… And glory shone all around
So I sang this afternoon, immersed in the joy of the Christmas season, weeping with pleasure at being able to sing again (and exercise my lungs; my singing is supposed to be both pleasurable and therapeutic), after many weeks of being laid low. And so I write about the hymn tune Sherburne paired with the text of the Christmas carol “While shepherds watched their flocks”, from which comes the angel descending in a shimmer of glory.
Not what I intended to post about today — but the Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio comic routine has turned out to be vastly more complex than I originally thought, so I’m going for the fire-bright Christmas angel. Stay tuned for something later about three people in gorilla suits.
From my 1/9/22 posting “The Burne-Jones Adoration”:
Hymns about the Angel proclaiming to the shepherds. Specifically, the hymn text in this Wikipedia posting:
“While shepherds watched their flocks” is a traditional Christmas carol describing the Annunciation to the Shepherds, with words attributed to Irish hymnist, lyricist and England’s Poet Laureate Nahum Tate.
… It is written in common metre and based on the Gospel of Luke 2:8–14.
Verse 1:
While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
all seated on the ground,
the angel of the Lord came down,
and glory shone around.The carol is sung to a huge number of tunes (it’s in common meter). Five of them [with printed music in the posting]: Winchester Old (from the 1982 Hymnbook of The Episcopal Church); one of the tunes named Carol (by Supply Belcher; from Karen Willard’s 1994 collection, An American Christmas Harp); Siroë (a tune arranged from Handel, also from Willard, but there with the text “Behold behold the love of God”); in the Sacred Harp tradition, Sherburne (#186 in the 1991 Denson Revision of The Sacred Harp; from Willard
Leave a Reply