Lesson 113: Thompson, Part 8
Reading assignment: Chapters 15, 16
Lining hymns. From Wikipedia.
Lining out, also called hymn lining, is a form of a cappella hymn-singing or hymnody in which a leader, often called the clerk or precentor, gives each line of a hymn tune as it is to be sung, usually in a chanted form giving or suggesting the tune. It can be considered a form of call and response.The practice of lined-out psalmody was first documented in England by the Westminster Assembly [English Puritan-Scottish Presbyterian], which prescribed it in 1644, though only for those congregations with an insufficient number of literate members or printed psalters. It became however the norm in English Dissenting churches of all levels, and American ones as well, even after psalters became more readily available.
Lining out became prevalent in the 17th century both in Great Britain and America, gradually developing a distinctive style characterized by a slow, drawn-out heterophonic and often profusely ornamented melody, while a clerk or precentor (song leader) chanted the text line by line before it was sung by the congregation. Though attacked by musical reformers as uncouth, it has survived to the present among some communities and contexts, including the Gaelic psalmody on Lewis, the Old Regular Baptists of the southern Appalachians (U.S.A.) and for informal worship in many African American congregations.
The tide turned against lining out in England and New England in the first quarter of the 18th century, with greater literacy, improved availability of texts such as New Version of the Psalms of David (1696) by Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, and more widely available and better-printed tune collections. Influential clerics in England and America disliked the ragged nature of the singing that resulted as the congregation struggled to remember both the tune and the words from the lining out.
Lining out was in most places replaced by “regular singing,” in which either the congregation knew a small number of tunes like Old 100th that could be fitted to many different texts in standard meters such as Common Meter, or a tunebook was used along with a word book. There began to be “singing societies” of young men who met one evening a week to rehearse. As time went on, a section of the church was allocated for these trained voices to sit together as a choir, and churches voted to end the lining out system.