What are your favorite hymnals? Crawford Wiley and I talk about our top five favorites. Since none are hymnals that our congregations sing from, we use them in our service planning and sometimes devotionally.

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Resources Mentioned on This Episode:

The United Methodist HymnalHymnal 1982Common PraiseEvangelical Lutheran WorshipGlory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal

Transcript of Our Favorite Hymnals on Music and the Church with Sarah Bereza Ep. 46

Favorite Hymnal 1: Common Praise

Sarah Bereza: Crawford, why don't you start out - what is one of your favorite hymnals?

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, so one of my very favorite hymnals is one that I first encountered when you and I were at the Christian Congregational Music Conference in Cuddesdon. What year was that? Was that 2015?

Sarah Bereza: I know we've been 2015, 2017, and 2019.

Crawford Wiley: Yes, that would be 2015. We were attending services at Christ Church in Oxford. And the hymnal there had this kind of striking, modern cover and I thought, Oh, this is interesting. It's a kind of thick little book and paging through it. It's called Common Praise, I should give the title. And it was published in 2000. It is the latest imprint of Hymns Ancient and Modern, for anyone who's familiar with that and all of its iterations. And some things about it are pretty standard. You've got four parts, or depending on which hymnal you've bought, just the melody line on one page, and then opposite or underneath it, the block of text. So that's a pretty common feature in Hymns Ancien and Modern and in a lot of hymnals, particularly in the UK.

Sarah Bereza: I'm wondering - is this a UK kind of thing? Because I have not seen that in any American hymnals for congregational use in any recent version.

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, I think that having the text interleaved between the stage of the music is a really common American thing. I think this is also by the way, why we kind of get used to the idea of hymn texts generally being about four stanzas. Because four stanzas is about as many stanzas as you can interleave between treble and bass clef. And then you have to shove them to the bottom and no one sings them.

Sarah Bereza: Yeah, once you have five, it's hard to read the one in the middle and sing the alto line or whatever.

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, interesting side effect of that. So one of the things that struck me about Common Praise was first of, it has a lot of hymns. Let me go all the way to the back here and see just how many we're talking about. This has 628 hymns which, for a hymnal that is not difficult to hold, is kind of a lot of hymns.

Sarah Bereza: As I recall, it's a pretty, it's like a really chunky book and the paper is on the thin side.

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, it's very satisfying to hold. It's kind of a nice little heft to it, but it's not awkward at all. And again, this is the edition that has the four-part harmonizations for the music. One of the things that the editors did was kind of two priorities that I wish were done more frequently in hymnals. They included a lot of new tunes and new texts, not just new texts set to old tunes. So instead of like the 13 different texts set to Hyfrydol that you encounter in some modern hymnals, you're going to get a new tune for those newer texts or an old tune, but that we haven't sung in a while, you know, so it's not just setting newer takes on texts to old tunes.

Sarah Bereza: And I'm guessing these are pretty decent tunes that are singable? Because sometimes you get tunes where I'm like, huh, that's a lot of syncopation for your average choir, right?

Crawford Wiley: No, these are these are really singable tunes. Some of them you've probably heard before. And some of these newer tunes are also from the just previous edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern w...