O Lord I Am Not Worthy
  • Maureen
    Posts: 675
    I've only seen this as a one part song (ABAB). But I'm looking at Hymns for the Ecclesiastical Year, and they have it as a two part song (ABAB CDCD), with the second half of the melody going up. It makes a lot more musical sense that way, in terms of the melody, because it doesn't just drop you BANG at the end of "...spirit healed shall be."

    Man, I feel like that guy in the Manly Wade Wellman story, who lived so far back in the hollers that he didn't know that "Fire on the Mountain" had a second half to the tune.... Was anybody else similarly ignorant, or was I the only one?

    (The second halves of the verses don't seem to be as good as the first halves, so I expect that's why they went away. But I'm surprised, because normally somebody would turn the second half into a refrain, by brute force repetition of the first verse if necessary.)
  • G
    Posts: 1,397
    I have never heard it with a "second half," and I have heard it a LOOOOOOT of places.
    I'm having trouble with links, so i don't know to which tune you link, but the phrases of the tune I know are ABCD.

    (Save the Liturgy, Save the World)
  • Steve CollinsSteve Collins
    Posts: 1,021
    Nor have I. But I do have all seven verses, collected from various Catholic hymnals.
  • BachLover2BachLover2
    Posts: 330
    maureen, to what are you referring?
  • Maureen
    Posts: 675
    Okay, this is probably a case of me talking in a confusing way and misusing technical terms... Sorry about that. I will plead not only ignorance but stupidity. :)

    OK, what I'm looking at: Hymns for the Ecclesiastical Year: Compiled, Arranged, and Harmonized by Alphonsus Dress. FR Pustet & Co., Ratisbon, Rome, New York, and Cincinnati. 1908. I couldn't link to the specific page, because it's on archive.org but not on Google Books. (Unless Google Books really messed up their cataloguing again.)

    You want to click on "Read Online" or download a pdf. In this case, for some reason Google made this 1908 book a no-preview, so you can't download a PDF at present. (Bleh.)

    "O Lord I Am Not Worthy" is on page n41, so far as archive.org is concerned, but on pp. 26-27 according to the book's original pagination. It is Hymn No. 25.

    The song as I know it only goes this far; and you just go round and with that, every verse only four lines long, no refrain, no nada.

    In this book, there's all this other melody after that, and the notes aren't the same. It's an 8-line song and not a 4-line song. It's got three verses of that, which would be 6 verses the way I've normally heard the song sung. It's not violently different; it looks like just a logical way to add a second half to the melody. Possibly it's even a harmony part to the first, but I'm not that good at sightreading.

    I'm fully prepared to be told that everybody else only knows the 8-line version, but I'm pretty sure all the modern printed versions I've seen of this were only 4 lines long. (Granted, I don't exactly run into a ton of hymnbooks.)
  • Maureen
    Posts: 675
    Hmm. It might be a more different melody than I thought. The words certainly don't seem to be the same, beyond the first part of the first verse.
  • Maureen
    Posts: 675
    Okay, this is really weird when I sit down and look at it. There are all these key signature changes and apparent time signature changes and I don't know what all. But it does seem to have the normal melody there. Somewhere.

    So after struggling and failing last night to make a midi file that made any sense whatsoever, I've just made a little pdf page of the song and attached it to this post, so that everybody can see what I'm talking about. (And possibly explain what the heck that notation is about.)
    O Lord I Am Not Worthy.pdf
    33K
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    After looking at the souce link, I would say that the software program messed up this page.
  • Maureen
    Posts: 675
    Well, my music software program is only as good as my understanding of what to input. My understanding of Western musical notation is very basic, so I'm always running into stuff I don't understand when I work with primary sources. (And then, when I find out what term is used for X and Y, I usually find out that my music software can do it perfectly well -- as long as you know the term and thus can find the correct command.) That's the wages of comparative ignorance.

    Ah, well, it's nice to learn things!
  • BachLover2BachLover2
    Posts: 330
    maureen, who did the type-setting on that? it appears to be in error...
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