Music Theory Thoughts

Haha! I have something to ramble about today. Um, what was it again? Oh yeah! While ice skating one more time before the snow messed up my skating rink, I was considering the structure of your average hymn, melodically speaking. And since I can use some fancy music theory terms and explain them it should make things extra long and rambly. Ok, here we go:

So I was thinking that most hymns use a binary melody system, following the pattern AABA. What this means is that there's really only two melody lines, probably four to six measures each. You sing the first line twice in a row, then go to the next melody line, and the first line ends the verse again. Uh, think "Come Thou Fount" or the more recent "In Christ Alone (My Hope is Found)." This is actually a pretty classical technique, though I'm sure a lot of classical music connoisseurs wouldn't consider hymns particularly works of art. Whatever. I was thinking onward, about a Negro Spiritual (just about the only one I know) which uses a modified version of this. "Wayfaring Stranger." The first two lines are actually a call and response, with very similar melodies. Call and response is another classical music thing, where there's a melody, and then a variation to kind of complete the musical thought. The chorus is a second melody, also call and response. This segues into a little bit of variation of the first call and response, which has the best ending on it.

This covers one kind of hymn, but I haven't thought much about hymns with more of a chorus to them, to try and classify them. How Great Thou Art has a verse of call and response (at least that's what I'm calling all of these, there may be a more specific term), and a chorus that I want to call a period, but I'm not quite fresh on that bit of music theory. I need to ask my piano teacher what book that was again and pick up a copy. I quite liked it as a reference and all that. I'll add that to the note I had for my piano lesson goal-things.

In other news, I'm looking for the right Minecraft map editor to get my terrain in order to create Yavn. I need something that maybe could generate mountains and hills and stuff where I want them without me having to make everything block by block. That'd just be annoying, yeah?