After church today, our new music director - one year in - shared his process for choosing hymns and other music for our services. It was engaging and disarmingly frank: pieces must be liturgically appropriate (match season or readings), practical (work with resources and time) and have aesthetic value (he likes them!). He's always asking others for their favorites and pet peeves, too.
And so we've ended up with a broader range of pieces - especially hymns - than with our previous music directors, in part because his sense of what's practical and of aesthetic value is informed by the repertoire of years working at many different kinds of churches. He comes from the Lutheran tradition, for whom communal singing is crucial. Ours is his first Episcopal Church, but he's proved a quick study.
So what was once a diet almost entirely of the 1982 Hymnal, a Metropolitan Museum of classics, is now regularly supplemented by hymns from Lift Every Voice and Sing, a hymnal created for African American churches which includes spirituals, gospel and much of the Methodist hymn tradition, too. The intergenerational community with whom we join voices in song has broadened and shifted its center of gravity from the cathedrals of the British Empire (...!) to American churches, black and white, with liturgical traditions high and low.
I wonder how else we could stretch - beyond the Anglosphere, perhaps? and into some of the hymnody which reflects the new theological landscape of a church led me women as well as men, which speaks of kindom rather than kingdom. In liturgy we already benefit from the language and insights of Enriching our worship.
