Extra-canonical Palm Sunday melody

As I've noted before, there are two obligatory Palm Sunday hymns in an Episcopal (or American Anglican) church: “All glory, laud and honor” and “Ride on, ride on in Majesty.”  Apparently they are obligatory for Lutheran congregations too, and in 2015 the LCMS talk show Issues Etc. did an 54-minute podcast episodes on the latter. Today at church we did both, along with the Bach-harmonized “O sacred head, sore wounded”; this is a pretty standard American Anglican combination.

I’ve written repeatedly about “Glory and laud and honor,” as John Mason Neale originally began his most ecumenically successful hymn translation. In my 2018 journal article on Hymnal Noted, it was found in 22 of 24 major American hymnals from the 20th century.

Three Riding Tunes

However, for the closing processional, “Ride on” had an unfamiliar tune, so I thought I’d research the various options. To recap, the text was written in the 1820s by an Oxford poetry professor.

In my list of top Lenten hymns, I noted there are two commonly used tunes. I checked a broader range of hymnals, and Hymnal 1940 was the only one to have three tunes:

1. The King’s Majesty: Hymnal 1940, Hymnal 1982, Book of Common Praise 2017.
2. Winchester New: The English Hymnal, New English Hymnal, Hymnal 1916, Hymnal 1940, Book of Common Praise 2017.
3. St. Drostane: Hymnal 1916, Hymnal 1940. This appears to have been the preferred 19th century American tune but has fallen away.

King’s Majesty is the one I sang as a kid. It appears to have become the American standard, as it is the only tune in two 2006 Lutheran hymnals: the ELCA’s Evangelical Lutheran Worship and the LCMS’ Lutheran Service Book. It was so popular that it was the only one retained by Hymnal 1982.

About the tune, The Hymnal 1940 Companion writes:

The King’s Majesty was composed by Graham George for this text in the Hymnal 1940. It is a splendid example of the modern unison tune, with a rhythmic freedom which helps convey to the listener the grandeur of its subject.

Alas, for those not familiar with it, that rhythmic freedom helps make it difficult to sing.

Winchester New — a 17th century Lutheran tune — has both a straightforward metre and is familiar from other usages (it appears three times in Hymnal 1940 and Book of Common Praise 2017. It is the only tune I’ve seen for this text in English hymnals.

Hubert Parry

However, today our music director threw me for a loop by using a fourth tune, Jerusalem, by the great English choral composer Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848-1918). Hymnary says that this 1916 (double long metre) tune is most often used for “O day of peace that dimly shines” and “And did those feet in ancient time.”

The latter is how it appears in New English Hymnal, with the text by poet William Blake that some have called England’s alternative national anthem. Apparently this was the text for which Parry wrote the tune, and how it was premiered by his former student Walford Davies. It was one of his final works, as he died in 1918 in the great influenza epidemic.

Still, I was unable to find anyone outside our parish who uses this idiosyncratic pairing. My childhood choir director had his own idiosyncratic combination — “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing” to Land of Rest — so obviously it’s easy to do for anyone who knows how to look up an alternate tune with the same meter.