Some hymn tunes

I have a Pandora subscription. I listen to it in my office (if I were less reticent to buy gadgets that might be obsoleted eight months or so from now, I'd consider buying a radio with the capacity to pick it up via my home wifi).

Right now, I have a channel on that's kind of become a big mishmash of stuff. It started out as Strauss waltzes, but I just whitelisted anything it played that I liked (to try to cut down on the volume of screechy soprano opera areas. I don't mind, and even like, some of the tenor and baritone stuff they play, but the high-range women singing hurts my ears sometimes).

Right now it's playing "Alleluia, sing to Jesus" - a hymn set to the old hymn-tune Hyfrydol. (I know it best as "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus," which is one of my favorite Advent hymns, partly because I like the graceful tune).

A couple weeks ago the new songleader tried to get us to sing "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah" and we couldn't do it. Or at least I couldn't easily. Because it was set to a different tune than what was familiar to me (I know it best from the Welsh tune known as Cwm Rhondda) and I kept having conflict in my brain between what I was hearing (and reading from the page; I do read music of course) and what my memory was telling me.

(And I LIKE Cwm Rhondda much better as a tune for it; it somehow seems grander)

A lot of churches these days have gone mostly to using praise songs or choruses as their sung music in the service. I get that for a lot of people that works, that a lot of people find that kind of music moving and useful to them. But I don't. I like the old hymns. I like the more complex language and the tunes that are so familiar to me (my mother used to sing them around the house, my grandmother sang some of them). I suspect my preference for what is called "classical" music may also play a role in this.

I also like learning some of the stories of the hymn-writers. A lot of them seemed to live with some kind of infirmity (Fanny Crosby was blind) or to have suffered through great loss (Horatio Spafford lost all four of his daughters when the "Ville du Havre" steamship wrecked. The tune he wrote later, he named Ville du Havre, and the words he wrote for it are It Is Well With My Soul)

Part of it is that I do find the older hymns (both music and words) more aesthetically pleasing to me (and I do get that it's a matter of taste; I just hope there won't come a day when I am in such a minority that I can't find a service to attend where any of the hymns are sung). But I think also, again, it's that feeling of "shaking hands with the past" like I get from knitting some of the old, old patterns. It gives me a feeling of roots and connectedness even though I live very far from family (and anyway, in my family there ISN'T really an "old family home" anywhere; the past-several-generations of ancestors on both sides moved around a lot, so I don't have any location of the US I could call my 'ancestral home,' and I'm such a mutt, genealogically speaking, that I can't really talk about "the Auld Sod" or the Motherland or anything like that.)