11/01/2018: Second Week of Epiphany—Dissonance

This morning’s anthem, ‘vom Himmel hoch, da kom ich her’, was written towards the middle of the sixteenth century. The text is by Martin Luther, and is believed to be his only contrafactum—that is, a borrowing of an existing folk tune. It was first published as a fifteen-stanza hymn (you’ll be relieved to hear that we’re only having three this morning) under the title “A Children’s Song for the Nativity of Christ”. Luther wrote it for his children, and you’ll hear the simplicity of that folk tune in the soprano line of Johannes Eccard’s setting today.

But what you will also hear in Eccard’s setting is a certain anxiety. It’s in F, but the second soprano pushes away from that home key with B naturals from the very beginning. That tritone—known to heathen musicologists as ‘the devil’s interval’—is, tonally speaking, as far from home as it is possible to be. Its leading-tone function pulls towards C, the dominant of the home key, but it doesn’t get there until after Eccard has visited the darkness of d minor in the middle of each verse. At times, the text of that floating soprano folk tune, which relays the message of the angels to the shepherds, will feel obscured by polyphony, and the denseness of men’s voices descending in parallel. If you’re not following this, don’t worry: my basic gist is that, in the anthem you’re about to hear, Eccard takes a simple children’s song, and pushes it somewhat further away from home than you might expect.

B naturals in S2 immediately imply a secondary dominant.

B natural finally resolves; descending tenor/bass parrallels.

Epiphany is a strange time of year. A period of recovery after the excesses of Christmas, for Lutherans it lasts all the way until Lent, and for many people January, with its self-flagellating resolutions of teetotalism, vegetables, and no fags, it is a pre-empting of Lenten sacrifice. Epiphany is a time of processing and upheaval: a new year, in which the rituals and decorations of Christmas fall away, leaving us with long, austere nights, bitterly cold weather, and the solemn theological reminder that Christ was born to die. But it is also a feast of visiting, and new beginnings. The Lutheran tradition of chalking the door letters C, M, and B onto your door represents both the names of the three Magi (Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar) and the prayer Christus mansionem benedicat: Christ bless this house. The sanctity of hospitality and the unification of Christ revealing himself to the gentiles are, in this simple ritual, intimately connected. But most important is the resonance with the Israelites chalking their doors during the Egyptian plagues at Passover, meaning that the killing curse would literally ‘pass over’ their homes. So in the spirit of the unity, hospitality, and the simply temporal phenomenon of hope, hear this anthem in the knowledge that its dissonances, like the winter, will pass.