Ever had the desire to write hymn texts or put your poems to music? Think it’s impossible because you have little or no music training?

Check out my 10 tips for putting poetry to existing music, on my guest blog post at Random Writing Rants, which is a terrific source of information, advice, and encouragement for adult and teen writers.

EDIT June 11, 2021: Random Writing Rants is no longer active, so I’m copying my ten tips for you here:

From Random Writing Rants

To get you rolling, here are ten tips for putting new words to old music. These are geared to hymns and faith songs, but the same principles apply to other poem themes.

1. Listen for the Holy Spirit ( or whatever muse inspires you) popping little rhyming phrases and themes into your head. As you read your Bible or listen to a sermon, imagery may jump out at you. Grab those ideas and see how they might be developed into verses. Themes and images that divide themselves into three, four, or even five parallel aspects lend themselves nicely to song stanzas. For example, my hymn text “Seasons of Life” has four stanzas, each one corresponding to (you guessed it!) one of the seasons. A refrain can serve to summarize, bridge, or unify the stanzas.
2. Choose a tune that suits the general attitude of your text and the musical style you’re going for. A soulful solo? Hand-clapping bluegrass gospel? Lyrical waltz?
3. Refresh your familiarity with public domain tunes, to help your brain suggest a good choice for a given text. I use recordings on Andrew Remillard’s YouTube channel or hymnary.org to hear the tunes. There are other helpful sites too.
4. If your poetry tends toward esoteric imagery, multi-layered metaphors, and literary tours-de-force, I suggest you bring it back down to earth when you write hymns. Hymn lyrics have to be easily understood to be absorbed while being sung. You know what I mean. How often do you sing a whole congregational hymn and when it’s done, you have no idea what the words said? Don’t let that happen to singers of YOUR songs! Be original, but not incomprehensible. Choose one simple image and build on it.
5. Songs are meant to be sung, right? So give singers a break, with easy-to-pronounce transitions between words. Don’t shove a mouthful of consonants into a speedy succession of eighth notes or tongue-twisting combinations in adjacent syllables. Beware of embarrassing words created from run-together sounds. Hearing “snot” in “It’s not” is a classic example. Sing it out loud and adjust as necessary.
6. Carefully match your words to the notes, using the right number of syllables. A printout of the tune’s sheet music, which often can be downloaded as a PDF file, can be a useful tool to help you match syllable for syllable. It’s okay to split a syllable across multiple notes or split a single note into its equivalent of shorter notes to spread it across multiple syllables. However, when you write new words to a familiar song, try to keep the same pattern of split notes and/or syllables that was in the original song, to help singers make the switch comfortably.
7. Match accented (stressed/emphasized) syllables to stressed notes. For example, sing “Jingle bells! Jingle bells” out loud to hear the primary accent on the “Jing” notes. It would sound weird to replace those words with “The Lord reigns! The Lord reigns!” even though the number of syllables is the same, because accenting “The” instead of “Lord” sounds weird. A better choice is “Jesus reigns! Jesus reigns!” because “Je” correctly matches the stress on “Jing.”
   Caution: Please don’t jumble the normal order of words in a phrase or sentence to make accents fit. That always sounds awkward or confuses the meaning of the sentence. Remember, your message (which actually is God’s message) is top priority in a faith song.
8. Don’t shortchange the message by forcing words into stilted rhymes, either. Look for original rhymes using words that contribute to the whole, not just throwaway phrases tacked on to complete a rhyme.
9. Look for opportunities to musically convey the emotion of verbal phrases. For example, the phrase “Praise the Lord” fits a rising sequence of notes, with the highest note gloriously emphasizing “Lord.” (The refrain of the old hymn “To God Be the Glory” does exactly that.) On the other hand, “Satan is dragging me down” calls for a downward sequence or an ominous minorish-sounding musical phrase. Passages that speed up or notes that are held out convey different dramatic effects too.
10. Last but not least: Get permission to use copyrighted music, or else stick to public domain tunes (which aren’t copyrighted). Give credit where credit is due: When you publish or perform your new masterpiece, cite the name of the tune’s composer.

Now, do you hear music bubbling up from your memory? It wants someone to give it new words! Why not you?

Back to my Faith Songs post…

If you haven’t already read my posts here on Faith Songs about my adventures in writing original music, take a look at them, too:
Writing Songs for the Lord
To the Ends of the Earth

By way of an update, I’m happy to say that, thanks to my musically inclined collaborator, Phyllis Neff Lake, the project of adding piano accompaniments to the hymns and faith songs in Songs for the Lord is well underway. Yay, Phyllis! Yay, God!

Meanwhile, I’m adding material slowly but surely to a second songbook. This one will feature original hymn texts set to some of my favorite classic hymn tunes. Just this morning, the Holy Spirit showed up with a new hymn idea in the wee hours. I grabbed a newspaper lying next to my bed and scribbled a draft of the verses before they floated out of my memory.  🙂

Let me know if you’re inspired to give it a try!

Blessings,
Linda

P.S. 9/28/2013

I just added new links to my Resources page that will interest poets who want to write new words to set to old hymns.  Hymnary.org offers XML and midi files of public domain hymns. MuseScore, a free music notation program, opens those files and lets you edit them. Replacing the old lyrics with your own words is easy! You can modify the notes, too. Then you can save and print professional-looking sheet music. Have fun!