Of course I cannot claim any responsibility for this hymn – but you know when you get something in your head and it goes round and round and you can’t get rid of it? That’s what happened to me a few weeks ago with the tune Eventide. Written by William Henry Monk in 1861, to words written a few years earlier by Henry Francis Lyte, ‘Abide with Me’ soon captured the hearts of churchgoers, and later of football crowds, worldwide. (The illustration is of the original printing in ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’, with an alternative version for ‘chanting’ on the second page)
Its popularity is not surprising – the words offer comfort to us all as we go through the troubles of life, pointing us to a greater being who is always there for us. And the tune has a predictability and ease, and a reassuring logic in its musical direction. The simplicity of the melody is the key to its memorability:
- There is a melodic range of just six notes (and it doesn’t go too high)
- Within each phrase there are just two different note lengths, plus a longer final note
- The first and third phrases are very similar
- Each phrase has a gentle shape in which the highest note is somewhere in the middle
- The key-note (E flat) is used less than the other notes – just once in phrases 1 and 3, not at all in phrase 2, and twice in the last phrase.
- Each phrase ends on a different note and the E flat is reserved for the last note of the final phrase. So the air of ‘finality’ is saved till last.
Harmonically, musical interest is achieved by
- Traditional 4-part harmony, with much use of contrary motion (movement in opposite directions) between the top and bottom voices (treble and bass)
- Both the second and third phrase modulate at the end (change to a different key-centre) thus providing harmonic variety
So overall there is a sense of predictability moderated by sufficient melodic and harmonic interest to avoid boredom. So that’s why I couldn’t get it out of my head.
So, the only thing to do was to try and look at it from a different angle – so I’ve made three versions of it in the last few weeks. One is a straightforward ‘easy piano’ simplified arrangement that my wife Jan and I did for our piano series – because playing music in four parts, and in three flats, is quite a challenge for beginner pianists. The other two are very similar to each other, and they are ‘fantasias’ on the tune. They begin with another melody – a descending figure – and then the Eventide melody creeps into the middle of the texture, coming in at a slightly unexpected point, as if the accent of the phrase is on the longer notes in the 2nd and 4th bars rather than at the beginning – Abide with me rather than A-bide with me. In the next section we find the melody in the lowest part, with other ideas above. In the third section the basic shapes of the hymn are developed and taken on a slightly different journey, and then finally the descending melody with which we began returns, but now with the Eventide melody at the top of the texture.
Here are links to recordings of these arrangements:
Eventide – Fantasia on Abide with Me for piano solo
YouTube Soundcloud
Eventide – Prelude/Meditation on Abide with Me for organ solo
YouTube Soundcloud
Abide with Me – arranged for easy piano (Janet and Alan Bullard Piano Series)
YouTube
Scores of all three versions are available for purchase from www.sheetmusicdirect.com, www.sheetmusicplus.com and (the first two) from www.jwpepper.com
So maybe it’s time to say farewell to Eventide now – I expect something else will pop into my head soon…