You would never guess that the source of this tune was not chant after hearing this piece. The pushing and pulling tension of chant complements this text in a way never before heard, making for passionate and moving song. This arrangement of “Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted: A Lenten Plainsong” is flexible for unison, SA choirs, or solo use and would be appropriate for Lent and especially Good Friday.
Plainsong and Meter
The hymn “Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted” is traditionally set to the German chorale tune O MEIN JESU, ICH MUSS STERBEN. However, in this choral arrangement, Benjamin Culli has taken the chorale tune and reverse engineered it into an elegant and stirring plainsong melody.
Plainsong is a style of music that preceded the emergence of congregational chorales (hymns). For most of the first millennium, plainsong was the exclusive musical identity of the Western Christian Church. Plainsongs were liturgical chants sung in Latin during services. They were unaccompanied and unbound by meter. Whereas chorales have a distinct and consistent meter (3/4 or 4/4, for example), in plainsong, the syllables of the words do not conform to a repetitive rhythmic pattern.
As chorales emerged, many chorale tunes were developed from extant plainsong melodies. For example, the hymn “Come, Holy Ghost, Creator Blest” (LSB 498) emerged with its metrical chorale tune in the sixteenth century, but the text was already roughly seven hundred years old at the time. That’s because the text “Come, Holy Ghost, Creator Blest” originated as a Latin plainsong for Pentecost: Veni, Creator Spiritus.
Lutheran Service Book retained the original plainsong melody, which is LSB 499. If you open the hymnal to 498 and 499, play the plainsong chant on the right-hand page, then play the metrical chorale tune on the left-hand page, you can hear the similarities. In the chorale (498), each syllable of each word receives one note. This reflects the hymn’s meter. In the plainsong (499), some syllables receive multiple notes, the distinctive feature of plainsong. This feature is called a “melisma,” where multiple notes are sung to a single syllable of text.
“Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted”
Culli’s plainsong melody of “Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted” draws inspiration from the chorale tune, but the melismatic syllables act in service to the intensity of the text. Consider stanza 1, which is sung by a soloist or unison voices in Culli’s arrangement:
Stricken, smitten, and afflicted,
See Him dying on the tree!
’Tis the Christ, by man rejected;
Yes, my soul, ’tis He, ’tis He!
’Tis the long-expected Prophet,
David’s Son, yet David’s Lord;
Proofs I see sufficient of it:
’Tis the true and faithful Word.
The words “smitten,” “afflicted,” “dying,” and “rejected” all receive melismatic treatment in the first section of the plainsong. This creates a suitable pushing-and-pulling, even straining, quality as the listener ponders the stark reality of the text, inspired by the prophecy of the rejected Christ in Isaiah 53.
In the second half of the stanza, the words “long-expected,” “Son,” “Lord,” “true,” and “Word” all receive melismatic treatment. The melisma draws your attention to the words as they get additional syllables, and this group of words all connected to the dying Christ echo the illuminated words in the first half of the stanza that illustrate His suffering and passion.
The second stanza of the hymn modulates from E minor to A minor, and a second harmonic voice enters. The second stanza reverts to the 3/4 meter of the chorale, and the soprano voice features the chorale’s metrical melody with a few exceptions. The accompaniment features an open fifth droning underneath the voices, and the harmonies are tight and chromatic. The third stanza returns to the plainsong melody in E minor for a solo or unison voices, like the first stanza.
This arrangement is appropriate for choirs, including those with limited voices, throughout the Lenten season, and especially during Holy Week. It could be particularly moving at a Good Friday service as a choral reflection or response to the Isaiah Reading or to a portion of the Passion Reading.
Play this setting at your church during Lent by ordering the sheet music below.
