William Flewelling

Hymn Texts to a Welsh Meter - 1 William Flewelling

Reading that the 2.88.888. hymn meter is considered powerful in Welsh hymnody - but that it is not used in English - I became curious. I tried the pattern out even though I initially could find no hymn tunes to that meter; indeed, it has not been used in English as my glance at my hymnals and online showed. So, I took my experience of hymn meters and the way this one was expressed and let the resonance begin to flow. It seemed to me that the meter did work in English, that it provided a powerful pattern and an inviting schema to express my own religious instincts and experience. I found a variety of stimuli for the texts, taken from scripture and other sources, put in my own medium and conveyed in the energies of the 2.88.888. hymn meter. Tunes were eventually discovered in a Welsh language hymnal, the 1929 hymnal of the Welsh Methodists.