Hymn tune in the context of Rote learning

A chorale is the name of several related musical forms originating in the music genre of the Lutheran chorale:

• Hymn tune of a Lutheran hymn (e.g. the melody of "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme"), or a tune in a similar format (e.g. one of the themes in the Finale of Saint-Saëns's Third Symphony)
• Such tune with a harmonic accompaniment (e.g. chorale monody, chorales included in Schemellis Gesangbuch)
• Such a tune presented in a homophonic or homorhythmic harmonisation, usually four-part harmony (e.g. Bach's four-part chorales, or the chorale included in the second movement of Mahler's Fifth Symphony)
• A more complex setting of a hymn-like tune (e.g. chorale fantasia form in Bach's Schübler Chorales, or a combination of compositional techniques in César Franck's Three Chorales [fr])

The chorale originated when Martin Luther translated sacred songs into the vernacular language (German), contrary to the established practice of church music near the end of the first quarter of the 16th century. The first hymnals according to Luther's new method were published in 1524. Luther and his followers not only wrote metrical hymn lyrics, but also composed metrical musical settings for these texts. This music was partially based on established melodies of church hymns and known secular songs. In the 17th century the repertoire was enriched with more choral and organ settings of the chorale tunes. By the end of the century a four-part setting for SATB voices had become the standard for the choral settings, while the congregational singing of chorales was tending towards monody with an instrumental accompaniment. The prolific creation of new Lutheran chorale tunes ended around that time.

Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern ('How beautifully the morning star shines'), BWV 1, is a church cantata for Annunciation by Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1725, when the cantata was composed, the feast of the Annunciation (25 March) coincided with Palm Sunday. Based on Philipp Nicolai's hymn "Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern" (1599), it is one of Bach's chorale cantatas. Bach composed it in his second year as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, where the Marian feast was the only occasion during Lent when music of this kind was permitted. The theme of the hymn suits both the Annunciation and Palm Sunday occasions, in a spirit of longing expectation of an arrival. As usual for Bach's chorale cantata cycle, the hymn was paraphrased by a contemporary poet who retained the hymn's first and last stanzas unchanged, but transformed the themes of the inner stanzas into a sequence of alternating recitatives and arias.

Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern is the last chorale cantata of Bach's second cantata cycle, possibly because the librettist who provided the paraphrases for the middle movements of these cantatas was no longer available. Bach scored the work for three vocal soloists, a four-part choir and a Baroque instrumental ensemble of two horns, two oboes da caccia, two solo violins, strings and continuo. The chorale melody of Nicolai's hymn appears in the opening and closing choral movements of the cantata. All instruments play in the opening festive chorale fantasia, in which the soprano sings the hymn tune, and the two solo concertante violins represent the morning star. An oboe da caccia accompanies the vocal soloist in the first aria. The strings, including the solo violins, return in the second aria. An independent horn part crowns the closing chorale.

Charles Edward Ives (/aɪvz/; October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an American modernist composer, actuary and businessman. Ives was among the earliest renowned American composers to achieve recognition on a global scale. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an "American original". He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones. His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.

Sources of Ives's tonal imagery included hymn tunes and traditional songs; he also incorporated melodies of the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.

Hymnology (from Greek ὕμνος hymnos, "song of praise" and -λογία -logia, "study of") is the scholarly study of religious song, or the hymn, in its many aspects, with particular focus on choral and congregational song. It may be more or less clearly distinguished from hymnody, the creation and practice of such song. Hymnologists, such as Erik Routley, may study the history and origins of hymns and of traditions of sung worship, the biographies of the women and men who have written hymns that have passed into choral or congregational use, the interrelationships between text and tune, the historical processes, both folk and redactional, that have changed hymn texts and hymn tunes over time, and the sociopolitical, theological and aesthetic arguments concerning various styles of sung worship.

Hymnology is not an "-ology" in the usual sense of an independent discipline that has a proper set of concepts and critical vocabulary that must first be learned before progress can be made. Rather, it's two disciplines: one that studies the texts and follows the rules of literary scholarship, the other that is trained in music and follows the rules of musicology. The "-ology" just means that they might publish in the same journals, occasionally attend the same conferences, or be asked to serve on a hymnal committee. If they write about the interaction between music and text, this is purely by instinct: there is no "scholarly consensus" for an underlying set of principles about how the interaction can be optimized. Often, the term "hymnologist" simply refers to anyone who has enough standing within the faith community to be asked to serve on a hymnal committee.

"Now thank we all our God" is a popular Christian hymn. Catherine Winkworth translated it from the German "Nun danket alle Gott", written c. 1636 by the Lutheran pastor Martin Rinkart. Its hymn tune, Zahn No. 5142, was published by Johann Crüger in the 1647 edition of his Praxis pietatis melica.

Johann Sebastian Bach's chorale harmonisations, alternatively named four-part chorales, are Lutheran hymn settings that characteristically conform to the following:

• four-part harmony
• SATB vocal forces
• pre-existing hymn tune allotted to the soprano part
• text treatment:
  • homophonic
  • no repetitions (i.e., each syllable of the hymn text is sung one time)

Around 400 of such chorale settings by Bach, mostly composed in the first four decades of the 18th century, are extant:

A hymn metre (US: meter) indicates the number of syllables for the lines in each stanza (verse) of a hymn. This provides a means of marrying the hymn's text with an appropriate hymn tune for singing.

There are 52 chorale cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach surviving in at least one complete version. Around 40 of these were composed during his second year as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, which started after Trinity Sunday 4 June 1724, and form the backbone of his chorale cantata cycle. The eldest known cantata by Bach, an early version of Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4, presumably written in 1707, was a chorale cantata. The last chorale cantata he wrote in his second year in Leipzig was Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1, first performed on Palm Sunday, 25 March 1725. In the ten years after that he wrote at least a dozen further chorale cantatas and other cantatas that were added to his chorale cantata cycle.

Lutheran hymns, also known as chorales, have a prominent place in the liturgy of the church. A chorale cantata is a church cantata based on a single hymn, both its text and tune. Bach was not the first to compose them, but for his 1724-25 second Leipzig cantata cycle he developed a specific format: in this format the opening movement is a chorale fantasia on the first stanza of the hymn, with the hymn tune appearing as a cantus firmus. The last movement is a four-part harmonisation of the chorale tune for the choir, with the last stanza of the hymn as text. While the text of the stanzas used for the outer movements was retained unchanged, the text of the inner movements of the cantata, a succession of recitatives alternating with arias, was paraphrased from the inner stanzas of the hymn.