LETTERS: FAMILIAR HYMNS PRESERVE OUR VALUES

To the editor:

A time warp, I thought, when I made out the tall windows of the old church gleaming through the mist. I had come to old Hanover Lutheran Church to join in singing of German Christmas music and hear a German sermon. It was warming to hear the congregation, which overflowed into the aisles, singing "Stille Nacht" and "Tannenbaum" and "O Du Froliche" songs composed about 200 years ago when Beethoven (not the composer of these songs) had moved from Bonn to Vienna, and Jefferson had just bought from France the ground on which my house stands.

About 40 years later, many German Lutherans came to Perry County and founded congregations which sang in German. Some continue to do so, but it seems easier to sing a German song than to compose German sentences. Welsh congregations which came to Patagonia in an effort to preserve Welsh continue to sing their Welsh hymns, but their spoken language became Spanish years ago, and they sing what they do not understand.

No need to la-ment changes in language. But I am troubled by chang-es in other matters. "Canned music" is how someone described the singing in his church. We can no longer be sure of live music in church. A tape player and a karoke cadence. The words come down on a window shade from the ceiling. There are no books and no musical score for the luckless singer. Generally, there is no part singing. The words are emasculated.

I attended a church in Florida in which, after a long warm-up session with a marimba band, the leader instructed us to sing again, "Twice as fast and twice as loud." The words were simply "Praise him" repeated eight times in each of the four verses. I had learned these words well when we had finished. An electric drum continued to beat.

I know the songs of Luther and Wesley and Fanny Crosby. These are statements of life's profundities and expressed in elegant language. I think of many of the phrases daily, and have since I was a kid.

Others tell me, "Yes, but people differ." True enough, but we try to teach values and humbly suggest that just possibly some things are more meaningful than other things and that maybe one who has learned and sung all the verses of "Lead Kindly Light" and falls asleep with the verses filtering through his mind may not gun down his classmates the next morning. Someone who sings in Handel's "Messiah" when in college will have wonderful memories which might be more lasting than the delights of soccer practice.

Our community has an assemblage of marvelous musicians, educated at varied levels from grade school through Juilliard. It is a tribute to our nation that at public cost we train one student to fatten hogs and the second to build a bridge and the third to play an oboe. The community has an obligation and a privilege in the use of these talents.

PETER HILTY

Cape Girardeau