of the finest German hymns. The Wesleys also adopted many German tunes, and their later editions contain much music in the style of Handel.

The Church of England accepted hymn singing officially only in 1820, following a controversy arising from the singing of hymns at a Sheffield church. The Oxford (High Church) Movement, begun in 1833, stimulated new compositions, translations of medieval hymns, and use of plainsong melodies. The present era of English hymnody dates from the publication of Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861; last rev. ed., 2013, as Ancient & Modern: Hymns and Songs for Refreshing Worship), characterized by austerity of style, conformity to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and the setting of each hymn to its proper tune.

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

Two influential collections appeared around the turn of the 20th century: the Yattendon Hymnal (1899), by the English poet Robert Bridges, and The English Hymnal (1906), edited by Percy Dearmer and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams; the latter includes many plainsong and folk melodies.

Continental hymnody has been largely influenced by Lutheran models, although in Italy the Waldensian church cultivates congregational hymnody influenced by local folk-song and operatic styles. The Counter-Reformation in the mid-16th century stimulated the composition of many fine Roman Catholic hymns, and a renewal of interest in the late 19th century eventually led, in England, to the Westminster Hymnal (1940). The reintroduction of congregational singing during mass in the late 1960s also proved a stimulus to the composition of new hymns and led to the adoption of many hymns from non-Catholic sources. See also Armenian chant; fuging tune; sequence; spiritual; Te Deum laudamus.