Why Do Some Hymns Have More Than One Tune?
This weekend, the internet reminded me—again—that hymn people do not all live in the same world.
Every year around this time, I repost a video with four different tunes for “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” And every year, I have the same experience: I am stunned by how many people do not know HAMBURG, which, in my mind, is the tune. The standard. The one. The obviously-correct-and-why-are-we-even-discussing-this tune.
Apparently, I am wrong.
Or at least… not entirely right.
Because every year, the comments fill up with people saying they have never sung When I Survey to HAMBURG in their lives. They know another tune. Or two. Or one I have never heard of. And every year, some small, overly confident part of me wants to say, “Well, that’s unfortunate. Let’s get you fixed.”
But hymn history, annoyingly, will not let me be that smug.
The same thing happened again on Palm Sunday. The closing hymn at church was “Ride On, Ride On in Majesty.” I have always known it with WINCHESTER NEW. The hymnal in front of me had THE KING’S MAJESTY. Our organist wanted ST. DROSTANE, which I had never heard before and would never have guessed was in the running.
Same text. Multiple tunes. Again.
So here is the question: why does this happen?
Because the hymn is not always the tune
That is the big thing.
When most people say, “I love that hymn,” what they usually mean is the whole package they know: those words with that melody. As far as they are concerned, they arrived together, like peanut butter and jelly, or church basements and bad coffee.
But historically, that has not always been how hymn singing worked.
Often, the text and the tune were more flexible than we tend to assume. A hymn text could be sung to different melodies, as long as the lines fit the same basic pattern. So the “hymn” was not always one permanently welded unit. Sometimes the text had options. Sometimes quite a few.
Which means the tune you think is the tune may actually just be your tune. Or your denomination’s. Or your grandma’s. Or the one your hymnal editors picked fifty years ago and everyone has been loyally defending ever since.
In plain English: if the words fit, the tune might too
Here is the least technical explanation possible.
Many hymn texts are written in a regular pattern. Same number of beats or syllables in each line, verse after verse. If another tune has the same pattern, you can often sing the text to that melody instead.
That is why old hymnals sometimes list alternate tunes underneath a hymn instead of acting like the printed one descended directly from heaven on stone tablets.
Your church may have treated one pairing as fixed and sacred. But historically, hymnals were often a little less dramatic about it.
This used to be much more normal than people realize
One of my old Lutheran hymnals from the 1920s does exactly this: it gives one tune, then casually lists other options underneath, like this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Because it was.
That kind of flexibility feels strange to people now because most of us inherited hymnody after a lot of those options had already narrowed. Over time, church bodies settled on certain pairings. Hymnals got standardized. Congregations learned one version and repeated it until it started to feel eternal.
And once something feels eternal, it is very hard to remember it was ever just an editorial choice.
“When I Survey” is a perfect example
This is why the annual When I Survey comment section keeps humbling me.
In my world, the tune is HAMBURG. Full stop. But clearly that is not true everywhere. Some people know ROCKINGHAM. Some know other tunes. Some are out there singing it in ways that make me want to clutch the nearest hymnal to my chest.
And yet, they are not necessarily wrong.
That is the part that is both irritating and useful.
Because a lot of hymn texts had more than one tune attached to them over time. What feels fixed now was not always fixed then. What feels obvious to one church body may be completely foreign to another.
So when someone says, “I’ve never heard HAMBURG,” the answer is not always, “That is because civilization is collapsing.”
Sometimes the answer is simply: they inherited a different stream of the tradition.
How does one tune become “the” tune?
Usually by the completely mystical and highly spiritual process of… people getting used to it.
Sometimes one tune is easier to sing.
Sometimes it fits the mood of the text especially well.
Sometimes one hymnal includes it, and that hymnal gets used for decades, and before long everyone assumes this is the only proper way the hymn has ever existed.
Sometimes a tune just wins by repetition. It shows up often enough that people stop hearing it as a choice and start hearing it as the choice.
And to be fair, some pairings are stronger, more singable, or more beautiful. Others feel like somebody made an unfortunate decision in committee and no one has had the courage to undo it.
So no, this is not musical chaos. It is not that anything goes. Some pairings work better. Some become beloved for good reason.
But beloved and universal are not the same thing.
This is where church musicians get in trouble
And by “church musicians,” I mean me.
Because if you spend enough time in one tradition, it becomes very easy to confuse familiar with correct, and correct with universally acknowledged by all faithful Christians everywhere.
That is how you end up looking at a comment section full of sincere people and thinking, “Well, this is troubling.”
But the older I get, the more I realize that hymn history is full of these moments. The tune I thought was the tune may simply be the one my people sang most often. That matters. Tradition matters. Familiarity matters. But it is not always the whole story.
Palm Sunday made the point all over again
I really did have that moment in real time.
“Ride On, Ride On in Majesty” is in the service, and I am ready for WINCHESTER NEW because that is how the universe is ordered. Except apparently not. The hymnal had THE KING’S MAJESTY. Our organist wanted ST. DROSTANE. She was most familiar with that one. I was standing there having a small internal crisis over a hymn tune.
And again: no one was doing it wrong.
It was just another reminder that hymn texts have lived in more than one melodic house.
Maybe curiosity is better than correction
I still have strong opinions. I assume I always will.
If you say “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” my brain is still going to go straight to HAMBURG. I am not pretending otherwise. We all have pairings that feel right in our soul.
But maybe the better response, when we discover someone sings a hymn differently, is not immediate correction.
Maybe it is curiosity.
What hymnal did you grow up with?
What tradition taught you that tune?
How did those words come to live in that melody for your congregation?
Those are better questions than “Who messed this up?”
Because sometimes there really is a widely used standard tune.
And sometimes there is just the tune we know, the one our people handed down to us, the one that still starts playing in our head before the organist has finished the introduction.
That is real. It is meaningful. It is worth loving.
It is just not always universal.
So yes, every year I am still surprised by the When I Survey comments.
And yes, a part of me still wants to say, “Friends, the tune is HAMBURG. Let’s be serious right now.”
But hymn history keeps rescuing me from that level of confidence.
And that is probably for the best.
