How would you go about putting scripture to a tune?

[Jennifer132]

A lady at my church invited myself and several other ladies to make a cd of scriptures to a tune. We each were assigned a chapter and are supposed to come up with simple tunes for the verses word for word for our children to listen to. Any creative ways to think up a tune for someone with no real musical talent? She's not looking for a Broadway performance, just simple, easy tunes, sung without instruments (since we don't play any!).

[Hyacinth]

Would it work to simply use well-known nursery rhymes?

[Guest]

I think Seeds family worship does this exactly. Also a lot of the fighter verses (desiring God ministries) have been set to music. Maybe look through those and get some ideas...

[Hilda]

Play/improvise with the pentatonic scale (easiest way to do that is to only use the black keys on a piano).

 

Almost anything you do with those five notes will sound great, and be easy for kids to sing.

 

Some fun Pentatonic links to inspire you:

 

https://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk

 

 

https://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=w5R8RAUboF8

[Patches]

You can often come up with a piggy back song. 

For example: Genesis 1:1 in the Beginning, God Created the Heavens and the earth. 

Goes perfectly to Are you sleeping? Repeat each phrase. 

Because children already know the tune... it is much easier to learn. 

HTH> 

 

 

[umsami]

There are actually CDs out there that have done that. (Don't reinvent the wheel. :))  Try Youtube. :)  

 

I think that nursery rhyme type songs are the best for the reasons Patches stated above.

[forty-two]

In addition to the above suggestion of fitting the words to common tunes - nursery rhymes or familiar hymn tunes - another approach would be to chant the verses. The advantage of chanting is that it easily accommodates verses of any length, and if your church chants the psalms or parts of the liturgy in its service, you'd already know some chant tones. The downside is that if you have no exposure to chanting whatsoever, it takes a bit of getting used to and that might negate the advantages of not having to fit the (non-metrical) verses to an established metrical tune.

 

There are a lot of indexes of metrical hymn tunes online, arranged not only by name and composer, but also by meter. So you could split a verse (or verses) into meaningful logical chunks, count the syllables in each line, and look up tunes that matched and pick one that was familiar or easily learned. (As I was playing around with Gen 1, most verses can be broken up in multiple ways, and the little words could be moved between lines without messing with the meaning. Plus, you can usually easily fudge one more or one fewer syllable in each line with most tunes.). Here's one index of hymn tunes: https://www.ccel.org/cceh/cceh_ind.htm

[forty-two]

So, I've spent the past hour playing around with Genesis 1, trying to fit it to common hymn tunes :lol:. It's easier to work with bigger chunks than just single verses - in fact, if your chapter is all on one theme, you could just do the whole thing to one tune.

 

I started by cutting and pasting the text into a word processor, and put each meaningful chunk on its own line. I then counted the syllables in each line, and took a look at the longest chunk, and whether any patterns were showing themselves. Then I looked up the tunes whose meter matched my longest line, and picked one I knew very, very well (this is key, it was easiest for me to work by ear instead of strictly counting out syllables, and to do that you have to know your tune by heart), and started singing the text, noting where breaks naturally fell, and adjusting my line breaks accordingly (combining small chunks, breaking up bigger chunks, re-chunking sections), as well as breaking the lines into verses. I found it easy to stretch too few syllables (make even a five syllable text fit a tune meant for eight), but with extra syllables, one extra was all that I could easily manage. I worked a verse at a time, and just kept going till I ran out of text. (It's troublesome when you end with less than a full verse - when you get within a few verses of the end, it's worth trying to jiggle the lines to end on a "verse break").

 

Anyway, I started out using the tune for the Doxology - Old Hundredth - which is in long meter (88 88) and that went reasonably well. There were some lines that required me to take out vowels (over becomes ov'r, the becomes th') to reduce my syllable count, and some lines where I stretched a syllable over three notes, but with creative juggling and *lots* of singing lines over and over and over until I got them to sound right, I got a decent rough draft of Gen 1:1-5 done in an hour :). (I don't know if that's easier or harder than pointing the verses for chanting.)