“Thank you for playing the Easter Songs!”
I had just finished playing When I Survey the Wondrous Cross for my April/Easter program and an older lady with a curiously misformed jaw was shaking my hand. She continued “I lost my voice to throat cancer, I can’t sing anymore. But I loved those Easter hymns about Jesus!”
What do you say to someone who has lost something as precious as their voice?
I may be only twenty with a perfectly healthy jaw but I could commiserate a little with this lady. I don’t sing. My voice breaks quicker than a hard sour candy that just got stepped on. But like the lady who was patting my hand, I have always loved hymns. To balance my love of words with my lack of singing, I arrange my own versions of hymns for my harp around a technique my teacher calls “word painting;” I make the sounds imitate the meaning of the lyrics. With instrumental hymns, the expressions of music can dramatize a sentiment that we have sung so long we have forgotten what it means. In my own arrangements of hymns on my CD The Joy We Share, I carefully thought about each of the hymns and their lyrics as I worked through harmonies, dynamics and tempos. Listen to my arrangement of the Easter hymn When I Survey the Wondrous Cross below as I explain.
The first verse counts everything as loss in comparison to the love of Christ. To mirror this emotion I begin the melody simply with single notes, ignoring “richer” harmonies. The second verse laments the suffering of Christ so I transpose the melody into a minor key with piercing embellishments to provide the extra prick of thorns. The final verse “demands my all” so I throw all the grander of the bass into the music and try to cover all of the harp octaves in the finale. This interpretation helps me understand the words . . . even when I can’t sing.
But the lady I knelt next to after playing that song understood something more about those lyrics–she had lost something she took pride in but continued to focus on “love so amazing, so divine.”
So to my new friend with throat cancer I said “But you have the words in your heart–and that is where they matter!”
“That’s right!” she agreed “I know ’em and I believe ’em. I hold His love in my heart.”
Listen to my recording of When I Survey The Wondrous Cross and download this song and other Easter favorites from my CD The Joy We Share here or on iTunes. Check out my YouTube Channel for more hymns.
When I Survey The Wondrous Cross
When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.
See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
Words by Issac Watts