Sing Unto the Lord: A Liturgical Hymnal. Anglican Music Publishing, 2023. 942 pp. $29.95 (hardcover).

In my earlier article, I discussed the various criteria for picking an Anglican hymnal.^[1] I did so as a starting point for writing a review of Sing Unto the Lord (SUL). As noted in the earlier article, this 2023 hymnal is offered as an alternative to the existing 20^th century Episcopal (ECUSA) hymnals — The Hymnal (1940) and The Hymnal (1982) — as well as two 21^st century Anglican hymnals: Book of Common Praise (2017) and Hymnal of the Heart (2023).^[2] With the 2017 Book of Common Praise, the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) sought to update Hymnal 1940 (H40) for REC or other Anglican parishes using traditional language — whether the 1928 prayer book, Rite I of the 1979 prayer book, or the “Traditional Language” edition of the ACNA prayer book. The BCP17 is published by Anglican House Publishers, which also publishes the ACNA prayer book. Since 2019, the publisher has also offered Magnify the Lord (MTL) intended for non-REC parishes; except for the name, it is identical to BCP17.

Meanwhile, SUL is more of a successor to Hymnal 1982 (H82), but with the 2019 ACNA modern liturgy replacing Rite II. For both MTL and SUL, key liturgical texts determine the words for most of the hymnal’s service music. As a successor to H82, SUL is best suited for contemporary language parishes, or perhaps parishes that use both.

This is the first of a two-part review of Sing Unto the Lord, focusing on its service music. In both parts, my review considers what is similar to and different from these earlier hymnals, to help an ACNA parish evaluating SUL as an alternative to one or more of these hymnals.

About Sing Unto the Lord

Sing Unto the Lord is a sizable offering, in more ways than one. Its dimensions are bigger than the 20^th century hymnals — wider than H40, and ¾” taller than both H40 and H82, with the same dimensions as MTL. By my count, it has 942 pages: 18 pages of front matter, 736 pages of hymns, 159 pages of service music, and 29 pages of index and cross-references.

The current (list) price is $30. Accompaniment is provided by a separate, spiral-bound “Keyboard/Guitar Edition”, a two-volume, 1220-page set priced at $97. By comparison, for H82, the two-volume, 1770-page accompaniment edition is $112, while for MTL the 910-page accompaniment edition is $275.

The editor of the hymnal is Mark Kelley Williams, parish musician of Christ Church Anglican in Savannah, Georgia, which the hymnal reminds us, was established in 1733 as the first church in the colony of Georgia. The eight-person “Hymnal Review Committee” included five music directors or organists from four ACNA dioceses across five states: Gulf Atlantic (Florida, Georgia), South Carolina. Ft. Worth (Texas), and Western Anglicans (Idaho). It also includes Williams’ wife, a voice teacher at Christ Church, as well as the retired bishop of the Great Lakes, and a Baptist musician who is the editor of the Hymnology Archive. The hymnal further acknowledges major financial support from two of the parishes represented on the committee: Christ Church Anglican, and its cathedral, St. Peter’s in Tallahassee, both of the Gulf Atlantic diocese. It is published by Anglican Music Publishing, a new nonprofit created to publish the new hymnal. In email correspondence, Williams said that the hymnal began as an effort to make an updated version of MTL, with new service music aligned to the 2019 BCP language (rather than the 1928/Rite I emphasis of MTL). When that effort was unsuccessful, he instead began efforts to create a completely new hymnal, with both the new service music and a new collection of hymns. The result was Sing Unto the Lord.

In the end, SUL is not a hymnal by the ACNA, in the way that H16, H40 and H82 were created by official committees of the Episcopal Church. Instead, like MTL, it is a hymnal for the ACNA, just as the historic English hymnals such as Hymns Ancient & Modern or The English Hymnal were developed by independent committees for the Church of England. ^[3] This has created a few complications, as discussed below. Since a major goal of the hymnal was to match the 2019 ACNA liturgy, first I want to discuss what such matching means for any Anglican hymnal. I then review how the potentially sung parts of the 2019 liturgy are similar and different from the earlier 1979 and 1928 Episcopal liturgies.

About Service Music

To review such a sizable book — with hundreds of changes from any similar predecessor — I decided to start with what I (mistakenly) thought was a simpler task, analyzing what H40 and subsequent hymnals term “service music.”^[4]

What does that term mean? An essay in the Hymnal 1982 Companion says

Service music is the term used in some liturgical churches to designate musical settings of texts from the liturgy itself. It is a distinct category of music used in the liturgy; other texts, such as congregational hymns and poetic texts for choir anthems, may be sung, but only the musical settings of the actual texts of the liturgy are known as service music.^[5]

As with H40 and MTL (but unlike H82), in SUL, this service music comes at the end of the hymnal. To track the evolution of service music (particularly Mass settings) since 1940, it is helpful to consider both the original H40 (released in 1943),^[6] as well as the second (1961) and third (1981) revised editions; the latter has been the only one available for purchase for more than a half-century. (Table 1 contains a summary of the contents of these four hymnals.)

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

The first three pages of SUL’s service music section lists its major subsections: Introduction, Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Supplemental Canticles, Communion Settings, Gloria, music from the Altar Book, and Miscellaneous.

After service music became commonly sung in local parishes — beginning roughly in the mid-19^th century — there have been two competing goals: variety vs. consistency. With a professional cathedral or elite choirs such as those in the English college chapels, the emphasis was on variety, often meaning a new Mass or Office setting every week (perhaps in a rotation of several dozen settings). Conversely, for congregational singing (or with a small choir), the goal is to master a small number of settings through repeated use. For congregation members without formal music training, learning through repetition is the only way they can participate in singing the Mass.

Since the publication of H40, the typical pattern for Episcopal (and now Anglican) churches seems to be to rotate two or three settings during the liturgical year, for penitential, festal and ordinary seasons. Even with such a rotation, many parishes will use the same arrangement year-round for the more difficult pieces, typically the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. The American hymnals — H40, H82, MTL and now SUL — thus include enough Mass settings for such rotation. These are not enough settings for the English practice of having the choir perform a rotation of 10 or more Mass settings for the congregation. Thus, until the 2023 Revised English Hymnal, English hymnals did not attempt to provide a choice of settings for each liturgical text.^[9] However, no matter how many (or which) settings are included in the hymnal, compared to a century ago, in this day of high-speed copiers (and projection screens), it is now practical for congregations to sing settings that are not in the printed hymnal.

Chants Encounters

In the service music section of typical Anglican hymnal, the reader will encounter various styles of chant. Like hymns, the chants have words, notes, and (usually) verses; unlike hymns, the verses do not have a fixed pattern or total number of syllables, but instead the phrases of the text are generally sung using a modified speech rhythm. In other words, hymns require editing the text to fit the fixed rhythmic pattern of the tune, while chants fit the tune to the existing (variable-length) text, such as a psalm or a biblical canticle.

Some chant forms are unison, while others offer four-part harmonies; with rare exceptions, there is no time signature. SUL incorporates the four main chant styles found in the other three Anglican hymnals.

Plainchant^[10] was the dominant form of Western liturgical music for most of the Middle Ages, with monophonic (unison) tunes sung to the speech rhythms of the Latin text; so-called “Gregorian” chant refers to a specific subset of the monophonic liturgical music. Largely displaced after the Reformation, plainchant made a dramatic comeback in Victorian England through the efforts of Thomas Helmore and others.^[11]

Anglican Chant is a uniquely English way of chanting an arbitrary text to a series of chords (harmonized voices), with four chords in the first half of the verse and six in the second half.^[12] Although the harmonic patterns of Anglican Chant can be traced to the 16^th century psalm settings of Tallis and Byrd — and others argue it predates the Reformation^[13] — the compact musical notation (of chords without specific words) appears to date to the 18^th century.^[14] It is not used for Mass settings, but instead for the other worship canticles and (in some cases) the Psalms.^[15]

More the 18,000 Anglican chant settings are known to exist. So far, the Anglican Chant Index has indexed 226 chant books from 1690 through 2023, including more than 100 from 19^th century England.^[16] Such chant plays a prominent role in the Daily Office settings of the three 20^th century American hymnals (H16,H40,H82) as well as MTL. While the notation is compact, it requires knowing for each verse when to shift to the new notes — through notations in the text a process known as “pointing.” Because the pointing varies from verse to verse, some believe that Anglican Chant is difficult to learn, particularly with new texts such as the Psalms. However, when one text is regularly used with the same tune, I have found this is usually no more difficult than learning any other text-tune combination.^[17] H40 includes a half page explaining how to sing Anglican Chant, while MTL provides a complete four-page tutorial that would be useful for any choir or congregation. SUL solves this problem by eliminating the use of Anglican Chant notation, and instead grouping words in under the appropriate notes; this also eliminates the need for pointing.

Simplified Anglican Chant has two chords per half verse, and with a different pattern for odd and even verses. Unlike Anglican Chant, no explicit pointing is needed, because the chord always changes on the last word of each half verse.

The simplified approach was promoted in the mid-20^th century Episcopal Church as an easier way of chanting the psalms. Writing in 1990, Elizabeth Downey explained:

[M]any ways of singing psalms are being tried… Simplified Anglican chant is one way which has met with wide success; it does not require the use of a pointed text, and relies upon a simple melodic formula with accompaniment. …

The very simplicity which is such an asset at the beginning may, after a period of time, seem less adequate for praying the psalms. A long-term plan for gradually introducing other chants should be developed; a congregation might move from the simplified form to the more structured, pointed Anglican chant, or to responsorial plainsong…^[18]

In previous hymnals, stand-alone simplified chants were provided by the “Appendix” of H82 (nine) and in the printed MTL (12).^[19] However, these chants were not matched to any specific text. For SUL, all the simplified chants are assigned to specific texts.

Beyond these three categories, SUL also classifies some music as Simplified Gregorian Chant; although not a term with a standardized definition, it is as good a term as any. It’s a unison plainchant sung like any other monophonic chant: however, it is written out more like Anglican chant, but with the passing notes at the beginning and the long reciting tone in the middle. Both H40 and MTL have a number of examples of this approach, including a familiar Venite.^[20]

In addition to these four categories — plainchant (“Gregorian Chant”), Anglican Chant, Simplified Anglican Chant, and Simplified Gregorian Chant — SUL uses a few other terms to label its service music. The most frequent is “Modern Arrangement”, but it also includes “Contemporary Folk”. For 12 pieces of music indexed in the service music but printed in the body of the hymnal, nine of these cross-referenced pieces are labeled “Metrical Hymn”, i.e. use modified texts that conform to the strophic pattern of a hymn. Unlike earlier hymnals, SUL explicitly labels the style for each of the Office settings and the extra pieces for the Mass; the ten complete Mass settings are mostly plainchant.

Impact of 20^th Century Liturgical Reforms

In developing (or choosing) a hymnal service music section, a key question is: which service(s)? As noted earlier, service music — whether Daily Office or Mass settings — means putting to music the English text of the liturgy. For Anglicans, that liturgy began with Cranmer’s 16^th century English translations of the Sarum Rite, which was the medieval Latin liturgy of Salisbury Cathedral.^[21]

For liturgical music, the differences across the first 400 years of the prayer book are pretty minimal: the 1549/1552/1559 and 1662 English and the 1789, 1892 and 1928 American editions of the Book of Common Prayer are very similar in terms of sung texts, with one notable exception. Since our first prayer book, Americans have always said (or sang) “Our father who art in heaven”. But those who attend a Choral Evensong from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer will recognize that English choirs call to the father “which art in heaven” with a request to “forgive them who trespass” (rather than those).^[22]

For centuries, Cranmer’s texts were also widely incorporated in the liturgies of other English-speaking Protestant denominations, whether in England, the U.S. or elsewhere. However, since the 1970s, Anglican (and other) liturgical texts have been changing. Not all changes to the liturgy have hymnal implications. The hymnal is not affected by changes to order of prayers, or — in most cases — prayers said by the priest (such as the Prayer of Institution). The break from traditional language came begin in the 1960s. During the initial sessions of Vatican II, a group of English-speaking bishops formed the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) in 1963 to develop common texts for English-speaking Catholics. In the 1970s they released officially approved texts for the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours (which included the Offices).

In response, English-speaking Protestants agreed to jointly develop ecumenical modern language texts to parallel the Roman Catholic efforts. In 1969, they created the International Consultation on English Texts (ICET) with Anglican, Baptist, Congregationalist, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic members, and representatives from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, the United States and Wales.^[23] The ICET issued three editions of Prayers We Have in Common, the final in 1975.^[24] It standardized modern language versions for 13 texts, of which seven are texts from the Mass: the Lord’s Prayer, Kyrie, Gloria, Nicene Creed, Sursum Corda, Sanctus/Benedictus and Agnus Dei. The six remaining texts were from the Daily Office: Apostle’s Creed, Gloria Patri, Te Deum, Benedictus, Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. Not standardized were several common Daily Office canticles— Venite and Benedictus es, as well as seasonal canticles such as the Ecce Deus and Pascha Nostrum.

The 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church adopted these ICET ecumenical texts for its new Rite II. Meanwhile, Rite I provided a reordered version of the historic (mostly unchanged) liturgical texts: the most visible change was the banishment of the Holy Ghost, with Rite I using the same Spirit-filled Gloria Patri as Rite II.^[25] In the final months of the 20^th century, the Church of England released its own compromise between traditional and modern worship. Ironically titled Common Worship, this multivolume library of 2000 included a rewritten psalter, four Eucharistic services, (at least) seven sets of Eucharistic prayers and — for the Daily Offices — a selection of 87(!) canticles that can be said or sung during worship.

Sacred Texts of the 21^st Century

In this century, the texts once shared through ecumenical cooperation have begun to diverge again. The Episcopal Church has moved further in a progressive direction with its (so far optional) 2018 “Expansive” language liturgy, which provides the option to drastically reduce references to God as the “father” or “son”.^[26]

Meanwhile, in the Roman Catholic church, Benedict XVI started a process in 2001 to develop more “accurate” translations of the Latin rite. In some cases, these updated translations moved back towards earlier texts, fixing three inaccurate translations of the ICET: “We believe”, “and also with you” and “God of power and might”. At the same time, the 2010 revision (which took effect in Advent 2011) also included non-ecumenical changes to the Gloria (“peace to people of good will”) and to the Nicene Creed (“consubstantial with the father”).^[27]

Finally, after Anglican Church in North America was formed in 2009,^[28] it developed its own liturgy. Its 2019 Book of Common Prayer changed many services and prayers and made modern language the default for the entire province. The 2019 BCP started from Rite II of 1979 BCP; for the purpose of singing the Mass, the changes from Rite II are mostly minor, and (with one exception) ignored the 2010 Roman update. A separate, “Traditional Language Edition” (TLE) was not released until 2022,^[29] but the sung texts generally match the 1928/Rite I language. As with today’s Episcopal Church, most of the ACNA (outside the Reformed Episcopal Church) uses modern language worship. My own experience of the last four decades has mainly been with traditional language worship.

A hymnal intended to serve an entire province mighty try to cover all these bases; at the same time, at a given parish some parts will be rarely used and thus given little value. Language is certainly one of those issues — SUL (like H82) includes both traditional and modern texts. So, in matching an ACNA parish’s liturgy to a hymnal, a key question is whether (and how frequently) the TLE is used: always, never, or sometimes. The other key issue is relative importance of the three main services in a given week or month. Most (not all) ACNA parishes have a weekly Eucharist. However, in some parts of the country, the Sunday service for the most Reformed (Catholic-averse) parishes might be more often MP rather than a Communion service (unlikely be called a “Mass”). Finally, a few churches have regular evensong — either on the weekend or midweek — while others use the liturgy occasionally or never. So, building a hymnal’s portfolio of the service music, the editors (and potential buyers) face tradeoffs between prioritizing traditional vs. modern, Eucharist vs. Office, and morning vs. evening. I’ll review SUL’s portfolio of musical pieces, first for the Mass and then for the Office.

Mass Settings

The most important sung texts of the Mass are Kyrie Eleison, Gloria, Nicene Creed, Sursum Corda (“The Lord be with you”), Sanctus, Lord’s Prayer and Agnus Dei — read in this sequence in the 2019 (and 2022) BCP. In practical terms, a complete Mass setting includes the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, with the Creed and Lord’s Prayer less often composed, published or sung. Most churches still use a single ancient Sursum Corda,^[30] which is included in all four of these hymnals.

Since the initial publication of H40, such Mass settings have evolved slightly:

• Kyrie: H40 included threefold and ninefold Kyries, but later hymnals have included both sixfold and numerous variants in between. H82 also included the Greek texts (“kyrie eleison”) in addition to the English ones.
• Trisagion: although not found in the Roman or English rite, this ancient Orthodox hymn is an alternative to the Kyrie in both the 1979 and 2019 prayer books.^[31]
• Sanctus: The original Sanctus of the Latin Sarum rite was followed by a Benedictus qui venit that was translated into English for Cranmer’s first (1549) prayer book (“Blessed is he that commeth in the name of the Lorde…”); however, it was omitted from the 1662 and all US prayer books until 1979.^[32] The Sanctus in the first two editions of H40 omits the Benedictus, while the third edition adds the combined Sanctus/Benedictus for six of the eight settings. MTL includes both forms of the Sanctus (without and with Benedictus) for the traditional Masses, but only the longer form for the modern Mass. The two other hymnals (H82 and SUtL) both include only the longer form for both traditional and modern Masses.^[33]
• Agnus Dei: Both H82 and SUL offer “Jesus Lamb of God” as a modern paraphrase of the Agnus Dei.

As with Hymnal 1982, the new Sing Until the Lord includes both traditional and modern service music, and both emphasize modern language overall. Table 2 shows the number of settings for each of the major sung pieces for their respective Eucharist services; some are part of complete Mass settings, while others are stand-alone pieces.

Table 2: Summary of Mass settings in Hymnal 1982 and Sing Unto the Lord^[34]

While they are tied to different prayer books, the 2019 translations for each piece within the Mass settings are largely the same as the earlier Rite II — with three minor and one major exception. The minor changes are:

• For the Kyrie, the 2019 allows three choices: the traditional Rite I (1662) language, as well as the two Rite II variants, Greek or modern English.
• The 2019 Sursum Corda follows the 2010 Roman revision (“and with your spirit”) rather than the earlier ICET (“and also with you”).
• The Agnus Dei was optional in Rite II, but in 2019 (as in 1662 and 1928) is once again recommended.

The most drastic changes with the sung versions of the 2019 texts were within the Nicene Creed: the creed of the 2019 BCP is different from that of the ICET, 2010 Roman or traditional Cranmerian language. Without a modern setting to match 2019 BCP, SUL has only one (traditional) setting of the creed —Merbecke’s arrangement found in H40 and MTL — but not the Douglas found in H40, H82 and MTL.

H40 and MTL respectively present together eight^[35] and five sets of Mass settings, with an assortment of isolated pieces — most importantly, the “Scottish” Gloria, familiar to most U.S. Episcopalians and Anglicans, which is also found in H82 and SUL. H82 organizes its Mass settings by piece, while SUL again presents the Mass settings as a set. H40, H82 and MTL share the three standard Episcopal Mass settings of the 20^th century: John Merbecke’s Booke of Common Praier Noted (1550), Winfred Douglas’ Missa Marialis (1915) and Healey Willan’s Sancta Maria Magdelena (1928). SUL keeps two (Merbecke and Willan), but drops the Douglas, except for its familiar Lord’s Prayer and its threefold Kyrie.

To support the new Rite II in the 1979 prayer book, H82 introduced three Rite II Mass settings — original settings by David Hurd and Robert Powell, and Richard Proulx’s metrical adaptation of the German language Mass of Schubert’s Deutsche Messe; however, the Powell lacked a Kyrie and the Proulx lacked a Gloria. SUL includes the Powell and Proulx settings and adds the Gloria missing from Proulx’s original adaptation of Schubert;^[36] it drops Hurd, which was the only ACNA modern mass setting in MTL.

In addition to these settings, a subcommittee selected for SUL four new complete mass settings of 4-8 pieces each. The new masses written for the ACNA texts are:

• Flager Mass by Chris Garven (b. 1968);
• Psalleto Mass by Frederick Richardson (a former Episcopalian, Anglican and Lutheran minister) and his wife Dale (a former Lutheran music director); and
• Christ Mass and New Jerusalem Mass, both by Mark Kelley Williams^[37] (b. 1960)

The hymnal includes two composite Masses by multiple composers; one uses the 2019 text, and one mixes 2019 and traditional texts. Finally, SUL includes four (originally Rite II) pieces but not a full Mass from Betty Pulkingham (1928-2019), a well-known Episcopalian composer.

Overall SUL has 10 complete masses — two traditional, seven modern, and one combining both — as well as excerpts from an eighth modern mass.^[38] Beyond these settings are four additional settings each of the Gloria and Lord’s Prayer. SUL has eight settings of the Lord’s Prayer, more than H40 (two), H82 (four) or MTL (three). I’m not sure whether I’m more surprised by the total number of settings, by the three new settings for traditional language — or that the editors still think there’s a demand for three modern language settings.^[39] One of the new traditional settings is the antiphonal (and whimsical) 2002 setting by Kathleen Kanewske, which I learned while worshipping at the local ACNA parish during my 2018 sabbatical at Baylor.

In addition to the main hymnal website, a second hymnal website includes recordings for all four of the new Masses, as well as some of the others. These resources help in evaluating the Masses and the hymnal, as well as in teaching a new Mass to the choir or congregation.

Daily Office

Beyond Mass settings, service music also includes canticles for Morning and Evening Prayer, collectively known as the Daily Office. While three hymnals grouped Mass settings by author (or Mass), all four hymnals organize canticles for the Daily Office by the canticle text.

For the use of the texts, the 2019 BCP is generally similar to the 1979, and like the 1979 (both Rite I and Rite II) omits the Gloria Patri except for the three canticles from Luke’s gospel. However, the actual texts of the 2019 (and thus SUL) are much different than in the 1979 (H82).

Even more than for Mass settings, SUL settings of the Office are primarily modern, while H82 offered only traditional settings for a few canticles; SUL also offers modified texts that don’t fit either category (Table 3).

Table 3: Summary of Daily Office settings in Hymnal 1982 and Sing Unto the Lord^[40]

Morning Prayer. As in the 1979, the 2019 and 2022 ACNA liturgies open with the choice of the Venite or Jubilate Deo (Psalm 100). However, the uniquely American text of the Venite is gone; instead, the ACNA liturgy uses Psalm 95 which is identical to the Venite in the first 7 verses.^[41] SUL provides three modern settings of Psalm 95 consistent with 2019 BCP, while the earlier MTL (like H40) provides settings of the American Venite of the 1928 and 1979 BCP.^[42]

SUtL provides three modern settings of the Jubilate Deo. As with Psalm 95, it uses the 2019 ACNA psalter, which is lightly modernized and thus closer to the 1928 or Rite I than to Rite II.^[43] It also provides four modern settings for the Pascha Nostrum (same text as Rite II), used as a Venite substitute during Eastertide.

For the remainder of the MP service, the seven canticles of the 1979 have been reduced to three in the 2019: Te Deum Laudamus, the Benedictus (from Luke 1), and the Benedictus es, Domine (from the Song of the Three Young Men). While in 1979, the Te Deum matched the ICET, ^[44] in the 2019 the Te Deum has numerous small changes and restores (as optional) five verses missing from the 1979.

Evening Prayer. The Phos Hilarion is an ancient Orthodox vespers hymn. It is the optional opening canticle for EP in 1979 and 2019; both modern and TLE editions of the ACNA prayer book keep the 1979 translation, except for the second word.^[45] SUL includes four modern settings for this text. For the two (now fixed) canticles, the 2019 translations of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis moved away from the 1979, to be lightly modernized updates of the traditional language. SUL provides two modern and one traditional setting for each. Beyond the texts, there is the question of the music. Since H40, the editors for each of the three subsequent hymnals felt much less need to provide continuity for Office settings than for Mass settings. H82 kept only ten Daily Office pieces; MTL made reuse of H40 pieces an explicit goal and retained 38 pieces.^[46]

Still, the continuity of SUL is considerably less than either of these. Only three of the Daily Office settings of SUL appeared in any of the three previous hymnals; all are Gregorian chant settings of traditional texts that first appeared in H40. Two are plainchant settings of Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis^[47] that also appear in MTL. The third is a 1974 Te Deum setting by English (later Episcopalian) composer Alastair Cassels-Brown (1927-2001), which was first published in the third (1981) edition of H40. Of these three, the Magnificat and Te Deum also overlap with H82.

One reason for this dramatic change is the almost complete elimination of Anglican Chant from the Office settings. H40 had 66 settings of AC, while MTL increased that to 87. My index of H82 isn’t complete, but I count more than 40 settings that use AC. Meanwhile, SUL has exactly six tunes from four composers. Only a small part of this decline in Anglican Chant has been due to replacement by simplified Anglican chant. H82 and MTL had only stand-alone simplified chants (music without specific texts) which were primarily intended for chanting the psalms;^[48] SUL has 17 specific texts with such chants, incorporating three existing and three newer tunes. The oldest and most popular of these simplified tunes — used for four texts in SUL — is by Jerome W. Meachen (1930-2015).^[49] Written in 1956, it was first published in the H82 Appendix, and also as one of 12 stand-alone chants in MTL. By 1996, one liturgist concluded that this setting in D major had become the most widely adopted example of this category: The Meacham simplified Anglican chant has gained such popularity over the past twenty years that almost any group gathered in the Episcopal Church can sing a psalm (or any other text) to this tune.^[50]

Also in SUL are two separate settings in E^b (accounting for eight texts) by Robert Knox Kennedy (b. 1945), who authored six of the nine Simplified Anglican Chants in the H82 Appendix. Another text utilizes a two-part setting that combines one of the Kennedy tunes with the Meachen tune transposed to E^b. The remaining four texts are set to three simplified tunes by Mark Williams. Beyond the standard Mass and Office canticles the hymnal includes numerous other pieces. Some pieces are to texts that I have sung, such as the Pascha Nostrum Easter canticle. Other texts are ones that I have not sung but presumably are important to one or more of the six ACNA parishes represented by the Hymnal Review Committee.

The ACNA’s Hymnal Efforts

The 2023 release of the (unofficial) Sing Unto the Lord is the offshoot of an earlier but ultimately unsuccessful effort to make an official ACNA hymnal.

The latter effort began with the appointment Williams as the new chair of the ACNA’s Music Task Force. The November 2019 ACNA announcement said that the task force had “released a new website with various resources for parish priests and music worship leaders.”^[51] In the oldest available archive of that website (now ACNAMusicResources.com), the August 2020 snapshot biographies of Williams and other members of the 10-member Music Task Force. A January 2021 ACNA story announced

The Music Task Force has worked closely with the bishops of the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) to produce a new hymnal based on the REC’s excellent Book of Common Praise hymnal with a selection of service music appropriate for the 2019 BCP. The College has approved a Review Panel for this work, and we look forward to considering at our next meeting a final version to be offered as a resource for the province.^[52]

Working with together with the Liturgy Task Force, the two task forces solicited “Communion Settings”^[53] aligned to the 2019 BCP. In March 2022, the ACNA website reported the next step: The Liturgy and Music Task Forces have formally requested, over the past year, submissions of Communion Settings for possible inclusion in the Service Music section of the developing new Anglican Church in North America Hymnal. We have been in receipt of many compositions …

Select members of the two task forces will gather in Savannah, GA this April to review the entire proposed Service Music section as a requested first step toward the development of a hymnal. The Service Music section will be presented to the College of Bishops at their June 2022 meeting for review and adoption. At that time, the two Task Forces will move on to reviewing the Hymns section of the proposed hymnal, taking the best from The Hymnal 1940, The Hymnal 1982, and sorting through a myriad of quality singable hymns composed since their publication.^[54]

Williams said that this April 2022 sub-committee selected the four new masses which are now published in SUL; New Jerusalem, Psalleto, Christ Mass and the Flager Mass. It also reviewed and sang through a complete draft of the service music section. This service music was incorporated in a draft hymnal called Glorify the Lord. To save time and money, it would (with full REC cooperation) reuse the MTL engravings^[55] of its 639 hymns, but replace the service music with a new collection aligned to the 2019 BCP. An initial draft and two revisions of Glorify the Lord were submitted to the ACNA’s College of Bishops, but were never approved.

With the ending of the official ACNA-sponsored efforts, Williams began working on creating an (unofficial) hymnal titled Sing Unto the Lord, intended for the two sponsoring parishes and other Anglican parishes seeking a replacement for H82. Williams and the Hymnal Review Committee compiled a new portfolio of 741 hymns, selected from those previously found in H82 or MTL, as well as others published since then. They also substituted more singable tunes for existing texts. The hymnal was published by Anglican Music Publishing, which also took over operation of the ACNAMusicResources.com website (removing mention of official ACNA ties) and created a new website specifically for the hymnal.

In May 2023, the publisher of Sing Unto the Lord contacted North American Anglican, asking if I (as someone who writes for NAA about church music) would be interested in reviewing the hymnal. Drafts of the hymnal were already being circulated, and I was sent a draft about two months before it was final in the summer of 2023. The first printed copies were released in October 2023. Reports of the forthcoming SUL briefly prompted ACNA interest in creating its own (official) hymnal. A June 2023 ACNA story reported that “Archbishop Beach shared encouraging news that the College of Bishops had approved the formation of a Hymnal Commission to be led by Archbishop Emeritus Duncan.”^[56] A September 2023 email blast listed the Commission members and its goals to create a new hymnal to be released in 2030.^[57] However, after the Commission met in November 2023, it announced it would not be developing a hymnal any time soon. Instead, it renamed itself the Music Resources Task Force, and shifted its focus to developing resources to support music ministries in local ACNA parishes.^[58]

Assessment of Service Music

The service music is only one-sixth of this new hymnal, but it reflects a lot of work and represents an important part of weekly Anglican worship. It’s also the most dramatically different from earlier hymnals, with a smaller proportion of returning music. For most parishes, the most important service music will be the Mass settings. How suitable is SUL for parishes using the 2019 Book of Common Prayer? Of course, it will land some adoptions by default, as the only hymnal with multiple Mass settings for the modern 2019 language — versus one in MTL and none in the other two options. It includes two of three familiar H82 modern settings (Powell, Proulx/Schubert) and the missing Proulx Gloria— as well as four other modern settings.

For the 2022 TLE, it keeps Merbecke and Willan of the earlier hymnals but drops Douglas’ arrangement of the historic plainchants. So based only on service music, it’s probably more appropriate for a modern or blended parish, rather than a TLE parish. On the Daily Office, it offers a more coherent strategy than H82, with balanced coverage of the major canticles. However, it offers little continuity with previous hymnals, with only three tune-text pairings found in any of the three previous hymnals — compared to nine reused pairings in H82 and 38 in MTL.

Beyond these text-tune pairings, also gone are any Office settings by more than a dozen pre-20^th century English composers. Particularly noticeable is the absence of almost any figure from the 19^th century Anglican Choral Revival, a period responsible for creating the vibrant Anglican choral tradition that we take for granted today. Those missing include these ten 19^th century composers whose service music compositions were included in all three prior hymnals: William Crotch (1775-1847), Stephen Elvey (1805-1860), John Goss (1800-1880), E.J. Hopkins (1818-1901), George A. MacFarren (1813-1887), Edwin George Monk (1819-1900), John Naylor (1838-1897), Frederick Ouseley (1825-1889), James Turle (1802-1882) and William H. Walter (1825-1893).

Four others from this period were included in MTL and either H40 or H82: Joseph Barnby (1838-1896), Vincent Novello (1781-1861), Thomas Turton (1780-1864) and Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-1876). Of these fourteen, six — Crotch, Elvey, Goss, Hopkins, Ouseley and S.S. Wesley— were important enough to be mentioned in Dale Adelmann’s seminal study of the mid-19^th century origins of the Anglican Choral Revival.^[59  The omission would be understandable if the settings were tied to the text and thus not immediately ready to be use with the new 2019 canticles. However, nearly all of the settings by these composers retained in H82 were Anglican Chant — which by definition can be used with any text.

Does this matter to anyone deciding about whether or not to adopt SUL? Probably not.

Does Service Music Affect Hymnal Choice?

The aforementioned points to a more general question. The service music of Sing Unto the Lord certainly provides a wide range of choices for modern language ACNA parishes, or those who use both editions of the ACNA liturgy. But the question remains: how often does it matter in a hymnal adoption decision?

Books aren’t important for those evangelical parishes in the ACNA that (like other evangelicals outside the ACNA) use projection screens. Other parishes use preprinted liturgical music sheets, which works well for churches that use the same one to three settings every year. Finally, user-friendly, integrated booklets are becoming are becoming more common, and it’s easy to rotate among two or three mass settings every year. Rather than provide music, some parishes will just provide the text (either in the bulletin or prayer book) and leave it to the congregation to pick up the tune. This can be off-putting for visitors: when visiting a church last month, I sang the Willan Decalogue responses for the first time in decades, and although a simple, it was a little bit tricky until I found it in the pew hymnal (which the bulletin didn’t mention).

In another case, I worshipped for a few months at a parish where none of the idiosyncratic assortment of pieces used to sing the Mass were in the hymnal, although each was on the screen. For about a month, it was disconcerting to sing a new setting that was neither familiar nor internally consistent. By comparison, the Merbecke, Willan, Hurd and other settings show the benefits of composing an entire setting at once in a unified style. Still, many parishes may decide that service music is integral to their selection of a hymnal. In those cases, the service music of Sing Unto the Lord accomplishes what it set out to do. It introduces (or updates) a wide range of modern Mass settings for the ACNA’s 2019 Book of Common Prayer, as well as a balance of modern settings for Morning and Evening Prayer.

For the Traditional Language Edition, the story is somewhat disappointing, with a small choice of Mass settings, and no Morning Prayer canticles. Still, it is adequate for a mixed-use parish. Alternately, the TLE service could be supported by a booklet or mass handout rather than the hymnal when a third Mass setting or Morning Prayer canticles are needed. However, I suspect that for most parishes, the main factor in choosing a new hymnal will be its portfolio of hymns for the entire church year. Please stay tuned for the final review installment.

Notes

1. Joel W. West, “Anglican Hymnals in the 21st Century,” North American Anglican, July 19, 2024, https://northamanglican.com/anglican-hymnals-in-the-21st-century/ ↑
2. The first three are comprehensive hymnals, while Hymnal of the Heart is intentionally simplified. ↑
3. The Book of Common Praise 2017 was a hymnal officially sponsored and developed by a committee of the Reformed Episcopal Church, as a replacement for the 1943 REC hymnal of the same name; neither should be confused with a 1938 Canadian hymnal entitled The Book of Common Praise, Being the Hymn Book of the Church of England in Canada. The BCP17 and MTL editions of the hymnal have been adopted by some but not all REC parishes, as well as a few ACNA and even Continuing parishes. Here I use “MTL” to refer to both editions, to reduce confusion between the BCP 2017 hymnal and the 2019 BCP liturgy. ↑
4. The Hymnal (1916) has a 56-page section labelled “The Morning and Evening Canticles and Occasional Anthems.” However, unlike its 1940 replacement, it does not include any Mass settings. ↑
5. Elizabeth Morris Downey, “A Survey of Service Music in The Hymnal 1982,” Hymnal 1982 Companion, vol. 1 (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1990), 150-159 at 150. ↑
6. The original 1943 edition is the only one currently indexed by Hymnary.org ↑
7. “Hymns” are those text-tune pairings that are counted as separate hymns by the 1982 and later hymnals. The Hymnal (1940) lists multiple tunes under one hymn number, and so the initial edition has 600 hymn texts and 725 hymn-text pairings. ↑
8. An additional 160 pieces of H82 service music (S289-S448) are separately published in the “Appendix” to H82, which is found in Hymnal 1982 Accompaniment Edition Volume 1: Service Music (New York: Church Hymnal Corp., 1985). ↑
9. The 1986 New English Hymnal included one traditional language setting (by John Merbecke) and a new modern language setting, the New English Folk Mass attributed (except in NEH) to George Timms (1910-1997), chair of the NEH hymnal committee. ↑
10. Among the terms chant, plainchant, plainsong, and Gregorian chant, at times two or more have been used interchangeably. ↑
11. Bernarr Rainbow, The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church (1839-1872). (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); Bennett Zon, The English Plainchant Revival. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). ↑
12. The first half of every verse begins with an initial reciting tone used for multiple syllables, followed by two passing notes and then a note to end the phrase the second half of the verse has four passing notes in between the reciting and ending tones. Longer texts often use a “double chant”, with different tunes for the odd and even verses. ↑
13. J. Powell Metcalfe, “The Origin of the Anglican Chant,” Musical Times 16, no. 378 (Aug. 1, 1874), pp. 574-576; https://www.jstor.org/stable/3353644 ↑
14. Ruth M. Wilson, “Harmonized Chant,” Hymnal 1982 Companion, vol. 1 (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1990), 215-237 at 225. ↑
15. A very different approach for chanting psalms is used by Nashotah House Plainsong Psalter, 3^rd ed. (Nashotah, Wisc.: Nashotah House Press, 2013). Each of the 150 psalms of the 1979 BCP is assigned one of 46 chant melodies. Within these melody, each half verse has a long reciting tone, with a total of 5-11 notes per half verse. ↑
16. See “List of chant books,” https://www.anglicanchant.nl/books/books_Year.html ↑
17. To learn how to sing these canticles, I found helpful the “Canticle Tutor” section of the website CradleOfPrayer.org provides a number of downloadable MP3 files for traditional language Morning and Evening Prayer canticles. ↑
18. Downey, “A Survey of Service Music,” 155-156. ↑
19. The Appendix is contained in the accompaniment edition of H82, and thus rarely seen by anyone other than an accompanist. Until I began researching this article, I had never heard of this 262 page Appendix — let alone the 160 official service music pieces (S289 through S448) contained therein. They are found be in the The Hymnal 1982: Accompaniment Edition, Volume 1 (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1985), available for viewing on the Internet Archive. ↑
20. The two first Venites in H82 appear to share this form, but are fully written out in the format of an ordinary “Gregorian” chant. ↑
21. An overview of the Sarum Rite can be found in Charles Walker, The Liturgy of the Church of Sarum (London: J.T. Hayes, 1866) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=yMcXTrBMdlIC ↑
22. Adopting the U.S. language of the Lord’s Prayer was among the updates provided by Samuel L. Bray and Drew N. Keane, eds. 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2021). ↑
23. Eugene L. Brand, “Worship and the Ecumenical Movement,” Ecumenical Review, 51, no. 2 (1999): 184-192. ↑
24. Prayers We Have in Common, 2^nd rev. ed. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975. ↑
25. The “Additional Directions” (p. 141) in the 1979 BCP allow use of the 1662/1928 Gloria Patri, but this is not what is written in Hymnal 1982 and appears to be rarely done. The Holy Ghost is still found in some fixed and variable prayers of the Rite I Eucharist and Offices. ↑
26. Matthew S.C. Olver, “New Rites: Expansive, Inclusive, or Stifling?” Covenant, November 14, 2018, https://livingchurch.org/covenant/new-rites-expansive-inclusive-or-stifling/ ↑
27. J.W. West, “And with your spirit,” August 1, 2008, http://anglicanmusic.blogspot.com/2008/08/and-with-your-spirit.html ↑
28. In January 1978, the New York Times reported the consecration of the four founding bishops of the “Anglican Church of North America.” However, the group soon broke apart, forming the three earliest jurisdictions of the (perennially fractured) “Continuing” Anglican movement. See J.W. West, “Celebrating 30 years of schism,” January 28, 2008, http://anglicanmusic.blogspot.com/2008/01/celebrating-30-years-of-schism.html ↑
29. The publication is labelled The Book of Common Prayer (2019) Traditional Language Edition 2022, but for simplicity’s sake, here I refer to it as the “2022” or “TLE” prayer book. ↑
30. The setting shared by these four hymnals dates to 1927 and The Choral Service (New York: H.W. Gray, 1927) https://archive.org/details/choralservice0000unse. In it, Winfred Douglas shifted from the Sarum setting to a more ancient Roman setting, and this pattern has been followed ever since. See “S 112 Lift up your hearts Sursum corda,” Hymnal 1982 Companion, vol. 2 (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1994), 91-94. ↑
31. H82 and SUtL share exactly one setting of the Trisagion, the one by Russian composer Alexander Arkhangelsky (1846-1924). It is the only setting I’ve ever heard sung, when my family sang it seasonally at a Continuing church in Palo Alto. ↑
32. The Benedictus qui venit was dropped in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer with its more Reformed emphasis. It was also omitted from the 1559, 1662 and subsequent prayer books, until the 1962 Canadian prayer book where (as in the 1979 America prayer book) it became an optional addition. ↑
33. Consistent with the 1662 but inconsistent with 21^st century worship, the Benedictus qui venit is omitted from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition. ↑
34. Not shown are six Greek language Kyrie settings in H82. For SUtL, the traditional pieces includes one modified traditional Lord’s Prayer (“forgive our sins”). ↑
35. H40 (actually first printed in 1943) has four mass settings, while the 1961 revision adds four more. The 1981 revision publishes a version of the Sanctus with the Benedictus qui venit for six of the eight previous Mass settings, omitting the Fourth Communion Service (Oldroyd) from the original edition and the Seventh Communion Service (Waters) added with the second edition. ↑
36. Hymnal 1982 uses the Proulx arrangement of the Schubert that was later published in 1985 by GIA without a Gloria, which was not published until 1989. See “S 96 Lord, have mercy Kyrie,” Hymnal 1982 Companion, vol. 2 (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1994), 70-72. ↑
37. The decisions by Garven and Williams as committee members to include their own Mass settings in the hymnal are not without precedent. Douglas and Chris Hoyt included Mass settings in the hymnals they edited (respectively H40 and MTL), while Hurd and Proulx were both on the H82 hymnal committee. ↑
38. By comparison, the Revised English Hymnal — also published in 2023, and also supporting both traditional and modern worship — has four modern and four traditional settings. Only two of the traditional masses would be recognizable to an American audience: the Merbecke, and eighth of the masses in the later edition of H40, a 1918 mass by English composer Martin Shaw (1875-1958). The REH includes both of the settings published in the 1986 New English Hymnal: the Merbecke and the modern New English Folk Mass. ↑
39. While the modern Eucharist services in the 2019 (like the 1979) list the traditional Lord’s Prayer first, the 2010 ICEL translations of the Roman Rite list only the traditional text and no longer offer a modernized alternative. ↑
40. For SUtL, the “other” settings are Daily Office listings cross-referenced to specific hymn paraphrases of the text that are printed in the main body of the hymnal. ↑
41. In the 1549-1662 English BCP, before the variable Psalm, MP began with all 11 verses of Psalm 95, a psalm whose Latin incipit is Venite, exultemus Domino. The American-invented “Venite” (published in the 1789-1979 BCP) is a composite of Psalm 95:1-7 and Psalm 96:9,13 — although both 1928 and 1979 offer a choice between this composite or the full Psalm 95. The 2019 BCP compromise is to recite Psalm 95:1-7, but to make verses 8-11 (unfamiliar to many American ears) optional outside of Lent. ↑
42. H82 has six settings of the Venite and three of Psalm 95 — none carried over from H40. ↑
43. For example, for the 2019 Jubilate, only 4 words are different between the modern and traditional language: “you lands” (vs. “ye”), “has made us (vs. “hath”). ↑
44. Prayers We Have in Common, p. 20. ↑
45. Phos Hilaron is a 3^rd or 4^th century Greek Orthodox hymn, and the 2019 prayer book has reinstated the opening phrase used in Victorian England (“O gladsome light”) in place of the idiosyncratic 1979 one (“O gracious light”). ↑
46. Here I am not counting Preces, Responses and Suffrages, both because hymnals group them differently, and because some hymnals do a better job than others of writing down was already common practice. ↑
47. The Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis of H40 are updates of settings published in Charles Winfred Douglas, The Canticles at Evensong (New York: H.W. Gray, 1915), 39-41 and 50-51. URL: https://archive.org/details/choralservice0000unse ↑
48. For an enthusiastic endorsement of the practice, see Justin Clemente, “Beauty You Can Afford: Singing the Psalms to Simplified Anglican Chant,” North American Anglican, March 3, 2023, https://northamanglican.com/beauty-you-can-afford-singing-the-psalms-to-simplified-anglican-chant/ ↑
49. “Requiescat in pace: The Rev’d Jerome Webster Meachen,” Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians, 24, no. 5 (May/June 2015):22, ↑
50. Jean Campbell “The Daily Prayer of the Church,” In Ruth A. Meyers, ed. A Prayer Book for the 21st Century. (New York: Church Publishing, Inc., 1996), 3-15 at 13. ↑
51. “New Music Resources Now Available,” November 25, 2019, https://anglicanchurch.net/new-music-resources-now-available/ ↑
52. “College of Bishops Meeting Communique,” January 19, 2021, https://anglicanchurch.net/college-of-bishops-meeting-communique ↑
53. Outside the ACNA, the customary term in liturgical and sacred music studies is “mass setting”, which is preferred 40:1 in Google Scholar. But the evangelical-dominated ACNA seems to avoid this term at all costs, and so the ACNA announcements and SUtL refer to a “Communion Setting”. Like the earlier H40, MTL refs to each setting as a “Communion Service.” ↑
54. “Update on Progress of the Future ACNA Hymnal,” March 8, 2022, https://anglicanchurch.net/update-on-progress-of-the-future-acna-hymnal/ ↑
55. Engraving is to music as typesetting is to text: today, both are forms of computer photocomposition that retain earlier terms dating to the era of metal plates and movable type. ↑
56. “Provincial Council and College of Bishops 2023 Recap,” June 28, 2023, https://anglicanchurch.net/provincial-council-and-college-of-bishops-2023-recap ↑
57. J.W. West, “ACNA plans new hymnal in 2030,” September 13, 2023, http://anglicanmusic.blogspot.com/2023/09/acna-plans-new-hymnal-in-2030.html ↑
58. J.W. West, “ACNA now plans 2029 music resources before hymnal,” November 21, 2023, http://anglicanmusic.blogspot.com/2023/11/acna-now-plans-2029-music-resources.html ↑
59. Dale Adelmann, The Contribution of Cambridge Ecclesiologists to the Revival of Anglican Choral Worship, 1839–62 (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1997). ↑