Please turn your hymnals to number 124 (Second Tune) and join with the clarinets in “Creator Spirit”.
Number: 124 (Second Tune)
First Line: Creator Spirit
Name: MELITA.
Meter: 8 8, 8 8, 8 8.
Tempo: With dignity
Music: John Bacchus Dykes, 1823-76
Text: John Dryden, 1631-1700
Based on Veni, Creator Spiritus
Clarinet Arrangement: 124b-CreatorSpirit
I’m not a huge fan of Dykes’ tunes, but MELITA is pretty good, at least in a triumphant, Anglican, kind of way.
The setting here is by John B. Dykes (PHH 147), originally composed as a setting for William Whiting’s “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” Published in Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861) with that text, MELITA is often referred to as the “navy hymn.” The tune is named after the island of Malta where Paul was shipwrecked.
A fine tune, MELITA is marked by good use of melodic sequences and a harmony that features several dominant sevenths (both are Dykes’s trademarks). Sing in harmony; because the lines flow into each other in almost breathless fashion, use a stately tempo.
Some more details regarding Bacchus Dykes from wikipedia:
Dykes’s defeat [He was of the “Anglo-Catholic-Ritualist” persuasion and at the time Protestantism and “Anti-Papism” was on the rise in the UK. ed.] was followed by a gradual deterioration in his physical and mental health, necessitating absence (which was to prove permanent) from St. Oswald’s from March 1875. Rest and the bracing Swiss air proving unavailing, Dykes eventually went to recover on the south coast of England where, on 22 January 1876, he died aged 52.[20] However, Fowler’s assertion [21] that he died at St. Leonard’s on Sea is false: he died in the asylum at Ticehurst, some 18 miles distant.[22] More significantly, his assertion that Dykes’s ill-health was a consequence of overwork, exacerbated by his clash with Bishop Baring, has recently been questioned; one scholar suggests that the medical evidence points to his having succumbed to tertiary syphilis, and speculates that Dykes may have contracted the disease during his undergraduate years.[23] He is buried in the ‘overflow’ churchyard of St. Oswald’s, a piece of land for whose acquisition and consecration he had been responsible a few years earlier.[24] Touchingly, he shares a grave with his youngest daughter, Mabel, who died, aged 10, of scarlet fever in 1870. Dykes’s grave is now the only marked grave in what, in recent years, has been transformed into a children’s playground.
