“Vox Jesu,” from the andante in one of the quartets of Louis Spohr (1784–1859), is a psalm-tune of good harmony, but too little feeling.
An excellent tune for all the shades of expression 272 / 228 in the hymn, is the arrangement by Hubert P. Main from Franz Abt—in A flat, triple time. Gentle music through the first fifteen bars, in alternate duet and quartet, utters the Divine Voice with the true accent of the lines, and the second portion completes the harmony in glad, full chorus—the answer of the human heart.
“Vox Dilecti,” by Dr. Dykes, goes farther and writes the Voice in B flat minor—which seems a needless substitution of divine sadness for divine sweetness. It is a tune of striking chords, but its shift of key to G natural (major) after the first four lines marks it rather for trained choir performance than for assembly song.
It is possible to make too much of a dramatic perfection or a supposed indication of structural design in a hymn. Textual equations, such as distinguish Dr. Bonar's beautiful stanzas, are not necessarily technical. To emphasize them as ingenious by an ingenious tune seems, somehow, a reflection on the spontaneity of the hymn.
Louis Spohr was Director of the Court Theatre Orchestra in Cassel, Prussia, in the first half of the last century. He was an eminent composer of both vocal and instrumental music, and one of the greatest violinists of Europe.
Hubert Platt Main was born in Ridgefield, Ct., Aug. 17, 1839. He read music at sight when only ten years old, and at sixteen commenced writing hymn-tunes. Was assistant compiler with both Bradbury and Woodbury in their various 273 / 229 publications, and in 1868 became connected with the firm of Biglow and Main, and has been their book-maker until the present time. As music editor in the partnership he has superintended the publication of more than five hundred music-books, services, etc.
“I LOVE TO STEAL AWHILE AWAY.”
The burdened wife and mother who wrote this hymn would, at the time, have rated her history with “the short and simple annals of the poor.” But the poor who are “remembered for what they have done,” may have a larger place in history than many rich who did nothing.
Phebe Hinsdale Brown, was born in Canaan, N.Y., in 1783. Her father, George Hinsdale, who died in her early childhood, must have been a man of good abilities and religious feeling, being the reputed composer of the psalm-tune, “Hinsdale,” found in some long-ago collections.
Left an orphan at two years of age, Phebe “fell into the hands of a relative who kept the county jail,” and her childhood knew little but the bitter fare and ceaseless drudgery of domestic slavery. She grew up with a crushed spirit, and was a timid, shrinking woman as long as she lived. She married Timothy H. Brown, a house-painter of Ellington, Ct., and passed her days there and in Monson, Mass., where she lived some twenty-five years.