Hymn of the Week: “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”
“O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”
Words: Charles Wesley
Tune "Azmon": Lowell Mason
This hymn is an interesting melange of English, European and American creativity and piety. It is rich in Biblical imagery, a hymn of exuberant praise and of inextinguishable hope for the coming of the kingdom of God.
The words to this hymn were written by Charles Wesley (1707-1788) to honor the one-year anniversary of his adult “conversion” to Christianity. The eighteenth and youngest child of the Anglican minister Samuel Wesley and his wife Susanna, Charles experienced a profound spiritual awakening when he was 31 years old, and a year later, wrote the words to this hymn to honor that anniversary. He was a leader of the Methodist movement founded by his elder brother John Wesley, although, unlike his brother, he never officially left the Anglican Church.
A prolific writer, Charles penned about 6,500 hymns in his lifetime! Among his most familiar, from the 1982 Hymnal, are “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”; “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”; “Ye Servants of God”; and “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending.” A tireless evangelizer, he traveled and preached in the field (literally) for over 25 years, accompanied by his wife, Sarah, for the last 15 years of this calling. Of their three surviving children (five died young), the two boys, Samuel and Charles Jr., were musical prodigies who followed in their father’s footsteps and had brilliant careers as composers and organists.
The tune Azmon (from Numbers 34:4-5 – a city south of Canaan) was composed by Lowell Mason (1792-1872), an important music minister in American Protestant churches and a prominent music educator. He spent much of his professional life in Boston, as President of the Handel and Haydn Society and an organist and choir conductor in various churches, before moving on to New York City, where he continued his successful career. He also traveled abroad and, upon his return, enthusiastically promoted the popular European idea of congregational singing accompanied by organ. Mason’s influence was such that the American tradition of shape note music and fugal congregational singing was eradicated from most parishes.
Among Mason’s best known sacred works are the arrangement of “Joy to the World” we sing each Christmas, and his original tunes for “Nearer My God to Thee,” and “My Faith Looks Up to Thee.” But another composition he wrote in the 1830’s, when he was superintendent of the Boston public schools, possibly eclipses his 1,600 hymns, a song that has tripped off many thousands of tongues: “Mary Had A Little Lamb.”
Faithfully yours,
Mary Therese
