Music Notes: First Sunday of Advent

Our service music at the Sunday Eucharists this Advent is adapted from the melodies of two great Advent hymns, ‘Conditor alme siderum’ (‘Creator of the stars of night’, Hymn 60), at 9:00, and ‘Veni redemptor gentium’ (‘Savior / Redeemer of the nations, come’, Hymn 54–55), at 11:15. The organ preludes will all be based on these melodies as well.

The author of ‘Veni redemptor gentium’, unusually for an early medieval text, is known: none other than St Ambrose, fourth-century Bishop of Milan and a great leader and teacher of the Church. Ambrose is credited with introducing hymnody into the Western Church, where he used it to combat the songs which the heretical Arians were using to popularize their views – much as St Ephrem did in Syria and St Hilary in Gaul around the same time. The kind of strophic, metrical verse hymn he wrote and promoted – almost always in stanzas of four lines of eight syllables each – became standard in the West, and a whole repertory of hymns, and the liturgical tradition at Milan, are still called ‘Ambrosian’ in honor of the saint. ‘Conditor alme siderum’, an evening hymn for Advent, is another, later, ‘Ambrosian’ hymn.

The tunes paired with these hymns are of later origin than the texts but are strongly associated with them. ‘Conditor’ is found in many sources and traditions notated or sung in triple meter, leading some scholars to believe that all chant hymn-tunes were originally sung in regular meters rather than in the flowing style we are more accustomed to. It will be heard this Sunday in a setting by living American composer Gerald Near.

‘Veni redemptor’ probably originated in Germany, and text and tune were so popular there that Luther translated the text (‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’) and adapted the tune (see Hymn 54) for use in his reforming movement. The tune is notable – and easily learnable – on account of its use of the same music for the first and last phrases. Countless pieces of choral and organ music are based on this hymn; this Sunday we hear a very beautiful and famous one by J.S. Bach, in which the highly ornamented melody is heard as a solo over a walking bass line: a stately procession, perhaps of the approaching royal Bridegroom in a reference to an image drawn from Psalm 19 found in the originals of both the hymns under discussion but omitted from the Hymnal versions:

Forth from his chamber goeth he,
that royal home of purity,
a giant in twofold substance one,
rejoicing now his course to run.

Veni redemptor gentium