As someone who has experience songwriting, I didn’t anticipate the challenge of transposing a text from the Bible to popular music to be quite as difficult as it was. To start, I thought that picking a text first would make the process easier, but this proved to not be the case. Sure it was easy to pick a portion of the text, but thinking of a song that correlated with the flow of the text was not an easy task. I then attempted to start with a song first, trying to interject the text into a preexisting lyrical framework, but found this to also be difficult. For starters, my musical taste falls outside of the realm of popular music, so many of the songs I listen to don’t exactly follow an easy, simplistic structure to align words to. Additionally, trying to conform a text to any given song requires a bit of paraphrasing or reworking of various words and phrases; this task is also tricky because how far can particular words be stretched while still maintaining the original meaning of the text? As I wrote in a previous blog, I was quite critical of certain hymns for altering the text in ways that I personally felt were too derivative of the original, so in order to avoid hypocrisy, I’ve been trying to keep my paraphrasing as minimal as possible.
All in all, this exercise has shown just how difficult the hymn process can be, both in terms of arranging music and in helping communicate the original meaning of a biblical text. Personally, I have yet to complete a transposition of my own, but I have been playing around with putting Psalm 23 to the tune of “Greensleeves” (if that in anyway can be considered popular music lol) because it just popped into my head the other day. Hopefully with more practice this process will become easier over time.