In our continuing series, Utilizing Public Domain for Your Ministry, we are highlighting VICTORY, an unusual tune in that it can be considered a collaboration between two composers who lived approximately 3 centuries and 2,000 miles apart. The musical and religious surroundings of each composer stand in stark contrast to each other, but the result is a solid and versatile piece of music.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was the leader of the late sixteenth-century Roman School of composers and the original composer of VICTORY. The Roman School composers were responsible for supplying a vast quantity of music to accompany the flourishing Catholic devotional activity in the wake of the Jubilee Year of 1575 and the formation of religious confraternities and orders like the Jesuits and Oratorians. Among the foremost composers in Renaissance Rome, Palestrina was one of a very few who was not a clergyman. While most sacred composers in Rome were ordained Catholic clerics, Palestrina was a married layman. Palestrina and his art were firmly entrenched in the city of Rome; he even used Roman publishers to print his music with the primary goal of securing a church job in the capital of Catholicism rather than seeking fame or wealth abroad.

Among the Roman School composers, Palestrina developed a reputation for setting texts with remarkable clarity. His melodies made it easier for listeners unfamiliar with the texts to understand those texts. He also made creative use of “text painting,” matching words with notes that demonstrate the meaning of those words. For example, you might hear words like “high,” “above,” or “heaven” sounded on very high notes. Palestrina’s compositional techniques reflect the Franco-Flemish masters who dominated sacred music in the centuries leading up to Palestrina’s maturity. In fact, many of Palestrina’s compositions are based on compositions by composers from the Low Countries and Spain who were fashionable in the preceding generations.

Such painstaking text setting is a result of the Counter-Reformation. Catholic theologians believed that music and the other arts were helpful tools that could attract and catechize worshippers. This strategy met with decided contemporary success in works like Sister Act, but the effect of its historical impact is harder to measure. As part of the Council of Trent’s efforts to reform the practice of Catholicism, a commission of cardinals in 1563 issued two decrees that each bishop was responsible for implementing in his own diocese. The first decree ordered that all secular influences be eliminated from sacred music; composers could no longer pair secular songs with liturgical texts to create church music. The second decree was that the liturgical texts remain intelligible; the music could no longer be so complicated as to obscure the words.

The Counter-Reformation’s leaders in Rome relied on Palestrina and a few other composers of the Roman School to purge sacred music of secular influences and compose liturgical settings that were easy for the large crowds gathered inside Rome’s basilicas to understand. Palestrina’s most famous achievement was the Pope Marcellus Mass, published in 1567. Historians do not know whether the namesake of the Mass ever heard the setting that bears his name because he was Supreme Pontiff for less than one month. However, the Mass setting cemented Palestrina’s reputation as the standard bearer of sacred polyphony.

VICTORY was later arranged by William Henry Monk, an English organist and music scholar of great renown during the nineteenth century. Monk advocated the use of plainsong as well as historical texts and melodies during contemporary worship. His adaptation of VICTORY, published in 1861, was the result of his editorial work on Hymns Ancient & Modern.

The asymmetrical form of VICTORY encompasses three four-measure phrases followed by a three-measure tag setting the exclamation of “Alleluia!” The asymmetry points to the tune’s Renaissance origins. Renaissance composers were not bound to regular, four-measure phrases as later Classical and Romantic composers were. If VICTORY’s form is irregular, its rhythm is anything but: all three phrases are rhythmically identical, though the pitches change in each phrase.

VICTORY began as the setting of the “Gloria Patri” (or “Glory be to the Father…”), the final verse of a setting of the Magnificat (or Canticle of Mary) published in 1591. This Magnificat setting was written for four voices, and the phrase that became the tune VICTORY is the final phrase of that setting. Monk adapted this Renaissance grand finale into the melody we are familiar with by isolating the melody, eliminating the other three voices that harmonized with the melodic voice, and simplifying the cadences at the end of each phrase. Palestrina’s original third phrase is much longer and more elaborate than Monk’s. Palestrina was composing for Rome’s most rigorously trained professional musicians, while Monk was adapting the music for universal congregational use.

Monk’s adaptation enjoyed vast popularity in the nineteenth century, and many authors set their texts to the tune VICTORY:

  • “My God, My Father, While I Stray” by Charlotte Elliott (1834)
  • “The Strife Is O’er” (translation of Finita jam sun proelia) by Francis Pott (1861)
  • “Fierce Raged the Tempest O’er the Deep” by Godfrey Thring (1861)
  • “May We Be One” by Christopher Wordsworth (1871)

In more recent decades, this popularity has waned, but we believe VICTORY is due for a revival. Consider sending an original text for VICTORY to info@onelicense.net. Perhaps your contribution will be published in next month’s blog!

We’re grateful for all of our readers who shared their original texts for THAXTED. As promised, we’d like to share one of our favorite submissions. This text, “O God of Our Humanity,” comes to us from Graham Oakes, and was first published in Praise Trust’s online hymnal.

O God of our humanity

O God of our humanity, we fall before your throne.
We have no hope or future outside your grace alone.
Yet we live as if we’re sovereign of our lives and destiny;
we are selfish in our purpose and weak in charity.
O God of our humanity, we fall before your throne
and confess that we have failed you despite the love you’ve shown.

O God of all eternity, our times are in your hand;
our lives are but a vapour, and fragile is our span.
Yet we act as if immortal, give no heed to life and death,
till we face a time of crisis and struggle for our breath.
O God of all eternity, our times are in your hand —
come, shake us from our arrogance and work in us your plan.

O God of love and justice, you stand beyond our sin;
yet still you would redeem us and change us from within.
No greater love was given than that of your own Son,
and no higher price is oHered to ransom everyone.
O God of love and justice, you stand beyond our sin,
but through the death of Jesus, we can be born again.

O God of power and glory, of victory and might,
you call us now to follow you and walk by faith, not sight.
For Jesus Christ is risen and we are risen too,
saved to serve a holy purpose and strive for what is true.
O God of power and glory, of victory and might,
come now, in our humanity, turn darkness into light.

Words: © 2010 Graham Oakes / PRAISE TRUST

Photo by Catherine Franken: https://www.pexels.com/photo/banc-enneige-19909879/