This page is provided so that you can hear the tunes of items which we use in church. Mostly they are written by the vicar. Please note that they are copyright - we are very happy to give permission to you to use them, but we would like to hear about it. Please include any use on your Christian Copyright Licence returns.
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Chorale Prelude on 'Ein Feste Burg'
Prelude arrangement copyright © John Hartley 2008.
Chorale 'Ein Feste Burg' by Martin Luther (1483-1546) and harmonised by many others since.
Story behind this music
I discovered to my surprise a few weeks ago that the vast majority of the congregation here at St Luke's Eccleshill did not know Martin Luther's famous hymn "A safe stronghold our God is still" (text translated by Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881, Mission Praise No. 2) - a gap in our knowledge which we will be correcting very soon.
In the mean time I wondered whether Bach or someone else had written a "chorale prelude" to this hymn. I'm grateful to colleagues from "Christians on the Internet" for pointing out to me that I had the wrong idea: a "chorale prelude" really means a piece for organ based on the hymn tune (the "chorale") which originally had the purpose of helping the congregation to learn the tune, but in fact became highly decorative and an art-form in its own right.
However, what I meant by this was a piece in which the choir sings the lines of the hymn, separated in time from each other, and in the gaps the organ or small instrumental group plays a contrasting part (usually consisting of three voices: a melody, a bass and an inner continuo part). The two famous examples, both by J S Bach, are "Sleepers Wake" and "Jesu, joy of man's desiring". It turns out that Bach did write two pieces on Luther's tune (BWV 80 and BWV 720), but neither of these are in this form.
So I decided I would write my own effort. And here it is. The "chorale prelude" part lasts about 2 minutes 15 seconds, and the repetition of the hymn for a second verse takes the whole piece to 3 minutes.
John Hartley.
Windows Media Player. When you click the left-hand "play" button your computer should have started to play the tune. If it didn't, you might be able to get the tune by clicking here, or by right-clicking the link, choosing "save target as", saving it onto your computer, and then opening it with a music-playing program.
Please remember that a midi file of a tune isn't supposed to be a state-of-the-art musical arrangement - it is only supposed to give a basic idea of how the tune goes. Any reasonable organist / keyboard player / music group could make it sound far better.