INTERVIEW: Charles Moseley

Writer, scholar and teacher, Charles Moseley, discusses his new book A Joyful Noise: Some authors, their times and their hymns …

 

What was the inspiration for the book?

First, curiosity: Who were these people about whom I knew very little, or nothing, except their dates of birth and death? Why did they write as they did? How did their work reflect what was going on in the Church and the wider world?

How did you choose the hymn writers featured in A Joyful Noise?

I could have chosen so many, but the book would have been too long… so Chronology was the key: some crucial periods in the history of the church, and, especially later, of Anglican and Methodist history, starting with the writer of the very earliest hymns we sing – St Ambrose – and going up to just before the revolutions of the 1960s. Anything after that is too close to our own time to be seen in a long perspective.

Why is singing together an important activity?

1. Bonding, building community. As in, say, football crowds.

2. It fixes ideas, even the default things the idling mind plays with, like repeated phrases, which can come to reveal their meaning as time passes.

3. So it can be ideological too.  

When did the singing of hymns become an integral part of worship?

Hymns have different functions at different times, of course but St Ambrose’s people in Milan did sing as part of worship, and he wrote them as a way of teaching – for they do state in simple memorable form some of the key doctrines of the faith. People  remember things they sing together. In the Anglican Church, it was only after 1820 that hymns were allowed to be sung as part of worship. The Dissenters got there first, but the real boost comes from the Methodists, and they taught us all to respect emotion in religion. 

What are the key components needed to write a memorable hymn, do you think?

It must have a clear pattern, rhythm and structure which fits singable music, and it must have something to say!

Do you have a particular favourite hymn or hymn writer – and why?

There are several, each my favourite when I am singing it. But, whittling it down:

1. Prudentius’ ‘Of the Father’s heart begotten’, NEH 33; Good theology, succinctly expressed, grand XVIth century tune.

2. J. M. Neale’s version of part of Bernard of Morlaix’s long, long poem (on everything under the sun), ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, sung to the tune ‘Ewing’, NEH 381. I love it for its sehnsucht: I shall have it at my funeral.

3. Samuel Crossman’s ‘My Song is Love unknown’, NEH 86. John Ireland’s tune, written when he and Geoffrey Shaw were in the middle of having lunch, helps. Greatly moving, a fine Passiontide hymn.  

As a writer, it has to be the wonderful and prolific Charles Wesley, closely followed by Isaac Watts.

 

A Joyful Noise: Some authors, their times and their hymns by Charles Moseley is available now in paperback, £16.99.