Ideas for Improved Parish Singing

Regular readers know how important I think it is for every Anglican church to have a vibrant worship program (centered on traditional hymnody). One oft-recommended solution is shortening the list of hymns to give average singer a chance to sing a given hymn more than once a year.

This month, I’m helping our church leadership brainstorm options for improving parish singing. I was unable to find even a simple summary of conventional wisdom, so I fed some books from my bookshelf into Gemini and massaged the results until I found them plausible. Below is what I came up with. 

I offer them in hopes that the provide a starting point for conversations at your local parish or mission. See also my 2025 Continuing Forward interview on singing in a small church, as well as the recent article in the Trinitarian.

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Ideas for Improving Parish Singing

Based on the music research identified in the Bibliography, this memorandum outlines the structural, psychological, and procedural barriers that suppress congregational vocal participation and offers a human-centered framework to help reclaim corporate singing in the parish.

Problem Assessment

The following points isolate why ordinary worshippers stay silent during public worship, focusing on individual attitudes and musical execution:

Skills, Attitudes, and Behaviors of Individuals

• Vocal Disenfranchisement: Many adults carry self-consciousness from childhood when an authority figure labeled them tone-deaf, creating a mental block against singing in public (Bell, 2000).
• The Amateur Illusion: The congregation is a unique musical group expected to perform publicly and read music at sight without any regular practice or rehearsal (Ashton, 1947).
• Passivity in a Performance Culture: Modern media culture conditions people to be passive consumers of hyper-produced professional audio, inducing vocal inadequacy among ordinary worshippers (Bell, 2000).

The Choice and Delivery of Music

• The Theological Disconnect: Worshippers stay silent when a hymn text feels like a dead historical artifact rather than a living symbol connecting their history to their present reality (Clark, 1991).
• Repertoire Overload: Dropping unfamiliar or complex music into services without a plan for repetition alienates the congregation, who rely on a small core of familiar hymns (Ashton, 1947).
• The Speed and Energy of the Tune: Slow, dragging tempos and a lack of rhythmic vitality from the accompanist drain energy out of the text and leave the congregation without a reliable anchor to follow (Sydnor, 1983; Wesley, 1761).
• The Perfection Trap: Prioritizing a performance-level standard of musical virtuosity over simple, accessible communal structures inadvertently intimidates the pews into silent spectatorship (Bell, 2000).

Options for Improving Singing

The following practical interventions focus on human and logistical adjustments to build familiarity, momentum, and communal confidence:

1. Establish a Strict “Core Hymnal” and Practice Repetition: Restrict the congregation’s active singing vocabulary to a smaller, deeply familiar core of 100 to 150 hymns, repeating unfamiliar selections over consecutive weeks (Ashton, 1947).
2. Introduce Brief, Un-rehearsed Congregational Learning: Dedicate two or three minutes right before a service begins to briefly walk the pews through a tricky phrase, a specific vocal part, or an unfamiliar tune (Ashton, 1947; Bell, 2000).
3. Enforce Rhythmic Vitality and Proper Tempos: Direct the accompanist to play with a firm, energetic, and rhythmically precise pulse, completely eliminating any tendency to drag (Sydnor, 1983; Wesley, 1761).
4. Provide Context to Build Shared Meaning: Have leaders briefly frame a hymn before it is sung by sharing its historical origin, its theological weight, or how the text connects to immediate, lived reality (Clark, 1991).
5. Disperse the Choir and Use Proximity to Combat Spatial Isolation: Ask worshippers to sit closer together toward the front, and occasionally disperse confident choir members to sit directly among the people in the pews (Ashton, 1947; Bell, 2000; Sydnor, 1983).
6. De-escalate Musical Virtuosity in Leadership: Ensure that musicians treat hymns as an open invitation rather than an exclusive, flawless artistic performance (Ashton, 1947; Bell, 2000).
7. Audit and Lower the Musical Keys: Transpose traditional hymns down a step or two to keep melodies within a safe, accessible vocal range for untrained and aging voices.
8. Balance Sound Reinforcement Volumetrics: Manage accompaniment and microphone volumes carefully to ensure a supportive baseline without drowning out the congregation’s physical sound.
9. Secure Pastoral Modeling Up Front: Ensure clergy actively and visibly participate in singing from the chancel, as their behavior establishes the primary cultural cue for the nave.

Bibliography

Ashton, Joseph Nickerson (1947). Music in worship: The use of music in the church service. Boston, MA: Pilgrim Press.

Bell, John L. (2000). The singing thing: A case for congregational song. Glasgow, Scotland: Wild Goose Publications.

Clark, Linda J. (1991). Hymn-singing: The congregation making faith. New York, NY: Church Hymnal Corporation.

Sydnor, James Rawlings. (1983). Hymns: A congregational study (Student ed.). Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press / Hymn Society of America.

Wesley, John (1761). “Directions for singing.” In Select hymns: With tunes annext: Designed chiefly for the use of the people called Methodists. London, England: [Publisher unknown].

BBC music abandons the rest of the world

After listening to the annual King’s College Lessons & Carols, I kept wanting to replay it — but the link would not work.

I sent several bug reports to BBC.co.uk. It turns out the BBC has abandoned their non-UK listeners. Since July 2025, the new BBC policy has become

• Live L&C on BBC 4 (Christmas Eve) tape-delayed on BBC (Christmas Day)
• Replay from the BBC app for up to seven days after Christmas Eve
• Nothing else

So ignore what it says on the BBC website: if you are outside the UK, the “12 days left to listen” should "12 days too late to listen.” 

The web crew at the BBC is too lazy to either display accurate information for non-UK users, or provide a more useful message than a generic “404” message when you click through.

With this change, the Beeb assumes that their only globally valued content is the news.

The loss of the KCC service to the ROW is a cultural travesty. The KCC Choir doesn’t seem to care — perhaps because they prefer to sell audio and video recordings of their services, rather than worry about free replays. 

This year's Kings College Cambridge carols

Update Jan 11: Recordings of BBC broadcasts (including Lessons & Carols) are no longer available to non-UK listeners on the BBC websites.

I just got through listening to the 2025 edition of the iconic Lessons & Carols service from King’s College Cambridge, broadcast live by the BBC since 1928. (KCC published a 16-page history of the service for this year’s broadcast).

This is the 7th year the choir has been led by Daniel Hyde, who took over in 2019 before the untimely death of Stephen Cleobury (1948-2019). 

I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. I’m a sentimental traditionalist, but I get that the goal of any music director — and certainly the temporary trustee of this historic treasure — must do things that are novel and creative, or at least mix it up with unfamiliar classics. At the same time, I have often found it jarring when an in-your-face dissonant modernity was thrown in with the most familiar and influential sacred music of the English-speaking church.

This year, as in 2023 under Daniel Hyde, there was both new content but continuity with what made the service so well-loved and influential for more than a century.

This Year’s Music

I looked up all the music in the booklet. Here is what was performed (hymns in bold)

1. Once in royal David’s city. Irby. Henry Gauntlett, harm. Arthur Henry Mann†. descant (V6) David Willcocks†
2. The blessed son of God. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1967)
3. Adam lay ybounden. Boris Ord† (1957)
4. Nowell, Nowell, Nowell. Elizabeth Maconchy (1967)
5. On Christmas night all Christians sing. Sussex Carol. arr. Philip Ledger† (1978)
6. It came upon the midnight clear. Noel. adapt. Arthur Sullivan, descant (V4) John Scott
7. The Darkling Thrush. Rachel Portman (2025)§
8. The Lamb. John Tavener (1982)
9. Ave Maria. Anton Bruckner (1861)
10. There is no rose of such virtue. arr. John Stevens (1963)
11. A boy was born. Benjamin Britten (1933/1955)
12. Unto us is born a Son. Puer Nobis. from Piæ Cantiones, arr. David Willcocks†
13. Nativity Carol. John Rutter. (1963)
14. The Shepherds' Farewell. from Hector Berlioz, L’Enfance du Christ, Op.25.
15. Dormi, Jesu! John Rutter (1999)§
16. I saw three ships. arr. Stuart Nicholson
17. O come, all ye faithful. Adeste, fideles. John Francis Wade. arr. and descant (V6) David Willcocks†, descant (V7) Daniel Hyde†
18. Hark! the herald-angels sing. Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn. descant (V3) David Willcocks†

† KCC composer. § KCC commissioned

Reflections

For congregational singing, the most important thing was that (as in normal years) there were five congregation hymns for those lucky enough to attend. This year, the melody is printed in the booklet (but as always in England, no harmony for the congregation). Four of the five had a descant, including the double descant for “O come all ye faithful.”

"Unto us is born” had revised harmony in the final verse rather than pure descant; I realize that the Willcocks arrangement is a local favorite, but I don’t care for V3 and don’t find it an improvement over the original. Ditto for the Nicholson arrangement of “I saw three ships.” OTOH, the Ledger arrangement of Sussex Carol was and is a keeper, as is Stevens’ adaptation of “There is no rose.”

First, the elephant in the room. The new carol by Rachel Portman (OBE) from a text by Thomas Hardy was surprisingly good — something worth considering for a parish service. Unlike the normal transgressive modern music by “proper” composers, this Academy Award-winning film score composer has an ear for harmony and thus found a reasonable medium between noveaux and familiar. Similarly, the 1967 carol by Elizabeth Maconchy was unfamiliar but definitely fun. I’ll take both of these over Judith Weir any day. 

Another surprise was the prominence of Sir John Rutter, who turned 80 in September. I love much of his work, particularly the Requiem. However, on an unfamiliar piece, I just never know which Rutter will show up: like Mahler or Stravinsky, it can be a tonal piece with novel and sparing dissonances, or it can be so out there that I’ll flip the station. I already knew and loved “Dormi Jesu,” which was written for KCC but not for Lessons & Carols; his Nativity Carol was also quite nice. I generally find Britten even less tonal, and so “A boy was born” was also pleasant surprise.

It was also great to get back the Boris Ord version of “Adam lay ybounden,” the one I sang as a choirboy in the 1960s with the St. Paul’s Choristers in San Diego. I’m certainly glad to be rid of the Peter Warlock (1894-1930) version — sung by KCC in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2022 — which was written by a composer with an affinity for the demonic.

The other type of surprise (disappointment) was the classical music. I spent four years as a music minor in college (across three majors) and it was a very formative period of my life. Tavener is a brilliant composer, but I guess like Britten I like (grok) some of it and not others; today was the latter. In contrast, I rarely like Bruckner and today was no exception.

What was really surprising was the Berlioz: I love Hector stocked up on his key works my freshman year, and took a 4-person seminar on him my senior year. This particular carol is lyric, but the melody from his sacred oratorio L’Enfance du Christ doesn’t seem any more sacred than “White Christmas.”

I enjoyed the works by two other English composers. I had never heard “The blessed son of God,” by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), but it was tasteful, solemn and reverent. But it felt odd to hear it four pieces before Noel — the British tune for this American text and the second most famous hymn of Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) — given RVW’s (largely successful) effort to banish Sullivan. (I just finished an article on Sullivan’s hymns and will say more when it is published).

References

• Peter Relph, "A list of carols commissioned for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King's College, Cambridge, 1983 - Present,” updated Dec. 8, 2025, https://www.peterrelph.com/post/a-list-of-new-music-commissioned-for-the-festival-of-nine-lessons-and-carols-at-king-s-college-camb 
• David Sinden, “Carols”, updated Dec. 24, 2025. https://www.sinden.org/carols  (the definitive resource for comparing the recent KCC and St. John’s carol service music)

Congregational singing at Advent lessons & carols

This weekend, our family attended an Advent lessons and carols at another church where we knew some people. I normally just go to the one at my church, so it was a chance to see how other people interpret it.

I’m not sure there is a standard set of lessons for Advent lessons (as King’s College Cambridge has set the standard for Christmas lessons). While the lessons differed from St. John’s Cambridge, I did find a 2018 Advent L&C service with identical lessons (and other US churches that had nearly-identical lists):

1. Genesis 3:1-15
2. Isaiah 40:1-11
3. Jeremiah 31:31-34
4. Micah 5:2-4
5. Isaiah 11:1-9
6. Zephaniah 3:14-18
7. Luke 1:26-38

Congregational Singing

One great thing was that this church has a strong music tradition (apparently with a special fund) and one that emphasizes congregational singing. We sat about 1/3 of the way from the front, and there was strong singing throughout. In contrast, this month at my home parish, I can recall the congregation was tenative on the early verses of some hymns (perhaps less familiar) until they got the hang of it.

The music director had two hymns where verse 3 was a capella, and two other hymns where men and women alternated. This is not rocket science, so I'm surprised more parishes don’t do this, particularly on longer hymns.

With the seven lessons, there were only four choir-only pieces. I only recognized one: the Peter Warlock version of “Adam Lay Y Bounden,” which KCC did on Christmas Eve in 2002, 2004, and 2006 (according to David Sindon’s latest report). My wife asked me if this is the one that I and her younger brothers sang as St. Paul's Choristers in San Diego decades ago, and I said no. I went to my KCC iTunes playlist, and we did the more tonal Boris Ord version (that both our daughter and I prefer). Still, a reasonable choice, and the Brahms anthem “The White Dove” had possibilities.

Hymnal 1982

There was a great choice of hymns and lots of chances for the congregational to sing. However, this was a service at a parish where they use my least favorite hymnal, Hymnal 1982 (when compared to Hymnal 1940, Magnify the Lord or even Sing Unto the Lord). And the music we sang out of the booklet (straight from H82) was a reminder why.

Here are the six hymns that we sang:

1. O come, O come Emmanuel to Veni Emmanuel. In 2018, I posted a detailed discussion of how (unlike H40 and also MTL) Hymnal 1982’s idiosyncratic phrasing (breaks only on every other phrase) is unnatural and hard to sing, and my daughter & I felt it again this week. There is a compromise position, which I heard this fall at another H82 parish for an ordination: do a lift (gentle pause) in the middle of the doubled phrase, to keep the energy moving forward but allow everyone to catch their breath. Instead, we plowed like a metronome to the end of the long phrase. To its credit, SuTL uses the H82 notational look, but maintains two beats at the end of every phrase. (yes!)
2. Comfort, Comfort me my people. A worthy hymn that's not in H40, but in H82, MTL and SUtL. However, H82 (as is its wont) omits the harmony for the pews and the choir, while both MTL and SUtL include the 4-part harmonization (which SUtL attributes to "Johann Jeep, 1659"). (The tune is variously listed as Genevan 42, Psalm 42, or Freu Dich Sehr.)
3. Savior of the Nations, Come! This Martin Luther adaption of an Ambrose (4th century) text is sadly not in H40. Both H82 and SUtL use Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland without harmony (sigh), while MTL includes four parts for a different tune, Antioch. The former is more familiar — but needs parts.
4. Come thous long expected Jesus. Everyone has Wesley's text with the familiar Stuttgart. That wasn't so hard, was it?
5. Hark! A thrilling voice is sounding. Everyone uses Caswall's translation with Merton. Ditto.
6. Lo! he comes with clouds descending. This is where my daughter and I agreed to disagree. I prefer the four part St Thomas, while our true Anglophile loves the flowing Helmsley sung by all the English choirs. All four hymnals provide both (the correct choice), leaving it to the choirmaster or priest to decide. However, H82 omits the harmony for Helmsley. H40 directs unison but the organ part becomes SATB in MTL. SUtL follows MTL, except (for an added treat) includes the Rutter descant(!) on verse 4.

At this week's service, there was the other (milder) disappointment: no descants! And I can't blame that on H82, because descants are a choir thing that doesn't require (although can be helped by) a hymnal descant. Our parish is an H40 parish, but we are blessed with descants several times a month, particularly during festal season.

The Rutter descant for Helmsley is beautiful, but I can't find an Oxbridge descant for Veni Emmanuel. The Oxford Book of Descants includes one by Robert Gower, and in my library books by Antony Baldwin and Charles Webb include one. For this historic plainchant, I have heard (and prefer) a descant sung only on the last two refrains — providing additional emphasis to our vow that "Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel."

References

David Sindon, “Carol Service Spreadsheets,”  https://www.sinden.org/carols/

J.W. West, "Veni Emmanuel out of sync thanks to Hymnal 1982," December 19, 2018, https://anglicanmusic.blogspot.com/2018/12/veni-emmanuel-out-of-sync-thanks-to.html

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.

Lessons learned from studying four U.S. hymnals

In the first decade of this blog, one of my ongoing preoccupations (and occasional blog subject) was speculating about someday having a new Anglican hymnal. Now we have two: the 2017 Magnify the Lord (aka Book of Common Praise 2017) and the 2023 Sing Unto the Lord.

The way it played out is different that what I expected back 15 or 20 years ago. While the ACNA was officially not founded until 2009, here in San Diego individual parishes started leaving TEC in December 2005.

Beyond differences in what hymnals were produced, the elephant in the room is the decline in the importance of hymnals over the past 30 or 40 years ago. In this century, a large number of ACNA parishes have decided they don’t want or need hymnals due to their culture and worship practices. Many put everything on a screen, and a few put everything in a booklet. Of the former, some are constantly chasing the newest music — which is fundamentally incompatible with a fixed, agreed-upon corpus of music shared between churches and over multiple decades.

Hymnal Fragmentation

Compared to what I expected in 2005 or 2010, the most obvious difference is that there are now 4 hymnals used by non-TEC Anglicans, instead of one or maybe two. But after working to become a hymn scholar over these past years, I now know that that frequently a denomination or publisher will be disappointed when it tries to replace an old hymnal with a new one, either for something “new” or to make more money selling the “upgrade.”

An iconic example was the failed attempt by the LCMS (or more accurately, its money-making CPH publishing arm) to sell users of The Lutheran Hymnal (1941) on “upgrading” to Lutheran Worship (1982). Of course, TLH was arguably the best and most influential U.S. Lutheran hymnal of the 20th century, while LW was (at best) a so-so compromise from a failed effort to produce a joint hymnal (the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship) with its much more liberal LCMS brethren. CPH was more successful in wiping out TLH with its 2006 update (Lutheran Service Book), which is a decent hymnal but — more importantly — was backed both by a full CPH marketing push and a concerted denominational effort to eliminate older hymnals and unify under the new hymnal.*

The latter success cannot be a model for today’s ACNA hymnals. While The Hymnal (1940) and Hymnal 1982 were produced by official ECUSA committees (before “TEC” became the common acronym), MTL and SUL are hymnals for the ACNA but not by ecclesially-sponsored ACNA authorities. (MTL is an officially produced hymnal for the REC and its four US dioceses, but not mandated even for them). So in the next decade, there will be no stone tablets from Mt. Sinai (or Pittsburgh, Atlanta or Raleigh) saying “thou shalt buy this hymnal.”

(* Note: For Lutherans and Methodists among others, a “hymnal” includes both the music of an Anglican hymnal and all the liturgical elements that for Anglicans are found in a prayer book.)

Difficulty Evaluating Hymnals

I’ve spent more than six months examining the 800+ musical pieces in SUL, which required building databases that allow me to compare the two 21st century ACNA hymnals (SUL, MTL) with the two latest 20th century ECUSA ones (H82,H40) — ignoring The Hymnal (1916).

For the January 29 article on service music of SUL, I identified and cross-referenced 16 complete mass settings (nine traditional language, seven contemporary language) across these four hymnals; some of these are also found elsewhere. I also cataloged more than 200 specific pieces of communion music from full or partial mass settings (e.g., my favorite “Scottish” Gloria) found in at least one of these hymnals. I also cross-referenced nearly 400 pieces of Daily Office service music found in one or more hymnals.

Similar, for today’s (Aug 28) article on the SUL hymns, I made a database of 1216 unique hymn texts and 1630 hymn-text pairings found in one or more of these hymnals. While texts are standardized for service music (at least until recent divergence of contemporary translations), incrementally modified hymn texts made it more difficult (or even subjective) to decide if two hymns were the same text. Less obviously, some tunes have multiple names which makes it a challenge to match them unless you do so one hymn at a time.

Difficult Committee Decisions

I’ve never been on a hymnal committee (nor have I shipped a new jet engine, fighter plane or computer operating system). In earlier jobs, I did develop and maintain various forms of complex system software.

From studying these hymnals and talking to the two most recent editors (Chris Hoyt and Mark K. Williams), there are a lot of details to be tracked — of what you’re starting from, what you’d like to do, and what you end up adding, changing or deleting. Obviously it would help to have someone with OCB attached to the hymnal committee, as well as good tracking tools.

Unless you have a photographic memory, it’s nearly an impossible task, even with good tools. Talking to the editors 2,3,4 years after they made a decision, after spending a weekend on one small part of the hymnal (e.g. the change in Christmas hymns over a previous hymnal) I was probably that week more knowledgeable what the hymnal is (as opposed to why) than the person(s) who made it.

That doesn’t even get to the question of what decisions you want to make, and how you end up making them. It’s clear that the H40 and especially H82 decision making had both formalized processes and the logical consequence of such processes: bureaucracy and politics. I have not yet seen the H40 working papers, but it seems that the H82 process was the more political of the two— the hymnal feels like the result of conflicting visions rather than the relatively unified vision of H40 (or the stronger moral and technical authority of C.W. Douglas, who had no equal in the H82 process).

MTL had 1½ leaders — an editor (Hoyt) and a clear second-in-command, Andrew Dittman. Knowing the two, while they both have strong opinions and thus must have had conflicts, both have been friends and worked alongside each other for a long time. I thus see evidence of a blended effort to create a vision and implement that vision for the new hymnal.

From reading, emails and calls regarding SUL, its process was even more streamlined: Williams is the editor, and everyone else listed played an advisory role. Even more so than with the Douglas H40, SUL is the result of a unitary vision.

Inevitable Tradeoffs

What is in each hymnal? Below is a summary I published with my Part 1 review, including not just H40 but its two later updated editions (of which 1981 is now what’s found in most churches).

Table 1: Hymns and Service Music in U.S. Anglican hymnals, 1940-2023

	Hymnal 1940	Hymnal 1940 (1961)	Hymnal 1940 (1981)	Hymnal 1982	Book of Common Praise 2017	Sing Unto the Lord
Hymns[7]	725	725	751	720	639	741
Service music	141	160	175	288[8]	161	140
Total musical pieces	866	885	926	1008	800	881
Complete Mass settings	4	8	8	5	5	10

From this, there is roughly a “normal” size for the hymnal, the number of hymns, room for service music etc. So at a first order of approximation, if you want to add 200 hymns you have to drop 200 hymns. My guess is that for each hymnal, perhaps 10% of the hymns are clear losers — either from before when it went to print, or realized soon thereafter. But if dropping 200 hymns is 25% of the preceding hymnal, even if finding that next 10-15% to eliminate avoids hymns that are widely used, it still will end up dropping hymns that are important to someone.

Conclusion: No One Answer for Everyone

Looking back to 15 years ago, my biggest surprise is that there is still no “ACNA” hymnal for the entire province, let alone all US Anglicans. No one hymnal is suitable for all parishes across all dioceses of the ACNA, let alone Continuing churches. (The decision for Continuing Anglicans is much simpler, but there is still the choice of 1940 vs. 2017).

The flip side of this is that each of the 21st century hymnals is less of a compromise than H82, and thus a better fit to a specific subset of US Anglicans. So what would I recommend?

First, for existing users of H40 or H82, there’s no requirement to change. In many aspects of life newer is not better, let alone an “upgrade”. People meet in 100 year old buildings and some drive 30 year old cars or stay married for 60 years. Change is not, by its nature, inherently good. 

Over my many parish visits and conversations, my sense is that either there’s a groundswell of interest in replacing the old hymnal or there isn’t. Clearly, having a new rector or music director throw out the old hymnals because he can is not a sufficient reason to do so — any more than firing the assistant rector or getting rid of the organ is. In extreme cases, this can prove a career-limiting move.

However, some parishes have already decided to look for a new hymnal — or some new or newish parishes may not have a hymnal and thus can make the decision from scratch. Which hymnal should they choose?

1. The short answer: compare MTL and SUL to each other — and if you have a hymnal, to the one you have.
2. The next longest answer: MTL is the successor to H40 and SUL to H82, so unless your parish character has changed, the starting assumption is that the average parish will be more happy to “upgrade” within its lane.

But beyond these simple rules, there are further considerations:

• MTL is a less extensive revision and SUL a more extensive one (higher proportion of new material).
• MTL consciously valued saving material from H40 and rarely borrowed from H82 (the Hurd mass setting being the major exception). SUL has no particular loyalty to any previous hymnal, so there is no guarantee that your favorite hymn or setting from any of the previous hymnals will be kept. (Put another way, the editor chose what he thought best from MTL, H82 and H40, while recovering a few even older hymns).
• The ethos of MTL for things like inclusive language follows H40, i.e. almost none. SUL is certainly more aggressively updated than MTL and less updated than any 21st century TEC hymnal would be; on average, I'd say it’s between H82 and MTL: “Good Christian men” become “Good Christian friends” but with Chesterton we still sing "All Thy saints in warfare".

Finally, H82 came at a time when the 400 year old liturgy became Rite I and the prayer book was split into Rite I vs. Rite II. Thus, in the 1980s, both the prayer book and hymnal allowed for both, and together they were frequently used by parishes that had one service of each. Four decades later, the ACNA liturgy commission decided that contemporary language is the norm, that traditional language could be tolerated for a few cranky parishes, but that no prayer book would support both.

Each of the new hymnal mainly supports the 2019 or 2022 (“TLE”) ACNA liturgies. MTL is a Rite I (or TLE or 1928) hymnal with four traditional mass settings and (IMHO) the best of the H82 contemporary settings — David Hurd’s “New Plainsong.” If you’re an H82 parish and Hurd is not your preferred setting, you’ll be disappointed — as will those parishes that rotate between 2 or 3 settings across the liturgical year.

Instead of 4 vs. 1, SUL is slightly more balanced with 2 (TLE) settings vs. 6 for the modern (2019) texts. However, SUL omits one of the three core traditional settings. Perhaps it’s not one used in S.C., but (in my biased opinion) it’s the most musically important of the three, the Douglas “Missa Marialis” adapted from authentic medieval chants. (Of course, if all your mass settings are in the service booklet, you can ignore these two paragraphs).

But if you’re not a blended parish, nine times out of ten the default choice is the best choice. Going beyond that default choice would likely require understanding in more detail the differences in the core portfolios of 600-700 hymns that account for most of the pages of each book.

Below is what I’ve written on the subject of 21st century US Anglican hymnals; not a lot of other people are doing so. Beyond these articles, I am glad to provide resources (e.g. a database) to readers if someone is interested in more specifics on what’s different.

References

• West, Joel W. “Magnify the Lord,” book review, The Hymn, 71, 1 (Winter 2020): 41.
• West, Joel W. “Hymnal Choices for North American Anglicans,” North American Anglican, June 15, 2020.
• West, Joel W. “Anglican Hymnals in the 21st Century,” North American Anglican, July 19, 2024.
• West, Joel W. “Book Review: Sing Unto the Lord (Part 1) ,” North American Anglican, January 29, 2025.
• West, Joel W. “Book Review: Sing Unto the Lord (Part 2),” North American Anglican, August 28, 2025.

Hymnody Ascendant

Today was a rare midweek feast day for me: two sung Eucharist services, plus an evensong in one day. But the reason I'm blogging is that three hymns overlapped on the two Ascension masses.

Overlapping Editor Choices

The morning HC and evensong were part of the REC’s Anglican Way Institute annual conference, hosted by Holy Communion, the REC’s Dallas cathedral. The evening HC was at Chapel of the Cross, a sister REC parish a half hour away.

The former uses Magnify the Lord (Book of Common Praise 2017) as the former home parish of the MTL editor, while the latter since uses The Hymnal (1940). I sang in the (ad hoc) AWI choir at the former and in the pews at the latter, but essentially three hymns were the same with the same words and harmony.

I’ve also just finished by master database of 1600+ hymns in MTL, H40, H82 and the new Sing Unto the Lord (as part of finishing part 2 of my SUL hymnal review), so I was able to cross-references these hymns into H82 and SUL.

Here are the three hymns I sang twice, all with four part harmony:

1. All Hail the Pow’r of Jesus’ Name (Coronation in F): 6 verses (H40: 355 1st, H82: 450, MTL: 156, SUL: 175). Hymnary.org list 3,501 hymnals.
2. Hail the Day that Sees Him Rise (Llanfair in F): 4 verses (H40: 104 1st, H82: 214, MTL: 160, SUL: 181). Text by Charles Wesley in 553 hymnals
3. Crown Him With Many Crowns (Diademata in G): 5 verses (H40: 352, H82: 494, MTL: 149, SUL: 186).  807 hymnals

I don’t have a copy of H82 handy, but the H40 and MTL melody and bass part sung the same, and the SUL mens’ parts eyeball the same.

SUL has a descant by Richard Proulx, which (according to the Hymnal 1982 Companion) was previously found in H82. Neither H40 or MTL have any descants for any hymns.

Overlapping Musician Choices

Both services opened and ended with a crowd pleaser, but the AM had #1 for entrance, #2 for gradual and #3 for exit, while PM had #3 for entrance, #2 for sermon and #1 for entrance. Interestingly, MTL and SUL treated all three as Ascension hymns, while H40 and H82 only treated #2 as such.

The two hymnals I sang from have different hymn selection guides. I asked the PM music director about the overlap, and all he could offer is “great minds think alike.”

Both also used the Willan mass setting, but that is not surprising then since the 1940s that has been the standard “high” (or “ordinary”) season mass setting for US ECUSA (and later Anglican) parishes — at least until Rite II came along, when that role was taken by the Hurd or Powell setting. (Hurd seems normal to me but probably others would see it as serious and thus penitential rather than festive).

No doubt: Everyone's favorite St. Thomas hymn

The first Sunday after Easter is often called “low Sunday,” or sometimes as “Doubting Thomas Sunday.” Since the first English prayer book in 1549, the gospel reading has been from John 20:19-23, where Jesus greets the 11 and establishes auricular confession. More recently, that’s been extended toby adding verses 24-31, with the entire story of “Doubting” Thomas, appointed for all three years of the RCL and ACNA lectionaries. That was what we heard this morning at our 1928 BCP parish.

As I wrote in 2012, there is one hymn suitable for this date: “O sons and daughters let us sing!” set to the tune O Filii et Filiae. Here are excerpts from the Hymnal 1940 Companion (p. 73-74):

[The Latin original] was written by Jean Tisserand, a Franciscan monk, who died at Paris in 1949. It is first found in a small booklet without title printed between 1518 and 1536, probably at Paris.…The translation by John Mason Neale has been frequently altered since it was first published in his Mediævel Hymns and Sequences, 1851. 

The tune, O filli et filiae, is probably the original contemporary melody since none other has been used with the text. The earliest known form is a four-part setting … [from] 1623.

This hymn is #99 in my favorite hymnal (H40), with nine verses. The author notes that H40 drops three of the verses from Neale’s original, but it appears that the 1986 New English Hymnal adds a 10th verse after a very different adaptation of the same nine Neale verses.

All verses can be sung on Easter, but verses 1,5,6,7,8 are normally sung on low Sunday. The same hymn is #142 in Book of Common Praise 2017 (aka Magnify the Lord), the first hymnal published for ACNA usage, mainly as an update for H40 for traditional-language parishes.

As I noted earlier, Hymnal 1982 split this hymn into two separate hymns with the same tune: #203 with five Easter verses and #206 with six Doubting Thomas verses.

This month, I have been researching the second of my two-part review of Sing Unto the Lord, a 2023 hymnal published as a replacement for H82 for more contemporary language ACNA parishes. SUL replicates the H82 pattern (as it does in many other areas), with #170 with five Easter verses and #169 with six Doubting Thomas verses.

Since Covid, I've been monitoring the online bulletins for six Episcopal and ACNA parishes. Three sang the translated Tisserand text today: two H82 parishes sang #206, and one H40 parish sang #99, as we did at our Continuing parish.

Sadly, the Savannah, Georgia ACNA parish that is the home of Sing Unto the Lord did read John 20:19-31, but did not schedule hymn #169 from its hymnal. Instead, it had two regular Easter hymns (part of the overflow from Easter Sunday that often happens throughout early Eastertide).

Still, I think the message is clear: for those who focus on the Doubting Thomas story for low Sunday, there is one clear choice of a hymn — Neale’s opening verse, his five verses about John 20:19-31, plus (in some cases) three other verses from Neale’s longer original hymn — all set to the earliest known (if not only) tune used for this text.

Caravaggio, Incredulità di San Tommaso

The most famous C&E oratorio

Virtually all Anglicans know Handel’s most famous sacred work — which is probably the most famous long-form sacred work ever written in English. Most would know the three parts — first with OT prophesy of a Messiah and his birth in 1st century Judea, the second with Christ’s atoning sacrifice, and the third focusing on the second coming.

In a Friday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — in the weekly “Houses of Worship” feature — assistant WSJ editorial page writer (and Hillsdale alumna) Nicole Ault laments the scarcity of Eastertide performances of what instead has become a staple of the Christmas season. The work was originally performed April 13, 1742 during Eastertide, and its librettist thought it ideally suited for Holy Week.

She spotlights the enduring power of the text by English librettist Charles Jennens:

A devout Anglican, Jennens wrote “Messiah” in part to battle the deists of his age, who posited a distant God but not a Savior. As rationalists, they put no stock in things of faith like resurrection from the dead. “ ‘Messiah,’ with its insistence on God’s free . . . gift of his Son, on the historical fact of the Incarnation and the supernatural fact of Redemption, was an assertion of everything that the Deists sought to deny,” writes Richard Luckett in his 1992 book, Handel’s Messiah: A Celebration.

Ault closes her column with a tribute to the witness the final part that this libretto offers to the promise of the Resurrection:

But besides testifying to facts that require faith, “Messiah” also bears witness to a hope that results from that faith. The feeling is personal: “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” sings the soprano in one of the work’s sweetest solos, “yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

It is also unassailable. Easter seals the promise of eternal life, revealed at Christmas but unfulfilled except through death and resurrection. Thus, quoting the apostle Paul, “Messiah” can say what is ours to proclaim as well: “O death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?”

The Missing Verses to St. Patrick’s Breastplate

“I bind unto myself” — the English translation of the ancient text known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate — is the recommended by Anglican practice to be sung (at least) twice a year..

One obviously is today, on St. Patrick’s Day, in honor of the missionary bishop who brought Christianity to Ireland in the 5th century. The other is on Trinity Sunday, because — as Patrick intended — it taught the doctrine of the Trinity in an understandable form, 15 centuries before Donall and Conall did.

I previously blogged on this 7 (actually 6½) verse hymn that most readers know from Hymnal (1940) or Hymnal 1982. Even with the switch of tune on verse six, it is a long hymn to sing.  As I wrote in 2019:

In my interviews on church music practice last fall, it was a (slightly) controversial hymn: everyone loved the doctrine and the memories it evokes. However, the parishioners were split: most loved the complete hymn, but a minority complained that it was too long. (IIRC only one music director regularly abridged the hymn).

Still, I have sung it many times — even a capella for all seven verses in a church retreat. It is probably my daughter’s favorite hymn at this point.

However, in January I learned about the missing verses of the hymn, that both complete the hymn and make it longer. I heard about it from a priest who has been a mentor to me and my father, Fr. Lawrence Bausch, who was (fittingly) rector of Holy Trinity Episcopal (later Anglican) Church in San Diego. In 2010 I wrote about their last worship service at their original home.

At a January 11 service at their new home, we sang all nine verses of the hymn. Fr. Bausch said he learned about the missing verses decades earlier, and argued that since then, he has always scheduled all nine verses, because the extra verses make the crucial theological points that were set up by the rest of the hymn.

About those Missing Verses

The Hymntime website lists the history of the 1889 poem by (Mrs.) Cecil F. Alexander:

Alexander penned these words at the request of Hercules Henry Dickinson, Dean of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle:

“I wrote to her suggesting that she should fill a gap in our Irish Church Hymnal by giving us a metrical version of St. Patrick’s Lorica, and I sent her a carefully collated copy of the best prose translations of it. Within a week she sent me that exquisitely beautiful as well as faithful version which appears in the appendix to our Church Hymnal.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams arranged all nine verses to St. Patrick and Deidre for the 1906 The English Hymnal. Here are verse 5 (familiar to US Anglicans) and the missing verses 6 and 7:

I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, His might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, His shield to ward;
The Word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.

Against the demon snares of sin,
The vice that gives temptation force,
The natural lusts that war within,
The hostile men that mar my course;
Or few or many, far or nigh,
In every place and in all hours,
Against their fierce hostility
I bind to me these holy powers.

Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
Against false words of heresy,
Against the knowledge that defiles,
Against the heart’s idolatry,
Against the wizard’s evil craft,
Against the death wound and the burning,
The choking wave, the poisoned shaft,
Protect me, Christ, till Thy returning.

Fr. Bausch said (paraphrasing) that while verses 1-5 talk about obedience to God and his power, without verse 6-7, it doesn’t say why. Clearly, many “modern” 20th century Christians don’t believe in demons, temptations, holy powers, Satan, wizards and the like. But this is their fault: the world remains enchanted by the eternal presence of the creator, whether we recognize it or not.

As a fully-modernized rationalist, I am struggling to overcome this delusion of disechantment. And nine verses is a lot of verses, even for the most diehard parish. Still, any church that uses St. Patrick’s Breastplate as a catechetical tool (rather than a cultural artefact) should pull out the extra verses once a year &emdash; preferably when thereis support from choir and organ.

An evangelical against Christianity

I was talking with a church friend Thursday. At some point, when we were talking about culture vs. church, I mentioned how (back in 2010) I blogged about the most famous anti-Christian pop song of the late mid-20th century. We discussed how — given its anti-Christian bigotry — we couldn’t Imagine any Christian who listened to (or read) the lyrics would ever request or otherwise endorse it

After we got off the phone, I read that this same song was performed at the funeral of our 39th president, a man who had campaigned and been elected as a Southern Evangelical.

The song, of course, is “Imagine,” from the 1971 John Lennon album of the same name. It peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. For those who didn’t read the earlier post, this is how John Lennon famously described his approach in a Rolling Stone interview at the time:

'Imagine' is a big hit almost everywhere -- anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do: Put your political message across with a little honey.

Or as freelancer Stereo Williams reflected in Billboard during the turbulent summer of 2020:

Why John Lennon’s Protest Perennial Became an Anthem For the Clueless

…It’s a song that was almost destined to turn into what it’s become today. In many ways, the track epitomizes the sanitizing of Lennon as a persona and public figure; controversial ideas couched in a likeable melody — and a more saccharine distillation of what was a very complex and contradictory oeuvre of topical music on a wide range of issues. 

This Week’s Funeral

Fast forward to this week. Like any (departed) president, James Earl Carter Jr. (1924-2024) had multiple funerals, include the most visible, his state funeral Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral, the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. The diocesan bishop and Carter’s “personal pastor” led the prayers.

The full program is online. The hymns were

• Eternal Father, strong to save, aka the “Navy Hymn”
• Amazing Grace
• All hail the power of Jesus’ name

According to the program, the first two were performed by a choir, and the congregation was invited to sing the last hymn.

Just before the Lord’s Prayer was a song performed by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood. The couple met in 1987 when both were married, and then toured and recorded songs together in the 1990s. She divorced in 1991, he divorced in 2001; they officially started dating in 2002 and married in 2005.

The program lists five verses of the song by Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono. The first two verses were

Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky 

Imagine all the people

Living for today...

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for 

And no religion too 

Imagine all the people 

Living life in peace...

To my earlier criticism, with a courses from two seminaries and a master’s degree under my belt, I would add two thoughts about why this song would be anathema to any devout Christian.

First, the premise of the song is that human being are perfectible, and through hard work, we can make a perfect utopia in this life. There are all sorts of political science and sociological explanations why that will never happen (e.g., “power corrupts”), but as Christians we know than after the fall and in this world, there never has been and never will be more than one perfect human to ever walk the face of the earth.

Second, in Christian worship, this reveals a faulty eschatology, one that does not trust in God the Father (or Son or Holy Spirit), His divine revelation and promises as revealed to the human race. We know where and what perfection will look like — in the New Jerusalem revealed in Revelation — but don’t know when or exactly how it will come about. Instead, we are called to wait for God to deliver on His promises, in the time and manner of His plan.

Reaction

A few other people remarked on the incongruity of this choice, most notably those reported by the Christian Post. The best known of those mentioned is the famous Christian apologist, Catholic Bishop Robert Barron:

"Under the soaring vault of what I think is still a Christian church, they reverently intoned, 'Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try' and 'imagine there’s no country; it isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.' Vested ministers sat patiently while a hymn to atheistic humanism was sung."

"This was not only an insult to the memory of a devoutly believing Christian but also an indicator of the spinelessness of too much of established religion in our country," Barron added.

I admire Bp. Barron greatly, but presidential funerals are elaborately choreographed over years if not decades. This was no accident. This controversial song was variously reported as being one of Carter’s favorites by the Daily Mail and Fox News.

Like anyone else, President Carter had the right to pick his music — but Christian churches and pastors should draw the line. Alas, this church isn’t going to do so for an anti-Christian song, and (the reality is) probably no church (other than perhaps the decedent’s own pastor) is going to say no to a former president.

So why would Jimmy Carter do this? He was a smart man, an Annapolis grad, a former nuclear engineer. He taught Sunday school and knew his Bible, even if his Baptist beliefs moved markedly leftward after he left office.

The Nation, a famous (and historic) leftist weekly, both celebrated the choice and found earlier quotes explaining Carter’s reasons:

Carter spoke more than once about his enthusiasm for the song. He delighted in the fact that “Imagine” had become a truly international anthem. “[I]n many countries around the world—my wife and I have visited about 125 countries—you hear John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ used almost equally with national anthems,” the former president said in a 2006 NPR interview. “So John Lennon has had a major impact on some of the countries that are developing in the world.”

Asked by the Associated Press about his favorite Beatles song when he was attending the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival for the debut of Jonathan Demme’s documentary, Jimmy Carter Man From Plains, at the time of the premiere of Across the Universe, a film framed by the music of Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, Carter once again mentioned Lennon’s majestic solo song.

“My favorite is ‘Imagine.’ When I go to a strange country, Cuba and other places, in some of those nations, ‘Imagine’ has become [an unofficial] national anthem. If you go to Havana, for instance, you’ll see a statue of John Lennon,” he said, referencing the memorial in Havana’s Parque John Lennon. “When we go to a folk performance or a symphony concert or to modern American music, they always play ‘Imagine,’ and it’s one of my favorites just personally. If you listen to the lyrics closely, you’ll see that it’s against religion, it’s against national boundaries, it’s against nationalism, it’s against jingoism, but the impact it has on people is profound.”

There seems to be a contradiction between this view and Carter’s stated religious beliefs.

None of us know the judgement of our own souls, let alone someone else’s. But I would hope that most devout Christian clergy would reject this song in a Christian context, if for no other reason than for its potential for misleading both Christians and non Christians about our ultimate purpose and God’s promises to the world.

Choirs and congregational participation

For a term paper, I recently spent several weeks about the nature of how choir and congregation singing contribute to an Anglican worship service. This recent effort — as with my book chapter “The Ressourcement of Liturgical Music by John Mason Neale” in a recent edited volume — as in the context of how the 19th century Anglican Choral Revival improved both choral and congregational singing. In addition to 19th-21st century Anglicans, I sometimes think about the influence of Lutherans and the Wesleys (two Anglican priests that never joined the Methodist denomination).

But in a podcast last Friday, choral singing got an unexpectedly strong defense from the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminar defended choral singing, Al Mohler (emphasis added):

I just had a question sent in…“Should a church choir sing music on Sunday morning that does not include the congregation?”

… Should a church choir sing music on Sunday morning that does not include the congregation? No. Because the congregation, if it is right, I believe in terms of church order, the congregation should be worshiping in terms of the choir-singing as well. So if it’s just a performance, and sometimes that’s the real danger is that the congregation is not singing, it just looks so much like a performance as we see out in the world, that people assume that’s what it is. But I don’t think that’s always what it is. And I just want to tell you, I’m a veteran of this of a long time, and so you can just hear my experience and say, well, that’s giving too much credit to your experience.

But I was in the children’s choir, I was in the junior high choir, I was in the middle school choir. I was in the senior high choir. I’ve been in choirs a long time in my life. And I do recognize that there are dangers, there are temptations when it comes to a choir in worship, but I am not steadfastly against it. I guess I made that point pretty clear. I just think it needs to be very clear that this is not a performance, but I believe there is certain music that can be sung by a choir on behalf of the congregation that can be teaching and edifying in terms of Christian worship. I’m just not going to be absolutely dogmatic about this, because quite frankly, I’ve been a part of churches in which you had choir, and I’m a part of a church that doesn’t have a choir, at least in terms of the traditional choir role in Protestant worship.

And I understand the arguments for both, and I’m going to say I think the biblical argument is the congregation should always, always be involved as the people of God gathered for worship. Whether they’re the ones singing at a specific moment I think is a different question. So I couldn’t get to both questions in that list there, but at least wanted to take that question. I think it’s a really good question that could help others to think through this issue as well.

Although I’ve been an Anglican since 4th grade, I strongly identify with the “don’t perform for us” sentiment of the question. I understand what Dr. Mohler is trying to say, although I think he could have been more concise. But this is an important topic, so let me make a few quick points:

1. Anglican theology and practice are different from Southern Baptists, so we (clergy, laity, music directors, worshippers) are not so allergic to a “performance”.
2. A key reason for having choirs is that they can (usually) sing something that the congregation cannot, or sing it better.
3. Many churches have choral services that more performance than shared worship — but most people realize that. There certainly are organ recitals or performance of a piece of sacred music outside Sunday morning. I believe the test is whether or not it uses the prayer book, but some would argue that (say) a Lessons & Carols service has enough prayer to be worship.

So if the only music during a service is a choral anthem, is that worship or a performance?

To some degree, if you give the congregation a chance to sing then it is worship, and if you don’t it is not. The rector lets the congregation sing so they can participate, not (in most cases) because they make the music more beautiful than the choir alone. I’ve seen many aspects of these tradeoffs. 

First, I try to sing harmony for every hymn and piece of service music, and get annoyed when it’s unison (yes Gregorian chant is unison), and even more annoyed when the choir is allowed to sing harmony but the congregation is not.

Second, I’ve worshipped at some large US churches (including the largest TEC church) where the division of labor is clear and natural. The choir sing something complex and rarely sung, and we all listen. But there are plenty of hymns, and the congregation gets to sing familiar (and simpler) music that allows them both to sing and participate in creating the worship service. When I go to church conventions, this is particularly striking because on average these attendees (majority clergy) know the music better than your average parish.

Third, the American norms emphasize singing more than the English ones. You go to a tourist cathedral (let alone a college chapel) are if you’re lucky you get one office hymn at the end. At a Sunday morning mass, some cathedrals (St. Paul’s London) include more congregation hymns than others (Westminster Cathedral). So being a cathedral tourist is more about hearing a performance than attending a hymn-sing.

Finally, there has been a dramatic decline in congregation singing in my lifetime. Grade schools are much less likely to teach music than decades ago, and the fraction of young adults who know anything about classical music is small. Some say CCM is more democratic, but in some cases it is less so: the songs you once knew become passé, so if you haven’t listened to a CCM radio station (or web streaming service) recently, you won’t know the music.

In conclusion, I would argue that the Anglican ethos in the U.S. expects a balance of choir and congregation during a worship service. Most musically inclined Anglicans like to hear a good choir now and then — whether every service or just every month or two depends on taste. And all of us — no matter how talented — feel neglected if not robbed if we are not given our own chance to participate in the singing of the Eucharistic worship.

How John Mason Neale helps us celebrate Easter

This morning, for family reasons we ranged afar from our normal parish, worshipping at an Anglo-Catholic ACNA parish. (Yes, they exist outside of Texas). The parish doesn’t have (and, in my lifetime, rarely has had) a choir. The music was provided by the organist and congregational singing.

Of the four hymns from Hymnal 1940, two were translations byJohn Mason Neale. This made me wonder how many Easter hymns are by Neale.

When I got out of church, my library of American and English hymnals was miles away. So I started with Hymnal 1940, of which five of the 17 Easter hymns were Neale translations. Later on, I found that four were also in Hymnal 1982 and Book of Common Praise 2017:

• 93: “Thou hallowed chosen morn of praise”
• 94: “Come ye faithful, raise the strain” (H82: 200; BCP17: 138)
• 96: “The day of resurrection! Earth tell it all abroad” (H82: 210; BCP17: 123)
• 98: “That Easter day with joy was bright”  (H82: 193; BCP17: 134)
• 99: “O sons and daughters let us sing” (H82: 203; BCP17: 142)

From my forthcoming book chapter on Neale, I know that the first four are also among of the 28 Neal translations in Hymnal 1940 that are translations from the first millennium. For H82 and BCP17, it is 3/21 and 3/15 respectively.

The first three are 8th century texts attributed to St. John of Damascus, and are among 10 from his book Hymns of the Eastern Church that were republished in Hymnal 1940. The fourth does not list Neale in the hymnal, but in The Hymnal 1940 Hymnal Companion, the editor concedes that the 1940 version is “based on that of Neale’s Hymnal Noted”. (For those not familiar with Hymnal Noted, I posted a longer article on the influential Neale-led compilation back in 2018).

The fifth hymn is a translation of a 15th century text by Franciscan monk Jean Tisserand, a translation published in Neale’s compilation Medieval Hymns and Sequences. That was our closing hymn this morning, soon after we sang “The day of resurrection” for communion.

So more than 150 years after his death, Neale’s translations are still influencing everyday worship by American Anglicans.

Cambridge Christmas Eve #106: plus ça change

Last week, the exemplar of the modern English choral sound — Kings College Cambridge — reprised their 106th annual Christmas Eve service of Nine Lessons and Carols. The recording of the live BBC broadcast is available until January 23 and the bulletin is available at KCC’s Lessons & Carols website.

The service, created in 1918 and broadcast (almost) continuously since 1928, was central to defining and promoting the distinctive “English” choral sound after World War II.

Both the service and the sound were created by the legendary Arthur Henry Mann (1850-1929), the former Norwich chorister who was appointed to lead KCC in 1876. The transformation of KCC — and English choral music — was brilliantly described by Timothy Day in I Saw Eternity the Other Night, his 2019 book about the choir, which I was fortunate to review in 2021 for the Journal of Anglican Studies.

Changed and Now Different

Although I listen every year, the last time I published a systematic analysis was for 2020’s recorded Covidtide performance. Some things are different and some are not: as the French would say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 

This year most noticeable change is the near absence of the work of Stephen Cleobury (1948-2019), who conducted more Christmas Eve broadcasts (37) than any other, with the longest tenure of any KCC music director since Mann.

In 2018 — the centennial of Lessons and Carols and Cleobury’s final Christmas Eve service — both Cleobury and KCC pulled out all the stops, with a major promotional push, a documentary and two CDs — one in anticipation of the centennial and one capturing the centennial service.

The December 2018 service included one piece arranged by Cleobury (“Seven Joys of Mary”), and one edited by him. It also (characteristically) featured three hymns with Cleobury descants: “Once in Royal David’s city,” “While shepherds watched their flocks,” and “Hark, the herald angels sing.” The first was the standard arrangement to open the KCC service for many years: it is listed as the opening descant in the oldest online program for KCC — the 1997 service recorded in the archives of KCC’s 2019 website (as well as 2000, 2010 and many services in between).

As every year since December 2019, the service was led by Daniel Hyde (1980- ), who succeeded Cleobury as music director in October 2019, less than two months before his death. A choral scholar at KCC under Cleobury in 2000, Hyde used the Cleobury opening descant in 2019 and 2020, but not any service since. In fact, none of the hymns sung by the choir since 2021 have included one of Cleobury’s familiar descants.

Changing but the Same

While the service is world-popular for the singing, the original point was the lessons. As the 2020 booklet summarized

Wherever the service is heard and however it is adapted, whether the music is provided by choir or congregation, the pattern and strength of the service, as [Eric] Milner-White pointed out, derive from the lessons. ‘The main theme is the development of the loving purposes of God ...’ seen ‘through the windows and the words of the Bible’.

Unlike the original 1918 service created by Mann and Rev. Milner-White — but like all services from 1997-2007 and since 2018 — the first reading censors God’s pronouncement from Genesis 3:16 as being offensive to modern sensibilities:

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

However, consistent with KCC’s official hymnal, the 1986 New English Hymnal — and unlike (say) Hymnal 1982 — the new-born King was “born that man no more may die” and “to raise the sons of earth.”

The service also continues to introduce new music, both the annual new commissioned carol (instituted by Cleobury in 1983) and another new work in memory of Cleobury.

Congregational Hymns

This year, the congregation had a chance to sing five hymns:

1. Once in Royal David’s City, verses 3-6
2. O Little Town, verses 1-4. Americans are reminded that it's always Ralph Vaughan William’s Forest Green and not the St. Louis we hear on the radio.
3. The First Nowell, verses 1,2,4,6 (and all refrains)
4. O Come All Ye Faithful, verses 1-7
5. Hark! the Herald-Angels Sing, verses 1-3. As in the New English Hymnal used at King’s College (but unlike Hymnal 1982) Jesus was “Born that man no more may die, Born to raise the sons of earth.”

According to David Sniden’s KCC database, the first hymn and the last two are unchanged for all services since 1997, and were part of the original 1918 service (although in 1918 the choir performed a carol before the first hymn).

With Cleobury’s descants banished, #1 had a descant by Philip Ledger (who led KCC from 1974-1982) and #3, #4 and #5 descants by David Willcocks (1957-1973). For Adeste Fideleis, verse 6 uses the Willcocks descant while the refrain to verse 7 was reharmonized by Hyde.

A pleasant surprise was the descant by Thomas Armstrong to #2 (“O Little Town”), which seems quite traditional (if not retro) compared to the more flowery descants of the past two or three decades. This descant was previously sung by KCC (under Cleobury) in 2016 and captured on this KCC audio recording among several found on YouTube. 

Armstrong is a common name, but the liner from a 2015 Christmas CD from Queen’s College Oxford helpfully notes that the descant is by “Thomas Armstrong (1898 – 1994)”. Armstrong was the organist at Christ Church, Oxford from 1933-1955. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

[I]n 1923 he … pursue[d] composition studies at the Royal College of Music with Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and R. O. Morris. …As a composer, Armstrong belonged to the gentle English tradition of Parry, Vaughan Williams, Howells, and Finzi; …. His own compositions are unjustly neglected, many remaining unpublished. One aspect of his music, however, is more familiar than people realize, for some of the striking descants sung in Christmas carol services and concerts were written by him. He acknowledged Vaughan Williams to be the greatest influence of anybody on his life.

This Year’s Carols

Beyond the hymns, there were only a handful of choral pieces that (if (s)he were just listening without a program) the average listener would say “that is a carol.” Two are familiar carols: “The angel Gabriel” and “Come ye faithful Christians” (aka Hereford Carol).

Another is Cleobury’s 2012 arrangement of “King Jesus hath a garden.” It’s not one I’ve heard before, but it sounds like a traditional carol — perhaps because the tune has been sung by the Dutch for nearly 400 years. A third is Ledger’s “A spotless rose is blooming,” written by Ledger in 2002 for KCC using a German text translated by Catherine Winkworth. All seem consistent with Percy Dearmer’s 1931 explanation of the role of a carol of expressing the joy of the season:

The typical carol gives voice to the common emotions of healthy people in language that can be understood and music that can be shared by all. Because it is popular it is therefore genial as well as simple; it dances because it is so Christian, echoing St. Paul’s conception of the fruits of the Spirit in its challenge to be merry — ‘Love and joy come to you’. (Dearmer, 1931, p. v-vi)

Two pieces are more like what one scholar termed an “anthem carol” — although not strophic, they (mostly) have the feel of a traditional Christmas carol — both because of the texts and also because they are written by well-known sacred composers.

The first was the KCC debut of “And all the stars looked down,” premiered at the 2022 Christmas concert of the Lord’s Taverners: John Rutter adapted a Chesterton poem to new music written in Cleobury’s memory. The other was “O radiant dawn,” written by James MacMillan using the text for Dec. 21 from the Advent “O Antiphons” (also verse 5 of the Veni Emmanuel Advent hymn).

Other “Carols”

In one way or another, the other pieces don’t quite sound like carols. Perhaps the closest was this year’s carol commissioned by KCC — “He smiles within his cradle” by Cheryl Frances-Hoad — which uses dynamics and other familiar carol techniques, even if the harmony is not what most listeners would expect.

Two other ones were also close. One is “Benedicamus Domino,” a 1924 carol by Peter Warlock. Listening to it again, there were two reasons that I didn’t care for it. First, with the unfamiliar Latin words racing by, I had no idea what they were singing (the program includes an English translation). Second, the texture of the BBC broadcast seemed muddy — whether due to my home stereo, the chapel’s notorious acoustics or the BBC audio mixing, I can’t really say. With the same speakers, another YouTube recording captures joyous sentiment of the refrain translated “Hurrah, this is our year!”, with a Dec. 23 performance by Magdalene College, Oxford.

The other is the 2006 setting of “Adam lay ybounden” by Matthew Martin, former music director of Keble College, Oxford. As with the YouTube Covidtide performance by Pembroke College Cambridge, it has an atmospheric feel to it rather the rigid stanzas of the more familiar carol by (former KCC music director) Boris Ord. But to me, that feel means that the sound and texture pre-empt the teaching value of the text — and thus (IMHO) the Ord rendition is more suitable for a services of Lessons & Carols, where historically the carols has taught as much (or more) than the lessons.

The remaining three, written in the last 40 years, feel out of place at a celebration of the birth of baby Jesus. They may be a triumph for modern music, but not something I would expect earn a lasting spot in the (vast) Christmas repertoire (but then I have a strong bias against modern tonality).

This Year’s Sung Service

For the record, here is the full list of this year’s choral and congregational music (with composition dates where available). Past and present KCC music directors are shown in italics.

1. (Hymn) Once in Royal David's city: C.F. Alexander; music by Henry Gauntlett, arranged by A.H. Mann, descant by Philip Ledger
2. Out of your sleep: 15th century; music by Robin Nelson (1999)
3. Adam lay ybounden: 15th century; music by Matthew Martin (2006)
4. Illuminare Jerusalem: 16th century; music by Judith Weir (1985). Commissioned by KCC.
5. O radiant dawn: Liber Usalis; music by James MacMillan (2007)
6. (Hymn) O Little Town of Bethlehem: Phillips Brooks; traditional English tune arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams, descant by Thomas Armstrong
7. King Jesus hath a garden: 17th century Dutch (Heer Jesus beeft een Hofken) translated by G.R. Woodward; traditional Dutch tune adapted by Charles Wood, arranged by Stephen Cleobury
8. A spotless rose is blowing: 14th century German (trans. Catherine Winkworth); music by Philip Ledger (2002), originally composed for Stephen Cleobury and KCC.
9. The Angel Gabriel: Sabine Baring-Gould; Basque carol, arranged by David Willcocks
10. Come ye faithful Christians (Hereford Carol): traditional English; English folk tune, arranged by Christopher Robinson (2012)
11. Who is there that singeth so (Sir Christèmas): 15th century English; music by William Mathias (1971)
12. (Hymn) The First Nowell: traditional Cornish; traditional Cornish tune, arranged by David Willcocks (1961)
13. He smiles within his cradle (The Cradle): 17th century Austrian; music by Cheryl Frances-Hoad (2023). Commissioned by KCC.
14. And all the stars looked down: G.K. Chesterton; music by John Rutter (2022), composed in Cleobury’s memory
15. Benedicamus Domino: 15th century English; music by Peter Warlock (1924)
16. (Hymn) O come all ye faithful: J.F. Wade translated by Frederick Oakley et al; music by J.F. Wade, arranged by David Willcocks and Daniel Hyde
17. (Hymn) Hark! the herald-angels sing: Charles Wesley et al; music by Felix Mendelssohn, descant by David Willcocks

References

• Day, Timothy. I Saw Eternity the Other Night: King's College, Cambridge, and an English Singing Style. Penguin UK, 2018.
• Dearmer, Percy, “Preface”. In Percy Dearmer, Martin Shaw, and Ralph Vaughan Williams (eds.) The Oxford Book of Carols, Oxford University Press, 1931, pp. v-xxvi.
• Stoker, Richard. “Armstrong, Sir Thomas Henry Waitunlocked (1898–1994),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography." (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/54713