Heavenly Music: A Song History

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Larry Conger credits "Heavenly Music" to Hymns and Tunes, 1886, the same source the 1985 Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal names for its tune HEAVENLY MUSIC, so the two appear to be the same melody, though that rests on the matching credits.[1][2] Hymnary.org lists that tune at No. 1154 of The Seventh-Day Adventist Hymn and Tune Book, edited by Edwin Barnes and Franklin Edson Belden and published by the Review & Herald in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1886.[3][4] There it carries no composer's name, is credited only as an arrangement, and sits in a section of "Old Melodies."[3] Hymnary also catalogs the melody in two earlier collections, The American Vocalist (1849) and Linden Harp (1855).[5]

Engraving of angels seated on clouds playing a viol, violins and wind instruments before an organ

Johann Sadeler I, King David Playing the Harp with Angels Dancing and Playing Music (detail), engraving, ca. 1590–1600. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.

The words sung to the tune, left anonymous in the 1886 book, turn up in Adventist songbooks from the mid-nineteenth century on.[3][6] Hymnary finds them in The Advent Harp (1849), a book "designed for believers in the speedy coming of Christ," in Hymns for Second Advent Believers (1852) under the title "Heavenly music," and in the 1886 tune book.[6] The 1985 hymnal, which still sets the words to this tune, gives their source as James White's Hymns for God's Peculiar People (1849), and the tune also appears in the Spanish-language Adventist hymnal of 2010.[2][5]

Larry Conger includes it in Sacred Songs For Dulcimer Ensemble, a tablature-only collection of nine hymns, spirituals and shape-note songs with a part for each player, written for two or three standard dulcimers with baritone or bass dulcimer on most songs, published by Fingers Of Steel.[1]

Our book that contains the song "Heavenly Music"

Sources

  1. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Sacred Songs For Dulcimer Ensemble".
  2. Hymnary.org: "What Heavenly Music" (Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal, 1985, No. 452).
  3. Hymnary.org: "The Seventh-Day Adventist Hymn and Tune Book (1886), No. 1154".
  4. Hymnary.org: "The Seventh-Day Adventist Hymn and Tune Book: for use in divine worship".
  5. Hymnary.org: "HEAVENLY MUSIC".
  6. Hymnary.org: "What heavenly music steals over the sea".
  7. Image: Johann Sadeler I, King David Playing the Harp with Angels Dancing and Playing Music (detail), engraving, ca. 1590–1600. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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