Congregations Sing Better with Familiar Hymns

Since the Anglican choral revival of the 19th century, music has been a central part of the Anglican identity — second only to the prayer book. At best, parishes that neglect their music are offering an incomplete version of Anglican worship, which both disappoints though who know better, and lowers the expectations (and musical understanding) of those who’ve only experienced second best.

In visiting various traditional (hymnal-based, mostly Rite I) parishes over the past 20 years, I’ve always tried to get ideas about how improve the music in the church. Still, there is a wide range of variation across local parishes.

Some differences are pretty obvious when you walk in. St. Martin’s in Houston — the largest Episcopal Church in the country — has a well-trained and screened 32-voice choir, suitable for a presidential funeral. Other U.S. parishes have impressive soloists, fancy organist, or the most demanding repertoire of the great English cathedrals or collegiate chapels.

At the other extreme, many small churches have a piano or no accompaniment at all. Worse yet, some give up entirely and only offer a said service, every service of every week of the year.

But if you pay attention, you will also notice a difference in congregational singing. Two churches 10 miles apart may differ dramatically in singing from the pews, particularly if one has made a conscious effort to improve congregational participation and skill.

Webinar: “Music in a Small Church”

I’ve just posted the video (on YouTube) and a story (on the Continuing Forward website) from a panel discussion that I recently led with two parish priests and a music director on how to improve the music in a small Anglican church. Our focus was on Continuing Anglican parishes, which worship from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and (most often) from Hymnal 1940. (Some parishes have adopted the Book of Common Praise 2017).

Some of the advice is not surprising, as when one said “any music is better than no music.” I certainly have lived out this maxim over the last decade when organizing a capella singing at diocesan and national retreats (including at our 2022 and 2024 national mission retreats). The singing has been quite effective when there is a core group familiar with the sung liturgy (both chant and hymns) and willing to sing out.

The panelists minced no words about the importance of the priest leading the congregation’s singing by example. They also encouraged expanding the congregation’s repertoire through regular use of a hymn sing (congregational singing practice) held midweek.

A Standard Canon of Anglican Music

However, one topic that did not (directly) come up was the importance of leveraging and reinforcing a recognizably standard repertoire of hymns. I can’t tell you how often people have left a service with comments “Did you know that hymn?” and “No, did you?” — sure signs that the musical choices have created confusion.

There are really three issues here:

1. Each parish will have a list of hymns they know. When we joined a (recently formed) ACNA church in 2009, the rector shared with me a list of 90 “Hymn Favs.” Given a chance, I might have “accidentally” dropped a dozen and would not have cared either way about another 10 or 20, but certainly 50 or 60 are ones that would be recognized at any US Anglican church.†
2. A musically savvy Anglican visitor or new member walking into a parish will rightfully expect certain hymns to be sung on certain days of the liturgical year, choices that have remained steady across a range of hymnals in the last 90 years.
3. Conversely, a parish should be teaching the standard canon of Anglican hymnody as part of their annual repertoire. If every parish has its own idiosyncratic hymns or mass settings, then we’re failing to provide the common worship sought by Cranmer — just as much if every parish had its own prayer book.

Together, these point to the importance of teaching and reinforcing a standard list of pieces that is shared by hundreds of other churches around the country. This usually requires selecting a recognized hymnal, and being judicious in what is (and is not) selected from such hymnal.

For the ordinary of the Mass, the choices are more bounded. Traditional language U.S. parishes have standardized on three settings: the medieval (Douglas’ Missa Marialis), Reformation (Merbecke’s Booke of Common Praier Noted) and early 20th century (Willan’s Sancta Maria Magdelena). If you walk into a parish on any given Sunday, if the congregation is singing the ordinary (rather than listening to the choir), it will normally be one of these three.

For Rite II or (2019) liturgy, there is less standardization. My favorite to sing (as someone who tries to avoid Rite II or Hymnal 1982 wherever possible) is Proulx’s adaptation of Schubert’s Deutsche Messe. However, the most reverent is Hurd’s New Plainsong, while it seems difficult to avoid the Powell mass setting among those who use H82. (The latest ACNA hymnal introduces five new modern language mass settings, and it’s unclear which if any will become widely used).

† For various reasons beyond the scope of today’s post, there are key differences between the US and English canon of Anglican hymnody.

The Canon of Anglican Hymnody

Picking common hymns is a numerically more challenging exercise. Across the four most recent U.S. Anglican (including Episcopal) hymnals — H40, H82, MTL and SuTL — I identified 1225 distinct hymn texts and 1650 text-tune pairings. Using the latter definition, the four hymnals have 639 to 751 “hymns”, and thus none has even half of the available list of hymns.

Still, at certain times of year, some choices are obvious:

• Advent: “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending,” “On Jordan’s Bank,” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” 
• Epiphany: “What Star is This, with Beams so Bright” and “Earth Has Many a Noble City” 
• Lent: “Forty Days and Forty Nights“
• Palm Sunday: All Glory Laud and Honor”
• Holy Week:  “O Sacred Head Sore Wounded”

and of course Vaughan Williams’ “Hail Thee Festival Day” once (or all three times) at the high feasts of the spring. Yes, on Christmas and Easter there are so many great hymns to choose from, but if you don’t sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” and “I Bind Unto Myself Today” on Trinity Sunday, you need a new music scheduler. Certainly, those hymns that are found across all four hymnals are those who have stood the test of time.

I will concede that there are two problematic areas:

• Choice of Tunes. Hymnals include multiple tunes, and different parishes will have different habits. As a choirboy, we always sang “Ride On, Ride On in Majesty” to King’s Majesty, composed for this purpose for The Hymnal (1940). I was shocked when I joined a parish 400 miles away that had never heard of this tune, and instead preferred Winchester New, the tune best known for “On Jordan’s Bank”; however, my preferred tune proved very difficult to sing in tempo and in tune without accompaniment.
• Ecumenical Considerations. In many congregations, the majority of the members come from a different Christian denomination, and want to import their own hymns into the parish. Recent hymnals include more borrowed hymns — particularly hymns well known across many traditions — as a way to address this concern within reason.

Conclusion

None of this should suggest that parishes won’t have their own local preferences. But if the majority (or even a large plurality) of hymns are not familiar to other Anglican parishes, I would submit that the worship isn’t very Anglican.

The clergy or musical staff will certainly want to widen the parish’s comfort zone by adding important hymns that may be unfamiliar. But — and I know some will disagree with me here — it should not come at the cost of ruining the worship experience of those who come to church to sing, and are among the vast majority of Americans who cannot sightread an unfamiliar melody or rhythm. If a majority of the day’s hymns are unfamiliar, it will be no surprise if the congregation responds accordingly.

I believe the best test of congregational singing is how well people sing when there’s no choir or organ to carry them. At our 2024 retreat, we had wonderful singing by 30 people in the small chapel — not because of a large number of top singers, but it was because we chose familiar hymns. For the two masses we sang

• Tuesday: “Glorious things of thee are spoken,” “Lo, he comes with clouds descending,” “Humbly I adore thee,” and “Jerusalem, my happy home” 
• Wednesday: “I bind unto myself,”  “O spirit of the living God,”  “Come with us, O blessed Jesus,” and “Christ for the world we sing”
  

Yes, it’s a challenge to maintain pitch and tempo when singing all seven verses of St. Patrick’s Breastplate a capella. But on the other hand, the hymns were all well known to those assembled from across the country. Also, consistent with longstanding best practice,  the closing hymns were familiar, upbeat melodies with a message aligned to the theme of the respective masses.

As Anglicans, we have a proud heritage of creating and sharing distinct hymns. We also borrow specific hymns by authors and composers from other traditions, such as “A Mighty Fortress” (Luther), “O God Our Help in Ages Past” (Watts) or “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” (Wesley). But together, these form a standard corpus of Anglican hymnody, one we should proud to celebrate every Sunday morning.