The other day I woke up with a song in my head I hadn’t heard in a long time, the hymn Beneath the Cross of Jesus. The name of the tune is St. Christopher.
When I thought about the tune, I realized it has some fairly sophisticated harmony. My memory of the hymns I grew up with was that they were harmonically simple, mostly built around three chords: I, IV, V. But this hymn has a lot going on.
I imagine a lot of things that I remember as being simple weren’t. I was simple, and my world was richer than I realized.
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You can find the sheet music for the hymn here. I’ll write out the chord progressions for the first two lines.
I idim | I | V7 ii7 V7 | I III |
vi iidim | vi VI7 ii vi | II VIII7♭5 | III |
If you’re not familiar with music theory, just appreciate that there are a lot more symbols up there than I, IV, and V.
The second line effectively modulates into a new key, the relative minor of the original key, and I’m not sure how to describe what’s going on at the end of the second line.
Harmony is what you get when you put music through a slicer. Instead, rotate 90 degrees and look at the four voices. At the end of the second system that is what is called a “German [augmented] sixth”; but what you really need to hear is that stepwise approach in contrary motion to the E in the outer voices that is the dominant of a tonicization of A minor.
Similarly, in the first full bar there is only one harmony, C major, root position. The rest is stepwise ornament that do not deserve to be thought of as “chords”. What we are dealing with is four-voice counterpoint with very little rhythmic independence; that is what creates the illusion of “chords”.
What makes this one “better” and why you remembered it where you have forgotten a hundred others, is the balance between the greater interest in the counterpoint and the lesser interest in the rhythm. Many hymn settings have little interest in either.
My standing as a composer to say these things may be found here: https://www.broadheath.com .
‘Harmony is what you get when you put music through a slicer. ‘
That’s a really great way to put that! As an amateur composer with an interest in theory but very little formal training, I think a lot about the relationships between scale, harmony, and counterpoint, and that way of putting it really speaks to me.