Rock of Ages, rediscovered

Normally in my church choir--Episcopal--we sing mass settings, psalm settings, chant, motets, and anthems of various genres.   Of course, we sing hymns as well.   Last night during the first half of rehearsal we had sung a recently composed mass, tonal (anchored in a structure of tones) but not without dissonance.  All the mass settings we rehearsed were of that flavor.

But during our break, our director
was messing around with the well-worn Protestant hymn, "Rock of Ages." Anyone who's been to a Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist church, or listened to gospel or country music, knows it well:

Rock of ages, cleft for me
Let me hide myself in thee.


The melody even sounds rocking (that is, the rhythm of someone rocking back and forth in a rocking chair):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM7gt_cSxjw

In searching YouTube for clips of "Rock of Ages,"  I discovered that many famous contemporary singers, such as Amy Grant and Vince Gill, have "covered" it.   I was surprised at how widely it's been covered, in gospel, country, operatic, and choral a cappella (unaccompanied) style.  I was surprised at how much I liked some of those covers.

At my grandparents' Baptist church in Morganton, North Carolina in the 1970s, and at my own Presbyterian church, I remember it sung differently:  with lots of slides and plenty of diphthongs (slurry lazy vowels) here and there, with a strident male voice and a painfully vibratoed female voice sticking out like twigs from a bunch of kindling wood.  Kind of messy.  People were happy to sing the easy melody, and almost shouted it.

Rock of AAAEEEeeges, cleft for me

Let me huIIIIIeee-ed mahsef in thee.

Playing it during our break last night, Robert improvised a non-traditional accompaniment on the piano, sliding away from anchoring tonic-dominant chords toward sevenths and ninths, sort of jazzy, the chords making you laugh because they were unexpected.  (He's very good at that).  But Robert's tempo was reverent, not rushing, lingering to capture the hymn's words.  Hiding oneself in Jesus the Rock isn't something that needs rushing.  You could be in that crevice for a long, long time.

I love singing music I don't know, sight-reading every week.   I love singing lines that express the text.  I feel, in my marrow, the bloom and wane of a long note held out.  The dissonant grating of two notes against each other, stretched until they beg for resolution, thrills me when I get to sing that suspension.  Purcell or Monteverdi or Handel's possibilities for ornamentation--those improvised extra notes that you toss in once you get the hang of where they can go--make me jump and tingle to do them.   After twenty years of early-music and other classical singing, I've found the sounds that fulfill me.

But hearing Rock of Ages, out of context and as funny-incongruous as it was, filled me with something deeper: my childhood.  That Southernness that I tried to rid myself of is still there in hearing Rock of Ages, even more me than a long gorgeous high phrase from 16th-century John Taverner.  I laugh that hymns like Rock of Ages, and Just As I Am, are still me, but they are.  And damn it, singing them still comes out more easily than singing that swoon-worthy high solo from the Taverner mass.  Damn, I say.  Rock of Ages comes flooding back just as easily as those 1970s disco lyrics lying dormant in my brain, as easy as a knee reflex kick.   There's none of the striving and nervous excitement of wondering whether that high A in the Taverner will come out.

What is it about music when it's associated with an event, with a place, a dance, your grandparents, music firmly implanted even if you don't like it? ("Just As I Am" is another story).  Our childhoods are complex tangles of doing things because the people dear to you do them.   I sang those hymns because they were what we had.  They are what I was given, along with the Southern accent and the humidity and the inferiority complex.

I'm grateful to be reminded of what's buried, lying dormant, in me.  It often happens most clearly through music.