In 2014, Don Carson—who was then the president of the evangelical Christian organization The Gospel Coalition—sat down with the Christian singer-songwriters Matt Boswell and Keith Getty to discuss the role of music in modern Christian worship. In the past ten years, American Matt Boswell has garnered a considerable reputation among Protestant churches in the US for his songwriting, recordings, performances, and training materials on how to lead church worship.1 But Keith Getty OBE—originally from Northern Ireland—has been a veritable pillar of Christian worship music worldwide since the early 2000s, collaborating with his wife, Krystin, and English singer-songwriter Stuart Townend. With the latter, Keith wrote the phenomenally popular song “In Christ Alone” in 2001, which was voted the UK’s second-most loved hymn of all time in 2013, according to BBC Songs of Praise.2Keith (a pianist/guitar- ist/composer) and Krystin (a singer/lyricist) tour internationally and have active recording careers with their own Dove Award-winning music label (distributed by Capitol Christian Distribution), but their airplay on Christian radio in the US and the UK is not commensurate with their reputations and popularity in churches worldwide.3 This is because—unlike radio favorites MercyMe, For King & Country, Lauren Daigle, or Matthew West—the Gettys and Townend are self- identified popular “hymn-writers,” focusing on strophic songs for congregational singing rather than Christian-themed “pop” music for radio airplay (the same can be said of Matt Boswell, who is the author of Messenger Hymns).4 Following the path of the modern English hymn-writer Graham Kendrick (active from the late 1960s and known for his perennial favorite “Shine, Jesus, Shine”), the Get- tys and Townend have built their reputations as Christian artists by writing simple, catchy, congregation-friendly melodies, featuring stepwise motion and limited syncopation—songs like “In Christ Alone.” These melodies are ready-made hymns that are published widely with chordal keyboard accompaniments in church hymnals.5 However, the Gettys’ own performances of their hymns on recordings and on tours feature diverse instrumentations and innovative arrangements that incorporate Irish music, bluegrass, gospel, and even rock influences, often with virtuosic instrumental solos between verses.6 Thus, the Gettys’ music has successfully appealed to “traditional” and “contemporary” churches alike, leaving it (somewhat) immune to the heated polemics of the “worship wars” in modern church music.7
Don Carson’s choice of guests for his 2014 interview was strategic: the focus of the discussion was the role of music in congregational worship—an issue that Boswell and Getty, as modern-day hymn-writers, were particularly well equipped to address. During the interview, Carson asked his guests the following: “What place do we have for rejuvenating old hymns—picking the best of them and rejuvenating them again too? . . . do we have to start from zero in every generation?” As part of his response, Keith Getty said the following:
The hymn book’s transition to modern worship music . . . has taken away something of the breadth and actually something of the humility and a sense of the universal church, that you could sing the great hymns of the church fathers, the great settings of the Jewish Psalms they set . . . the songs of the reformers, the revivalists, and the people who changed, and as with every generation, as with every continent, as with every human being, each of those display nuances, strengths, weaknesses, that we today stand on the shoulders of and can learn from. So, I think to lose all of that history is an incredibly dangerous thing for our generation. The revival that many of The Gospel Coalition leaders have seen in theology in our generation didn’t actually happen because they just got back into the Word of God, it’s because they discovered and learned from leaders of previous generations and right now, musicians have neither that humility, nor that wisdom.8
In this paper, I will explore how the Gettys and their frequent collaborator Stuart Townend engage with past musical—and doctrinal—traditions in their hymn writing, focusing on one song from their Hymns for the Christian Life collection of 2012 titled “Before You I Kneel (A Worker’s Prayer)” (also written with Jeff Taylor, a Nashville-based accordionist).9 In particular, I will consider the songwriters’ use of musical material from J. S. Bach’s popular chorale setting of “Zion hört die Wächter singen” (the second verse of the hymn by Philipp Nicolai) in their modern song, suggesting that Bach’s chorale setting may provide the hymn with relevant textual and theological meaning, as well as forming its musical foundation.10 Moreover, I will suggest that the use of Bach’s material allows the songwriters to graft this hymn—and themselves—into an interdenominational historical lineage of Protestant worship music, emphasizing the continuity and interconnectedness of church music through the centuries. But before we can understand how and why Bach’s chorale setting was used in the modern hymn, we must first examine its musical qualities and venture some ideas about its own theological mean- ing—as intended by Bach, but perhaps more relevantly, its theological meaning as interpreted by the songwriters of “Before You I Kneel (A Worker’s Prayer).”
“Zion hört die Wächter singen” functions as the fourth movement and the second chorale setting of Bach’s cantata BWV 140 Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, composed for the twenty-seventh day after Trinity (the liturgical context of this cantata will be discussed later in the paper). Originally, the chorale setting was scored in E-flat for a tenor soloist (or tenors) accompanied by two violins, a viola, and basso continuo, but the composer later created an organ transcription of the work. The text of Bach’s cantata movement is a poetic German adaptation of Matthew 25:1–13, the Parable of the Ten Virgins (see table 1 for the original German text of the relevant verse with Cathe- rine Winkworth’s 1858 poetic English translation of it).11 The hymn was itself “borrowed” from the Lutheran theologian, pastor, and hymn-writer Philipp Nicolai (1556–1608), who in turn may have adapted its tune from a pre-existing Meistersinger melody, according to Walter Blankenburg and Friedhelm Brusniak.12 Thus Bach was himself part of a lineage of musical borrowing in worship music: in fact, the incorporation of past musical styles and compositions was as characteristic of Bach’s music as it is of the Gettys’ and Townend’s. In the words of Eric Chafe:
J. S. Bach’s interaction with tradition, embodied in countless aspects of his oeuvre—his settings of the modal chorale melodies of the Lutheran church, to name but one—is one of the most interesting sides of his work. Bach’s capacity to evoke and revitalize past musical styles often involves specific religious contexts for which a sense of temporal distinctions is central.13
One of Bach’s most recognizable chorale settings, the fourth movement of the cantata is typically Bachian in featuring not one but two distinct melodic lines that are played simultaneously. There is of course Nicolai’s solid and unadorned vocal melody, but Bach did more than realize a suitable harmonic accompaniment for the borrowed material: he wrote a second, fully formed melodic line for the instrumental parts that has proved to be far more memorable than the hymn tune itself. The juxtaposition and interaction of these two distinct musical lines has been interpreted by Bach scholar E. Ann Matter as a musical representation of conjugal union between Christ and his Church, based on the pervasive wedding imagery in the cantata’s text.14 Her interpretation of the chorale setting’s meaning is not universally accepted, however. The study of Bach’s religious music has become increasingly controversial in the last two decades, firstly, because of the growing abundance of individual musical-textual interpretations, and secondly, because of modern debates about the degree to which the composer’s musical settings should be interpreted as meaningful versus simply musical. In her iconoclastic thesis “Bach among the Conservatives” (2006), Rebecca Joanne Lloyd radically breaks from the approaches of traditional Bach scholars like Matter, Eric Chafe, Michael Marissen, and the twentieth-century Bach re- search group Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft für theologische Bachforschung.15 Lloyd criticizes these scholars for equating Bach’s theology with Martin Luther’s; for using him as a banner-bearer of German “muscular” Christianity; and for approaching his music as “exegetical” (in other words, assuming that the music does not just “dramatically” reflect religious texts, but aims to theologically interpret them through music).16 As part of her thesis, Lloyd offers a new interpretation of this very same cantata, which she reads as a simple, “dramatic” representation of Christ’s union with the individual soul (the so-called unio mystica, which is considered a Christian heresy entertained by the Pietists), rejecting Matter’s more orthodox interpretation of the cantata’s conjugal imagery as depicting the union be- tween Christ and the whole body of believers that makes up the universal Church. Lloyd’s thesis is devoted to uprooting ingrained assumptions in musicological scholarship that Bach was in fact a “theologian”—or, at least, that he was an orthodox one—but ultimately, she just leaves us with yet another interpretation of the interaction between Bach’s music and its text. Interpretations of this particular cantata seem to be hopelessly entangled in the intricacies of historical theological debates within the Lutheran church. How are we to assess the meaning of this chorale setting in such muddy and obscure waters? And more importantly, does either Matter’s traditional or Lloyd’s radical interpretation of Bach’s cantata have any relevant bearing on the chorale setting’s inclusion in the modern hymn “Before You I Kneel”?
Perhaps not, according to Julian Mincham, who has offered another reading of this cantata that bypasses the orthodox/Pietist controversy entirely. In his Bach Cantatas project, Mincham suggests that Bach’s treatment of Nicolai’s hymn may not have been intended to represent the union of marriage, but the relationship between the “earthly” and the “Divine.” In his own words:
It is possible that Bach saw this as a symbol of the earthly and the spiritual, seemingly apart, dissimilar and diverse and yet, by reason of the Ordained Natural Order, ultimately fitting together and perfectly complementing each other. Thus we might consider the chorale as representing matters spiritual, with the foursquare, almost stolid string melody as earthly life and environment. Each may be depicted perfectly well in- dependently, but the fundamental message is that they have been conceived, by the Almighty, as the two parts of the same reality.17
Nicolai’s hymn, on which the chorale setting is based, certainly reflects the wedding theme from Matthew’s parable, and in other parts of Bach’s cantata, additional wedding imagery is featured from the Song of Solomon. However, the Parable of the Ten Virgins as found in Matthew’s Gospel is not—in fact—a description of Christ’s final union with the body of his church (or its individual believers, as the case may be): rather, it is an exhortation for earthly preparedness for that great day. It encourages listeners to remain alert, readying themselves for the second coming of Christ so they are not caught unaware. If interpreted as suggested by Mincham, the juxtaposed melodies of “Zion hört die Wächter singen” represent not the mystical union of Christ and the Church—or of Christ and the individual soul—but the relationship between the mundane rumblings of the earthly experience and the order and purpose of heavenly realities.
Mincham’s interpretation remains debatable: though Nicolai’s hymn itself was based on Matthew’s parable, Bach also included as recitatives preceding the cantata’s two arias some poetic material by an unknown author that focuses on marriage in fulfilment rather than expectation (lending weight to either Matter or Lloyd’s interpretations, perhaps). Nevertheless, I would argue that Mincham’s suggestions about the meaning of Bach’s chorale setting are the most relevant to this discussion for three reasons. Firstly, given that the purpose behind the parable in Matthew’s Gospel is quite clear in its original biblical context, I think it possible that Bach’s own under- standing of the hymn related as much to preparedness as final union. Lloyd might object to this suggestion because it makes the age-old assumption that Bach was intentionally engaging in theological in- terpretation of the text through his music. However, the reality is that when we approach set texts as music scholars, we always do assume that their composers engaged intentionally with the words, in ac- cordance with their particular understanding or “interpretation” of them, even if we disagree as to what that “interpretation” was: Lloyd herself demonstrated this through her reading of this cantata, in which she suggested that Bach was propounding Pietist theology in his setting of the wedding imagery. Secondly, the placement of this cantata within the liturgical calendar would support the suggestion that its primary focus was on preparedness (more on this soon). Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, I would argue that it does not ultimately matter whether Bach interpreted the text as Mincham, Matter, or even Lloyd have suggested. If we aim to understand the meaning of Bach’s borrowed material within the modern song by the Gettys, Taylor, and Townend, we should be less interested in Bach’s intentions for the chorale setting than in the modern reception of it. What we actually want to know is how Bach’s chorale setting would be interpreted by modern, interdenominational Protestant evangelicals like the Gettys and Townend. As Nicolai’s textual material has been derived from the Parable of the Ten Virgins from Matthew’s Gospel, I think we could make a strong argument that the modern hymn’s songwriters would interpret the text within its original biblical context rather than its historical Lutheran context: biblically, it was a parable about being prepared in this life for Christ’s return.
If we are to approach Bach’s music as per Mincham’s suggestion, then the “earthly” experience is represented in the chorale setting by the instrumental line. Bach’s instrumental accompaniment is constructed of four discrete melodic segments (see example 1) ranging from two to four bars in length. In the initial statement of the instrumental themes, preceding the entrance of the vocal melody, these segments are arranged into an AABCD form, but as the chorale setting progresses, the melodic phrases are rearranged in unexpected ways (see example 2 and also table 2 for a diagram of the formal arrangement of the instrumental part in relation to the vocal melody). All four units are rhythmically fast: though the bass is predominantly written in quarter notes, the melodic segments form a steady stream of eighth and sixteenth notes, punctuated by only a handful of eighth-note rests, most of which lead into the upbeat of the A segment. Each segment blends seamlessly into the next without pause or reflection, evoking the ceaselessness of earthly life; the segmentation of the melodic materials suggests the fragmentation and repetition of the earthly experience; the ordering and reordering of the melodic segments appears to lack both predictability and purpose.
The most recognizable of the chorale setting’s melodic segments—the instrumental A segment—is distinctive, featuring both large leaps and several accented non-chord tones: the eighth-note suspension on beat two and the eighth-note appoggiatura on beat three of its first bar lends the melody a sighing, striving quality. The restlessness of the segment’s rhythmic motion—when combined with the 4/4 “walking” meter and a bumpy contour—creates a laboring instrumental part, toiling without rest. The two-bar segment ends on a curious weak cadence in E-flat on the upbeat of the third quarternote: this awkward, unexpected conclusion sounds as if the melody rushed to its end, only to continue on again almost immediately. The two initial statements of this melody are written over an intriguing E-flat pedal, underscoring the earthly melody with a monotonous drone from the outset.
The two-bar B segment follows after another leap of a fifth to a B-flat anacrusis, succeeded by descending scalar passages, mostly in sixteenth notes, and leading to a half-cadence. Segment C is also only two bars, but it begins with syncopated anticipation tones followed by descending leaps, effectively leading the music out of the tonic and into the dominant (B-flat), ending on a half-cadence in the new key. Segment D begins on an upbeat and continues with an eighth-note scalar passage that foreshadows a dominant cadence on the first beat of the segment’s third measure; however, this is interrupted by an unexpected extension of a bar and a half, which plunges into a lower register. It seems that the “work” of the earthly line is never quite done.
If we are to interpret Bach’s instrumental line as a representa- tion of the “earthly” life—with its repetitive, constant wanderings, without obvious purpose or design—then Nicolai’s vocal line is used as a representation of the “Divine.” When simultaneously sounded, these two melodies illuminate the mysterious relationship between the earthly life and heavenly realities. Contrasted with Bach’s instru- mental part, Nicolai’s tenor vocal melody sounds clear and slow, as if soaring above the pedestrian, “walking” instrumental part below. The Parable of the Ten Virgins specifically addresses the importance of readiness, stressing that the return of the Bridegroom (Christ) will be unexpected and cannot be predicted by earthly events. This aspect of the text is, I would suggest, reflected by the relationship between the instrumental and vocal parts in Bach’s chorale setting: though the music fits together, the lines are formally, rhythmically, melodically, and, at times, harmonically distinct.
As already noted, the melody of Nicolai’s hymn was probably not written by Nicolai himself, but adapted from a Meistersinger song.18 As such, the hymn is in the form AAB, also known as bar form, the musical structure associated with the Meistersinger tradition of German poet-musicians.19 The hymn determines the chorale setting’s overarching structure, but interestingly, the form of the instrumental part does not align clearly with the vocal melody, and the imposition of the hymn’s melody over the instrumental part is a source of surprise in this work: the introduction ends in bar 12, yet the vocal line does not enter until the third beat of bar thirteen (an anacrusis), entering unexpectedly and maintaining its autonomy throughout. Not only do the three phrases of the vocal melody’s Stollen (A section) enter on unusual and unpredictable beats (the first phrase enters on beat three, the second on beat four, and the third on beat two), but in the Abgesang (B section), the vocal line exhibits metrical displacement: a descending line from B-flat to E-flat starting on beat four in its initial statement is immediately echoed, but displaced to the second beat. The movements and entrances of the vocal line cannot be predicted from the instrumental line below, even though the hymn’s AAB structure ultimately determines the chorale setting’s overall form.
As well as being formally distinct from the instrumental line, the vocal line of the chorale is of course rhythmically and melodically distinct too, consisting mostly of quarter and half notes that arpeg- giate or elaborate the I, V, and vi chords. More interestingly, though, the vocal line is also harmonically distinct from the instrumental line. Retaining the characteristics of Nicolai’s straightforward Lutheran hymn tune, the vocal melody remains in the tonic key throughout, even while the instrumental line explores other tonal centers, as mentioned above (primarily the dominant B-flat, but C and G minor in passing, too). The harmonic interaction between these lines could have interesting implications for its underlying theological meaning. The instrumental introduction (consisting of AABCD) ends in the dominant key, as segment C modulates to B-flat, ending on a half cadence in that key, with segment D providing a four-bar consequent phrase that ends on an authentic cadence in B-flat. Without the stabilizing influence of the “Divine” vocal line, the instrumental melody wanders off into a non-tonic key within twelve bars. But in preparation to receive the vocal part, the earthly melody returns again to its rightful key, ready to harmonize with the tenor’s entrance. This oc- curs again in the instrumental interlude following the completion of the vocal line’s repeat of the A section (the second Stollen). The C segment ends on an elided dominant cadence, and after a brief excursus back to the tonic key, the D segment returns to conclude on the dominant before the beginning of the Abgesang (the vocal line’s B sec- tion)—once more in the tonic key. The instrumental line “awakens” or prepares for the coming of the vocal line by re-establishing itself in the right key. In the final iterations of the instrumental segments C and D—which consecutively finish the chorale setting—the wayward dominant tonality has been conquered, and both vocal and instrumental melodies end in E-flat major. The convincing synthesis of the vocal and instrumental lines—distinct in form, melody, rhythm, and harmony—could be interpreted as an intricate manifestation of the text’s theological meaning: the imposition of Divine order on the apparent chaos of earthly life and the importance of preparedness for the unexpected coming of God.
This analysis has found some compelling support for Mincham’s idea that Bach’s chorale setting depicts the interaction between the “earthly” and the “Divine”—an interpretation that would introduce some meaningful topical resonances between Bach’s borrowed material and the Gettys’ modern hymn on earthly work. But does this assume too much of the composers’ intent in borrowing ma- terial from Bach? To answer this, we should consider the hymn’s writers. On the Gettys’ website, the artists describe themselves thus:
Keith and Kristyn Getty occupy a unique space in the world of music today as preeminent modern hymn writers. In reinventing the traditional hymn form, they have created a catalogue of songs teaching Christian doctrine and crossing the genres of traditional, classical, folk and contemporary composition which are sung the world over.20
Engaging with “classical” music is an explicit part of the Gettys’ artistic ethos as “crossover” musicians, and the inclusion of Bach’s melody in their hymn certainly fulfils the requirements for a “classical crossover.” However, the incorporation of explicitly Christian musical materials in the Gettys’/Townend’s music as a purely musical element—without consideration for its historical context or textual associations—seems inconsistent with their other public statements about hymn writing. For example, the description of the Hymns for the Christian Life Project on the Gettys’ website reads:
“‘Hymns for the Christian Life’ reflects both the Celtic and American folk traditions, old and new world brought together, just as we lean on the rich legacy of Church music we already have with songs written for the life of the Church today” (emphasis mine).21 This collection was created in active dialogue with the “legacy” of church music, suggesting that any allusions to preexistent church music within the hymnody would be meaningful and intentional rather than just stylistic. Moreover, we can turn back to Don Carson’s interview with Keith Getty and Matt Boswell in 2014: in the excerpt already seen above, Keith Getty expressed a desire to maintain a connection with the “great hymns of the church fathers, the great settings of the Jew- ish Psalms they set . . . the songs of the reformers, the revivalists.” He said that “we [Christian musicians] today stand on the shoulders of and can learn from” church musicians from previous generations.22 In a separate interview with Adrian Warnock in 2008, the Gettys’ collaborator Stuart Townend made a statement that reflects a similar attitude towards historical worship music: “It’s a shame that some think lively worship has to be the modern stuff. People have been getting excited for centuries.” Here we see Townend challenging a modern assumption that before the advent of “worship bands,” church music was backward, boring, emotionally disengaged, or irrelevant.23 Both Townend and Getty have indicated that they see modern worship music as a part of a historical lineage, but what is particularly clear from Keith Getty’s phrasing is that the music of his self-described musical heritage is closely associated with the key events that form a part of his theological heritage: he mentions the mu- sic of “the church fathers” (denoting the leaders of the Early Church), “the reformers” (Martin Luther and then the Calvinist reformers who marked a return to a scripturally based understanding of the Christian faith), and “the revivalists” (possibly alluding to the Methodist Revivals, Thomas Chalmers and the Free Church of Scotland, and the First and Second Great Awakenings in America). Getty’s list is remarkably heterogenous: all Protestant , but of differing denominations (though, in fact, even the Protestant church’s roots in Catholic liturgy is acknowledged by the Gettys on their album Hymns for the Christian Life with the song titled “Kyrie Eleison”).24 The interdenominational quality of Keith’s answer is in line with the Gettys’ and Townend’s public images as “Evangelical Christians,” rather than members of a particular Protestant denomination. Keith Getty’s words are chosen carefully to acknowledge a broad base of Protestant influence and history, but it is evident from his phrasing that all the musical traditions that he judges to be worthy models for modern worship music are valued primarily for their theological and doctrinal messages rather than for their musical qualities or styles. Significantly, in the interview, Getty goes on to detail how the modern evangelical revival has sprung from theologians and churches looking not just at scripture, but also at historical models for understanding and handling it; he then suggests that a revival in church music should be achieved in the same way—by looking to the historical church and seeing how it handled music in worship.
Given Keith Getty’s focus on both historical tradition and theology in his answer, it seems unlikely that he and his co-writers would incorporate music from a distinguished Christian composer from the classical “canon” without intentionally engaging with and acknowledging the borrowed music’s theological meaning. Furthermore, in a brief interview about the Hymns for the Christian Life project, Krystin Getty talked about the challenges she faced in forging lyrics that adequately explored all the theological issues surrounding the complex topic of work in “Before You I Kneel (A Worker’s Prayer)”: “When we wrote this song on the working day, a hymn for work . . . there were so many new concepts that I had never even had to work into lyrics before, and that was exciting.”25 I would suggest that as a lyricist, Krystin intentionally used Bach’s chorale setting— with its possible juxtaposition of the earthly and the Divine—as a helpful framework around which to build a prayer about earthly strivings in the context of heavenly realities.
I have argued that the text—as well as the biblical and historical contexts—of Bach’s chorale setting proved significant to the songwriters of “Before You I Kneel (A Worker’s Prayer).” But I would suggest that its liturgical context was significant as well. The liturgical calendar, developed within the Catholic Church, has remained an important part of the Lutheran tradition (and many other Protestant denominations as well). As explained by Bach scholar Elizabeth B. Joyce:
The church year begins with the first Sunday in the season of Advent. On the broadest level, the year is divided into two halves. The first deals with the unfolding of Christ’s life and work. This half of the year builds to an emotional apex at Easter and the following fifty days, during which the Church celebrates Jesus’ resurrection, ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The themes prevalent during the Trinity season center around faith and doctrine, including such diverse topics as the appropriate manner of Christian living, preparation for current persecution and suffering, and the contrast of this life with the next. The central challenge is to maintain one’s faith. As the Trinity season progresses, eschatological scriptural readings prepare the Christian for leaving the world. With Advent, an expectation of the second coming of Christ merges into waiting for the birth of Christ; the cycle begins again.26
As already noted, Bach’s cantata Wachet auf was performed on the 27th Sunday after Trinity, in the second “half” of the liturgical year: this meant that it was performed in the part of the year that focuses on how Christians are to live while awaiting God’s entrance into the world. In the words of Eric Chafe, “The Trinity season represents the era of the church in the world.”27 As a part of the Gettys’ Hymns for the Christian Life project, “Before You I Kneel (A Worker’s Prayer)” explores how Christians are to work in the everyday while preparing for Christ’s coming: the overlap of topical themes between this song and the second half of the liturgical year seems too exact to be coincidental. Keith Getty himself identified the influence of liturgy on his songwriting in The Gospel Coalition interview. At one point in the discussion, Don Carson asked Keith Getty the following:
So, let me ask a slightly presumptuous question: what do you and Kristyn . . . and Stuart Townend do in terms of choosing topics? Do you think through at some point: “what Christian themes have we been overlooking? What . . . themes have we ignored, or . . . that we’re not singing about that we should, we should pay more attention to?” Do you . . . think about things like that?28
To this, Keith Getty answered:
Sure, though I guess there’s two answers to that. In terms of our own short biography, we began just in the frustration of group Bible studies, of trying to set the Apostles’ Creed. So we began with that, and that was where the first collection, “In Christ Alone” and so on, came from, then from that we expanded to looking I’m very prone to liturgy, so I thought looking through the service of worship, looking through the church’s year, and so we began to fill in the gaps of liturgy, and then two years ago, we took on another project called Hymns for the Christian Life, which was looking at subjects like work, the social needs of those around us, you know, fellowship and reconciliation.29
Though the Gettys’ and Townend’s hymns are used for corporate worship in non-denominational Protestant churches internationally, Keith Getty professedly draws on his heritage of church liturgy to shape and direct his song writing.30 The Hymns for theChristian Life project was not explicitly intended to “fill gaps in the liturgy” like the Gettys’ first project, but I believe the songwriters’ selection of topics for this collection was informed and guided by church liturgy and by historical composers who had themselves treated these “earthly” Trinity topics before—composers like Bach.
So, how did the Gettys incorporate Bach’s borrowed material into their modern worship song? The first thing to note about their borrowing is the issue of form. Significantly, Bach’s musical materials have been forged into a hymn. Corporate singing in Protestant church services attempts to recreate the musical worship of the Early Church, particularly as recorded in the Bible: in his letter to the Ephesian Christians, Paul writes “but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:18b–20, ESV); similarly, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul assumes that worship singing is practiced by all believers when he says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (3:16); and in Acts, Luke records, “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them” (16:25). The modern hymn borrows its melody from Bach’s chorale setting, but its form and function make a definite statement about the role of music in Christian worship that is at some variance with the musical tradition from which it borrows. Of course, Bach’s cantata is itself based on Nicolai’s hymn (though Nicolai’s melody is not the musical material borrowed by the Gettys, Townend, and Newman), so again, Bach has set a precedent for the re-forging of music from past musical traditions to fit modern needs and worship contexts.
In the modern song, Bach’s original musical material undergoes considerable manipulation to fit within the formal conventions of a hymn: to use J. Peter Burkholder’s more precise definitions for musical borrowing, the hymn’s melody is a “paraphrase” of Bach’s, using his materials to forge a new tune which, at some points, copies the original exactly (what we might more commonly call a “quotation”).31 As the song is in strophic form, the writers have organized the chorale setting’s melodic segments in a consistent, repeated order throughout, unlike the dynamic patchwork found in Bach’s original instrumental accompaniment (see example 3 above and example 4 below). Each verse is broken into two sets of four-bar parallel phrases, forming an antecedent and consequent. Notably, the hymn score features no introduction, but does include a notated instrumental interlude after the first and second verses, consisting of nearly the entire segment A from Bach’s chorale setting. Keith and Kristyn Getty’s recording of the hymn adds no extra vocal materials (bridges, etc.), but it does highlight the hymn’s source material through extended quotations of Bach’s original melody, going beyond the brief allusion in the instrumental interlude from the hymn score.32 Like in Bach’s original arrangement, the hymn recording starts with a statement of segment A (in an almost complete form) on violin, mirroring the chorale setting’s instrumentation. This interlude reappears after verse 1, but after verse 2, there is a complete statement of the chorale setting’s instrumental introduction—including modulation. Verse 3 then picks up again in the “right” key, and after a short extension, ends with another adjusted statement of segment A (see table 4).
The writers of “Before You I Kneel” also make considerable melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic adjustments to Bach’s musical materials to make a congregation-friendly hymn. Most obviously, they adapt Bach’s swift, bumpy melody to produce a singable, relatively unsyncopated vocal line that nevertheless retains the essential characteristics of the original. The first and second phrases of the hymn are based on segment A of Bach’s chorale setting, beginning with a leap of a fourth to the tonic, followed by stepwise motion up to the third scale degree. The accented passing tones are omitted, though the melody’s essential contour remains the same (see example 4 for a comparison of the relationship between the original and adapted melodies).33 The latter two phrases incorporate fragments of Bach’s segments D and B: like segment D, the hymn’s consequent phrases begin on the upper tonic followed by a descending scalar passage, broken by a neighbor tone (of sorts) on the fourth note. In the trans- posed segment D, this is A-G♯-A, but in the hymn, it is changed to A- F♯-A, so as to avoid the tonicization of the dominant. Interestingly, the troublesome C theme, which modulates into the dominant, does not have an adapted counterpart in the hymn. As an exposition on God-glorifying earthly toil, the song never leaves the “right” key: it is diatonic from beginning to end.
The songwriters also make some necessary adjustments to the rhythms of Bach’s original melodic materials. Both the hymn and the chorale setting are in common time, but the latter’s quick rhythm is augmented in the hymn, making it more suitable for congregational singing: sixteenth notes become eighth notes, and eighth notes become quarter notes. The harmonic rhythm is slowed considerably, too: Bach’s instrumental accompaniment features a new harmony on nearly every beat (and at times, twice per beat). Traditional, organ- or piano-led hymns can easily accommodate a new harmony on each beat, but this modern hymn favors a simplified harmonic motion that allows it to be led comfortably by guitars and contemporary music groups as well as by keyboardists. On the whole, the harmonic rhythm of “Before You I Kneel” is one chord for every half-measure (two beats). There are three occasions where there is an increase in harmonic movement (bars 11, 12, and 15), but there are also several points in which this pace slows down to only one harmony per bar (bars 3, 9, 10, 13, 14, and the final measure).
In his chorale setting, Bach employed a characteristically varied harmonic vocabulary: he embellished his harmonic progression with pedal tones (as in the first, second, and sixth iterations of segment A), along with many inversions, secondary dominants, and— of course—modulations. However, in order to make the earthly melody suitable as a hymn, adjustments had to be made: “Before You I Kneel” has a straight-forward harmonic scheme, suited to its diatonic melody. It features no secondary dominants, and only one suspension. See table 5 for a diagram of the hymn’s harmonic progression.
Finally, we can turn to the specifics of the hymn’s text, evaluating how it fits into the theological framework of Bach’s chorale setting. The song is sung as a prayer—as made explicit in its title; the Parable of the Ten Virgins, as found in the Gospel of Matthew and adapted by Nicolai, is not referenced directly in the hymn, but the extrinsic text does provide a framework of meaning for the modern song. The context of work is, from the hymn’s outset, framed by the relationship between the earthly and the Divine, and the theme of readiness is present: readiness for the return of Jesus through earthly submission and attentiveness to his will in the believer’s earthly labors, but also readiness to meet the Divine within the incessant cyclicity of earthly work itself. In the first verse, the text says:
Before You I kneel, my Master and Maker, to offer the works of my hands. For this is the day you’ve given Your servant; I will rejoice and be glad. For the strength I have to live and breathe, for each skill Your grace has given me; for the needs and opportunities that will glorify Your great Name.
Why rejoice at work? Work is tiring and arduous (as the song implies in the second verse to come), but the songwriters are expressing a Christian joy in the earthly present because of a belief that God cares about the daily striving of believers, is present for it, and works out his plan through earthly striving—”the works of [the believer’s] hands.” This verse also implies that God governs and orders daily work through the acknowledgment that time itself is something that he gives: “this is the day you’ve given your servant.” And there is a sense of preparing for God’s intervention in the world in the last line, bringing the verse to a close with a focus on the glorification of God’s name in the present—glorification that will reach its fullness with the return of Christ at the end of time.
The second verse opens with a prayer for God’s goodness to be present in earthly work, to bless it but perhaps also to redeem it and use it for good purpose—for God “to cover” the believer’s earthly work.
Before You I kneel and ask for Your goodness to cover the work of my hands. For patience and peace to shape all my labour; Your grace for thorns in my path. Flow within me like a living stream; Wear away the stones of pride and greed, till Your ways are dwelling deep in me and a harvest of life is grown.
Lines two and three ask for the believer to be equipped to execute this earthly work—focusing on spiritual strength to meet difficulties, rather than asking for the removal of metaphorical “thorns” along the way. Moreover, the third and fourth line make it clear that it is through the difficulties of work that spiritual strength is gained—like a muscle being exercised. This, the text suggests, is one of God’s purposes for work: to grow “a harvest of life” in the believer.
In the third and last verse, the focus pans out to reveal the finiteness of earthly work, to remind the worshiper of the temporality of earthly striving, and to again focus on the intervention of the Di- vine in the world:
Before You I kneel, our Master and Maker; establish the work of our hands. And order our steps to seek first Your Kingdom in every small and great task. May we live the Gospel of Your grace; serve Your purpose in our fleeting days; then our lives will bring eternal praise and all glory to Your great Name.
From the first line, we see the earthly intersecting with the heavenly as the prayer seeks for earthly work to be “established”: to be given purpose and a place in God’s permanent design for the world. Inter- estingly, the next line explicitly expresses a desire for God to impose his “order” on earthly work so that it fulfills his plans. The work of these “fleeting days” is all for God’s glory and done as the believer waits and anticipates his return in readiness—part of the “eternal praise” that the believer’s completed life will bring to God’s name. Throughout, the hymn encourages the believer to remain prayerful in earthly labor, waiting for the coming of God’s kingdom with patience, but also waiting with intentionality, striving to be prepared for his coming—prepared not by a wealth of industry or material productivity, but by the peace (verse 2, line 2) and humility (verse 2, line 3) brought about by patiently laboring under the divine reality of God’s sovereignty.
I have suggested that the borrowed musical material from Bach’s setting of “Zion hört die Wächter singen” imports specific meanings into this hymn that would inform our understanding of the latter’s music and text. In doing so, I have made various conjectures about the songwriters’ interpretation of Bach’s chorale and their intentions in incorporating it in their hymn; these conjectures may be criticized for being too sophisticated or not sophisticated enough. In any case, I would argue that the relationship between the two works must be interrogated closely in order to form a credible interpretation of the hymn’s meaning. Musical allusions always produce meaning because they forge intertextuality between works, inviting us to search beyond the surface of the music and its text, to ponder the significance of the borrowed material, and to ask of it “why are you here?” Through their act of musical borrowing, the Gettys, Townend, and Taylor invite us to approach their hymn intertextually, challenging us to consider how its meaning has been refined or altered by its relationship with Bach’s chorale setting, and calling us to situate its message within the intricate weave of biblical Truth and the rich his- tory of Christian worship music.
Read about Matt Boswell’s hymn collection and recordings at Messenger Hymns, website, all websites here accessed June 3, 2020, https://www.messengerhymns.com. Boswell is involved with the group Doxology & Theology, which conducts conferences and publishes materials on how to lead worship well. See Matt Boswell (ed.), Doxology and Theology: How the Gospel Forms the Worship Leader (Nashville: B&H Books, 2013), and Doxology & Theology, website, https://www.doxologyandtheology.com/. Boswell is a founding pastor of Trails Church in Prospero, Texas and since 2019, he has also been Assistant Professor of Church Music and Worship at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. See “Matt Boswell, a Leading Figure in Church Music and Worship, Joins Southern Seminary Faculty,” May 28, 2019, Southern News, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, https://news.sbts.edu/2019/05/28/ matt-boswell-leading-figure-church-music-worship-joins-southern-seminary- faculty/. ↩︎
“2013: The UK’s Top 100 Hymns,” Songs of Praise, BBC One, website, accessed June 3, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/ 42TSJ0LNMfp0h0wNvxqlw93/2013-the-uks-top-100-hymns. ↩︎
See “Keith and Krystin Getty Win Dove Award for ‘Inspirational Album of the Year,’” October 16, 2019, Getty Music, website, accessed June 3, 2020, https://www.gettymusic.com/news/2019doveaward. See also playlists from the major UK Christian radio station UCB1 (United Christian Broadcasting Network), available online and through digital radio (DAB radio). Christian radio stations in the US are numerous, but the major online radio station CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network)—available online and through an app—provides a good indication of a typical line-up for Christian radio stations in the US. Interestingly, the Gettys are not even highlighted performers on CBN’s Praise channel, which states on its homepage ‘Worship like it’s Sunday morning, all week long!’ See UCB1, https://www.ucb.co.uk/radioplayer/uk/, and CBN1, https://www1.cbn.com/radio/praise, both accessed June 3, 2020. See also “About Keith & Kristyn Getty,” Getty Music, website, accessed June 3, 2020, https://www.gettymusic.com/about-us.↩︎
There are some other important songwriting groups that focus on congregationally focused Christian music. Notables include the very successful Hillsong Worship group, part of Hillsong Church, a non-denominational evangelical church originating in New South Wales, Australia, but now with churches worldwide. Their songs, however, tend to be in radio-friendly pop formats. See Hillsong Worship, website, all sites here accessed June 3, 2020, https://hillsong.com/worship/. Another important group is Emu Music, which is a collaborative group of Christian songwriters and recording artists that are based between Sydney, Australia, and Oxford, UK; the musicians involved with Emu Music compose congregation-appropriate songs, perform in concert, record, and run Word in Song conferences in churches around the world. See “About Us,” Emu Music, website, https://emumusic.com/collections/zabout-us-1. Indelible Grace, based out of Nashville, is another group of songwriters and artists that have focused on revivifying hymn-based worship music by composing new music for old hymns. See Indelible Grace, website, http://www.igracemusic.com/.↩︎
For example, nine songs by one or both of the Gettys are included in the Mission Praise, a major modern hymnbook including over 1,000 old and new songs for church worship, published by HarperCollins, now in two volumes. Mission Praise (London: HarperCollins, 2015). ↩︎
A good example of a rock-influenced arrangement would be Keith and Krystin Getty’s “Come, People of the Risen King,” track 2 on their 2009 album Awaken the Dawn, Getty Music Label. Also, listen to the lively, Irish- and blues- influenced instrumental track “Village Reel,” as well as the rich fusion of country, gospel, and Irish elements in the canon-like arrangement of “Kyrie Eleison,” tracks 6 and 8 respectively, on Hymns for the Christian Life, released 2012 by Getty Music Label. ↩︎
According to the Gettys’ website, “in the more contemporary church, more than 60 of their songs are featured on top 2,000 CCLI charts between the UK and USA.” See “About Keith & Kristyn Getty,” Getty Music. CCLI is Christian Copyright Licensing International, which acts as a performance rights organization for Christian artists around the world, monitoring the performance of congregational songs via projector as well as through printed materials. See also “CCLI Top 100,” SongSelect, CCLI, which showed that eleven Getty songs were in the top 100 songs performed in churches on the access date of June 3, 2020, https://songselect.ccli.com/search/results?List=top100&PageSize=100&CurrentPa ge=1. ↩︎
Keith Getty and Matt Boswell interviewed by Don Carson on March 24, 2014, “Truth We Believe and Songs We Sing: How Important Is Theology in Worship?” The Gospel Coalition, website, both Carson’s and Getty’s quotations come from 3:06–4:34, transcription by author, accessed June 3, 2020, https://youtu.be/- msx TteHY. ↩︎
Keith Getty, Kristyn Getty, Jeff Taylor, and Stuart Townend, “Before You I Kneel (A Worker’s Prayer),” Hymns for the Christian Life (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2013). ↩︎
Johann Sebastian Bach, Cantata BWV 140 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1881). ↩︎
Philipp Nicolai, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Frankfurt: Philipp Nicolai, 1599), and Catherine Winkworth and Philipp Nicolai, “Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying,” Amazing Grace: Hymn Texts for Devotional Use, edited by Bertus Frederick Polman, Marilyn Kay Stulken, and James Rawlings Sydnor (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 54–55. ↩︎
Walter Blankenburg and Friedhelm Brusniak, “Nicolai, Philipp,” Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com, accessed June 3, 2020. ↩︎
Eric Chafe, Analyzing Bach Cantatas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3–4. ↩︎
E. Ann Matter, “The Love between the Bride and the Bridegroom in Cantata 140 from the 12th Century to Bach’s Day,” in Die Quellen Johann Sebastian Bachs: Bachs Musik im Gottesdienst (Heidelberg, Germany: Manutius, 1998), 107–17. ↩︎
A good example of these scholars’ approaches appears in Michael Marissen’s Bach & God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3–4: “I suggest in several chapters of this book that there are, however and moreover, vocal works of Bach’s in which his musical setting puts a religious spin on its religious text. That is to say, in these especially nuanced and interpretively noteworthy cases, ‘pure’ aesthetic appreciation of Bach’s pitches, rhythms, and tone colors would lead to serious misunderstanding of the repertory”; and also 13, ‘‘I would like to put forward the notion that Bach’s musical settings of church cantata poetry can project theological meanings that are purposefully different from those arrived at by simply reading his librettos.” See also Rebecca Joanne Lloyd, “Bach among the Conservatives: The Quest for Theological Truth” (doctoral thesis, King’s College London, 2006), 9–37. ↩︎
See Lloyd. The multiple strands of Lloyd’s argument run throughout her thesis, but see particularly page 7 to find her discussion on how Bach has been conflated with Luther because of the former’s service in the German reformed church, though the two men were not contemporaries and may have differed in their approaches to worship and theology; see pages 30–54 (particularly 37) to find Lloyd’s argument that Bach has been made a poster-boy of a particular brand of “muscular German Christianity” by a small but influential faction of conservative Lutheran scholars in the 20th century, and that his musical settings have therefore been interpreted as propounding anachronistic Lutheran theologies (it is in countering this point that she suggests her alternate reading of Wachet auf); see pages 41 and 168 to find her views on the commonly held assumption that Bach was not just a musician but also a musical “exegete”; see pages 133, 157–62, and particularly 173 to find her argument that scholars should approach Bach as a composer rather than a theologian, and his settings of religious texts as “dramatic” interpretations rather than theological “exegeses” (though the distinction between these two methods of musical setting is not clearly defined by Lloyd in her thesis). ↩︎
Julian Mincham, “Chapter 55: BWV 140 Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” The Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach: A Listener and Student Guide, website, accessed June 3, 2020, http://www.jsbachcantatas.com/documents/chapter-55-bwv- 140.htm. ↩︎
See Blankenburg and Brusniak, “Nicolai, Philipp,” Grove Music Online.↩︎
See John Milsom and Basil Smallman, “Meistersinger,” in The Oxford Companion to Music, www.oxfordmusiconline.com, accessed June 3, 2020. ↩︎
See “Projects: Hymns for the Christian Life,” Getty Music, website, accessed June 3, 2020, https://store.gettymusic.com/uk/album/hymns-for-the- christian-life/. ↩︎
“Truth We Believe and Songs We Sing: How Important Is Theology in Worship?” The Gospel Coalition, 3:06–4:34. ↩︎
Keith and Krystin Getty, “Kyrie Eleison,” track 8 on Hymns for the Christian Life, released 2012 by Getty Music Label. ↩︎
“Keith & Krystin Getty ‘Hymns for the Christian Life’ EPK,” on “Projects: Hymns for the Christian Life,” Getty Music, video, relevant portion from Krystin Getty found at 3:56–4:17, transcription by author, accessed June 3, 2020, https://store.gettymusic.com/uk/album/hymns-for-the-christian-life/. ↩︎
Elizabeth B. Joyce, “Representation of ‘The World’ in the Church Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2009), 2–3. ↩︎
It is also worth noting that though he now attends a non- denominational church, Stuart Townend has roots in the Anglican (Church of England) tradition, which is also liturgical. “Stuart Townend,” We Are Worship, website, accessed June 3, 2020, https://www.weareworship.com/uk/worship- leaders/stuart-townend/. ↩︎
J. Peter Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field,” Notes 50, no. 3 (1994): 851–70, here 854. ↩︎
Keith and Krystin Getty, “Before You I Kneel (A Worker’s Prayer),” track 5 on Hymns for the Christian Life, released 2012 by Getty Music Label. ↩︎
See Keith Getty, Kristyn Getty, Jeff Taylor, and Stuart Townend, “Before You I Kneel (A Worker’s Prayer),” Hymns for the Christian Life (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2013). ↩︎
