Comments reaching my ears are that "we don't know the hymns this week", or "that tune can only be sung to such and such a hymn", or "I wish we could sing one from the old book - I don't go much on the modern ones"... I could go on.
In response, here is a little insight into the world of the hymn-chooser.
A statistic or two: our three hymn books (New English Hymnal, Ancient & Modern Revised and 100 Hymns for Today) contain roughly 900 hymns in all, once duplications are taken into account. During my time at St George's, which is about eighteen months, we have sung rather fewer than half of these (between 300 and 350). This is out of a theoretical total of 600-plus hymn slots. So there have been plenty sung two or more times.
So how do the hymns get chosen? Well, the method of working is straightforward enough: first, you look up the readings for each Sunday's services, then you try to find hymns that match up with those readings or the general 'theme of the day'. That can be easier said than done, I can assure you. Certain times of the year are easier than others - Pentecost Twenty-something will quite likely have obtuse readings selected, whereas for Eastertide, it can be a question of which ones do you leave out?! Another thing that has to be taken into account is that some members of the congregation come to two sung services on a Sunday, which can cause problems on a day where the same hymn could be usefully sung morning and evening. Some of the 'old favourites', as a result, may get sung at the service which you don't happen to be at; or, when a day with a shortage of really apt hymns comes along, they may just be totally inappropriate even to plug an empty gap, or have been sung fairly recently.
I do actually believe that if there are only four or five hymns that are going to be sung by most people on a Sunday, then there should be minimal repetition (within reason) over three months. I attempt to have at least one hymn that everyone will know as either the first or last one, and add to those two or three which I guess some will know, and possibly another which may not be known.
This raises the question of tunes. It makes life far easier in the learning of new hymns if the tune is familiar, because reading a poem in often archaic language and making sense of it and a new tune can be counter-productive. Likewise, to broaden the repertoire of tunes, it can be a good idea to put a new tune to familiar words. At my church in Birmingham, there were several hymns which were traditionally sung to different tunes from the ones I was ready for: for example 'Dear Lord and Father' was not sung to Repton, nor was 'All my hope on God is founded' sung to Michael. This was quite an eye-opener to me, but I used it as an opportunity to think carefully about the words because the tune didn't do the same things as the other one. Even between NEH and AMR there are some big differences.
The hymnody at St George's is conservative to say the least. The number of really new hymns we sing is quite small, rarely anything written after 1980! There is a wealth of material as yet unexplored by Waterloovillians, but we must make full use of the resources we have before casting the net still farther afield.
The whole process of choosing hymns, which I do quarterly, takes on average two days' work, and involves a lot of serious thought. Sometimes I get it right, other times I'm not so successful, but perhaps this may explain some of the headaches caused by the hymns.
Having said all that (!) if you do have a favourite from one of our books that hasn't cropped up for a while, do let me know, and I'll try to fit it in, but please write it down for me, so it gets into the hymn file.
written by Mark B Dancer
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