2020.10.04
This week’s Sequence hymn, ‘The great Creator of the worlds’ [489], is a versification of a passage from the second-
century Epistle to Diognetus by F. Bland Tucker (1895–1984), an Episcopal priest who served as Rector of St John’s Parish, Washington, DC, for twenty years, and then of Christ Church, Savannah, from 1945 until his 1967 retirement.
Fr Tucker had the distinction of serving on the commissions that produced both the 1940 and 1982 revisions of the Hymnal. He is even more distinguished, however, by his many felicitous translations and versifications of, especially, early Greek and Latin hymns and other texts. In fact he is credited with more items in the Hymnal 1982 (including several single replacement stanzas) than anyone besides John Mason Neale, whose successor in this endeavor he might be said to be (just as he succeeded John Wesley in the rectorship of Christ Church, Savannah).
The music to which Fr Tucker’s text is mated has an interesting pedigree, being one of nine tunes written by the great English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis in 1567 for the metrical Psalter of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury during Elizabeth’s reign. This ninth tune (not so headed in the original) of Tallis’s was paired in this Psalter with a version of the ‘Veni creator’ (the one non-
Psalm- or Canticle-
paraphrase included, since it was appointed to be sung at ordinations and had been a medieval favorite): thus its common moniker ‘Tallis’s Ordinal’. The sturdy, beautifully balanced tune – also, unlike the eight numbered tunes, set in the Meane rather than in the Tenor – is built from the simplest of materials, and though predating the system of tonal harmony by quite some time, nevertheless prefigures it: the identical first and third phrases move upward from scale degree 1 to 5 by way of 3 and 4; the second phrase completes the scale by skipping from 5 up to 1 then returning stepwise to 5, while the last phrase is an exact transposition of the second, now completing the entire tune by outlining the lower half of the scale and returning to its final. Interestingly, the tune begins with a rest of the value of the moving notes (minims in the original and in the Hymnal 1940; quarters in 1982); this downbeat rest, in conjunction with the unbarred notation (and perhaps even the lack of a mensuration sign, common to all nine tunes in this source), opens up the possibility of feeling it in other than a foursquare pattern.
