Et melopoetisk greb på Grundtvigsalmen

Resumé

A Melopoetic Approach to Grundtvig’s Hymns
The church hymns written by N.F.S. Grundtvig are simultaneously poems,
theological statements and music, but they have predominantly been
the subjects of theological research and, to a lesser extent, literary research.
Musicological research has avoided literary critique of the texts of hymns
and, as a result, has nearly reduced itself to a theological-literary subdiscipline.
Hymn scholarship maintains an underlying logocentricsm, which
follows conceptions of the text as the actual hymn and the melody as its
subsidiary facilitator. These conceptions are implicit in the use of the genitive
in the phrase “Grundtvig’s church hymns.” However, this perspective
can be defended neither on the basis of Grundtvig’s own hymnological
poetics or through contemporary aesthetic theories about how signification
is produced in medially mixed utterances, like the church hymn.
In this article the author seeks to question the place of church hymns in
hierarchies of word-music by shifting focus from the issue of “to what
degree does this particular melody redeem Grundtvig’s text” to “what significance
is produced from the merging of words and melody in the hymn
during its situational utterance”.