A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification. The word hymn derives from Greek ὕμνος (hymnos), which means "a song of praise". The singing of hymns is called hymnody. Collections of hymns are known as hymnals or hymn books. Hymns may or may not include instrumental accompaniment.
Although most familiar to speakers of English in the context of Christian churches, hymns are also a fixture of other world religions, especially on the Indian subcontinent. Hymns also survive from antiquity, especially from Egyptian and Greek cultures. Some of the oldest surviving examples of notated music are hymns with Greek texts.
Ancient hymns include the Egyptian Great Hymn to the Aten, composed by Pharaoh Akhenaten; the Vedas, a collection of hymns in the tradition of Hinduism; and the Psalms, a collection of songs from Judaism. The Western tradition of hymnody begins with the Homeric Hymns, a collection of ancient Greek hymns, the oldest of which were written in the 7th century BC, praising deities of the ancient Greek religions. Surviving from the 3rd century BC is a collection of six literary hymns (Ὕμνοι) by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus.
Hymn (stylized as hymn), which stands for Hear Your Music aNywhere is a piece of computer software, and the successor to the PlayFair program. The purpose of Hymn, according to its author (who is currently anonymous for fear of legal proceedings), is to allow people to exercise their fair use rights under United States copyright law.
The program allows the user to remove the FairPlay DRM restrictions of music bought from the iTunes Store.
Most DRM removal programs rely on re-compressing the media that is captured after it is output by iTunes. This causes some loss in quality. However, Hymn can remove DRM with no reduction in sound quality, since it captures the raw AAC stream generated by iTunes as it opens each song, and saves this data using a compression structure identical to that of the original file, preserving both the quality and the small file size. The resultant files can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, including operating systems not supported by iTunes. It works (with a plugged-in iPod) on Mac OS X, on many Unix variants, and also on Windows (with or without an iPod).
"Hymn" is a song by American electronica musician Moby, released as the first single from his 1995 album Everything Is Wrong. The single, which was radically remixed from the album original, peaked at number 31 on the UK Singles Chart. A 33-minute ambient remix was released as "Hymn.Alt.Quiet.Version".
The song is also featured on Songs to Make You Feel Good Max-Strength, the second volume of Songs to Make You Feel Good.
Wave is the fourth studio album by the Patti Smith Group, released May 17, 1979 on Arista Records. This album was less commercially successful than its predecessor, Easter, although it continued the band's move towards more radio-friendly mainstream pop music. It was produced by famed artist/producer Todd Rundgren.
The title track was a tribute to Pope John Paul I, whose brief papacy coincided with the recording sessions. The first single off the album was "Frederick", a love song for her husband-to-be Fred "Sonic" Smith with a melody and structure bearing resemblance to "Because the Night", the group's biggest hit. The second single, "Dancing Barefoot", has been covered by many artists.
The band broke up after this album was released, and Smith went on to marry Fred Smith. She spent many years in semi-retirement following the birth of their children, Jesse and Jackson, until her 1988 solo comeback album, Dream of Life. The 1996 remaster of Wave includes Smith's original version of "Fire of Unknown Origin." Blue Öyster Cult's version was released on their album of the same name in 1981. The back cover of the original LP bore a quote from the Jean Genet poem, "Le Condamné à mort:"
"Hymn" is a 1982 hit single from Ultravox's sixth studio album Quartet (the third studio album recorded with vocalist Midge Ure) that reached #11 on the UK Top 40 singles chart and the Top 10 in Germany and Switzerland.
The song was written by Warren Cann, Chris Cross, Billy Currie and Midge Ure and produced by George Martin. The cover art depicts certain symbols of Freemasonry, most notably the compass and the square.
Lyrically, the song is more of a sermon than a hymn (or, at the very least, a psalm), with Midge Ure taking his lesson broadly from the Bible.
Musically, the chords are reminiscent of the National Anthem of the Soviet Union, known in Russian as "Hymn of the Soviet Union" ("Государственный гимн СССР").
The song has been covered by numerous acts including Magna Charta (1990), Cabballero (1994), Cosmo (1994), German electro project Music Instructor (1995), Supporters (1997), The Stunned Guys (1998), Edguy (1998), DJ Jaxx (2000), 4 clubbers (2002) Gigi D'Agostino (2003), Lunatica (2004), Tina Cousins (2004), Polish DJ Psychophaze (2005), Mägo de Oz (under the name "Mañana Empieza Hoy") (2005), Raz Ohara (2005), Age Pee (2006), Trancemission (2006), Parasytic (2008), PROXIMITY (2010), Kirlian Camera (2011) and Mägo de Oz again (2013)
Cædmon (/ˈkædmən/ or /ˈkædmɒn/) is the earliest English (Northumbrian) poet whose name is known. An Anglo-Saxon who cared for the animals at the double monastery of Streonæshalch (Whitby Abbey) during the abbacy (657–680) of St. Hilda (614–680), he was originally ignorant of "the art of song" but learned to compose one night in the course of a dream, according to the 8th-century historian Bede. He later became a zealous monk and an accomplished and inspirational Christian poet.
Cædmon is one of twelve Anglo-Saxon poets identified in medieval sources, and one of only three of these for whom both roughly contemporary biographical information and examples of literary output have survived. His story is related in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastical History of the English People") by Bede who wrote, "[t]here was in the Monastery of this Abbess a certain brother particularly remarkable for the Grace of God, who was wont to make religious verses, so that whatever was interpreted to him out of scripture, he soon after put the same into poetical expressions of much sweetness and humility in Old English, which was his native language. By his verse the minds of many were often excited to despise the world, and to aspire to heaven."