A Hymn to God the Father and Cognitive Dissonance

We are ending our choral conducting class with a unit on the expressivity of text.  (some of you may have seen my request for help in this forum post) Using John Dickson’s incredible article Musical Pride and Textual Prejudice: The Expressivity of Language in Choral Music from the September 1993 issue of the Choral Journal we are delving into several works of poetry and musical settings of different texts.  

 

The poem I presented in class on Wednesday was John Donne’s “A Hymn to God the Father.”  I know the poetry because of John Beck’s marvelous setting by the same name.

 

Dickson’s article first explores how numb we have come to the power of words.  He later talks about how we need to find a way to re-sensitive ourselves to the power of words.  It is a marvelous article on the subject – I encourage you to discover it for yourself or read it again on the ACDA website.

 

As I searched for resources related to the Donne poetry, I found several YouTube videos.

 

This is one – take a look for yourself and see if you feel the same “cognitive dissonance” as I did in their linking of image with word:

 

 

Fortunately, there was another YouTube video of a woman that captures the essence of the text quite well: