Our hymn-tunes are homophonic, based upon a melody sung by one voice, for which the other voices provide the harmony.  This style of music came into the Church through the German Reformation.  Though Calvin was a lover of music he restricted its practice among his followers to unisonal psalmody, that is, to certain tunes adapted to the versified psalms sung without accompaniment of harmony voices.  On the adoption of the Genevan psalter he gave the strictest injunction that neither its text nor its melodies were to be altered.

“Those songs and melodies,” said he, “which are composed for the mere pleasure of the ear, and all they call ornamental music, and songs for four parts, do not behoove the majesty of the Church, and cannot fail greatly to displease God.”

[Sidenote:  Luther and the German Church.]

Under the influence of the German reformers music was in a very different case.  Luther was not only an amateur musician, he was also an ardent lover of scientific music.  Josquin des Pres, a contemporary of Columbus, was his greatest admiration; nevertheless, he was anxious from the beginning of his work of Church establishment to have the music of the German Church German in spirit and style.  In 1525 he wrote: 

[Sidenote:  A German mass.]

“I should like to have a German mass, and I am indeed at work on one; but I am anxious that it shall be truly German in manner.  I have no objection to a translated Latin text and Latin notes; but they are neither proper nor just (aber es lautet nicht artig noch rechtschaffen); text and notes, accent, melodies, and demeanor must come from our mother tongue and voice, else will it all be but a mimicry, like that of the apes.”

[Sidenote:  Secular tunes used.]

[Sidenote:  Congregational singing.]

In the Church music of the time, composed, as I have described, by a scientific interweaving of voices, the composers had got into the habit of utilizing secular melodies as the foundation on which to build their contrapuntal structures.  I have no doubt that it was the spirit which speaks out of Luther’s words which brought it to pass that in Germany contrapuntal music with popular melodies as foundations developed into the chorale, in which the melody and not the counterpoint was the essential thing.  With the Lutheran Church came congregational singing; with congregational singing the need of a new style of composition, which should not only make the participation of the people in the singing possible, but should also stimulate them to sing by freeing the familiar melodies (the melodies of folk-songs) from the elaborate and ingenious, but soulless, counterpoint which fettered them.

[Sidenote:  Counterpoint.]

[Sidenote:  The first congregational hymns.]