I’m a player. A hymn-player, actually, specifically on the pianoforte. (Yes, yes, it was a lame opening, I know. :)) It’s been going on for the last ten-ish years, starting in seminary and running like a musical thread throughout my mission (every week in sacrament meeting, and then I accompanied the mission choir for seven months while putting on musical firesides throughout Bangkok, and in my last area I taught music theory for service, but I digress) and then thinning to a spider strand after I got home, only intermittently thickening into something audible.
Yesterday I was thinking about playing the hymns and decided to jot down a few smatterings of advice I’ve accumulated over the years:
Always keep the tune going. If things get complicated and you need to degrade gracefully, drop some of the notes from the left hand (keep the bass as long as possible since that’s the most obvious when it’s missing), and if it gets really bad, let go of the left hand entirely. Knowing what chords you’re playing really helps in times like these, because you can improvise the left hand until you get your bearings again (and get your heart rate down to normal again, if you’re anything like me).
Match the congregation. Don’t play too fast and don’t play too slow. You have to listen closely (without losing track of the music, of course), being in tune to when they need to breathe, how long you should hold notes, and so on. I usually give a little bit of extra breathing room at the end of each verse for good measure. (I plead guilty on blatantly inserting musical puns into this paragraph. My lawyer will be contacting yours.)
Make sure the hymnbook is open and secure before you start playing. It’s kind of unnerving to have the pages of the hymn start blowing about in the middle of a verse. And — heaven forbid — you don’t want the hymnbook to keel over and plop onto the keyboard while you’re still playing. That’s never happened to me, ever. I promise.
Don’t mess up the sacrament hymn. While of course you should strive for perfection, it honestly doesn’t matter all that much if you botch a chord or a measure or two of the opening or closing hymn. (If you do, pretend like it was an intentional atonal improvisation. :P) (No, “atonal” has nothing to do with the sacrament, though it’s a nice faux-etymological connection, don’t you think?) But you really don’t want to hit any wrong notes during the sacrament hymn, because it’s über-noticeable and detracts from the spirit. (If you do, luckily people have relatively short memories and attention spans, so your mistake will almost certainly drift into oblivion within two or three minutes.)
If you know the numbers for all the hymns, you’ve been playing too long — go get a foreign-language hymnbook and start reading that before bed so you can unlearn those numbers. ;)
Comments
That’s funny–a few years ago I tried to memorize the hymn numbers and considered it to be one of my talents. ~sigh~ :)
It’s all going to get mixed around once you start singing those French hymns, though. That’s what happened with me and the Thai hymnbook. Someday I’d like to learn all the hymn numbers for several of the hymnbooks (English, Spanish, French, German, etc.), but I think that’s going to have to wait till the Millennium. :)
I drop parts when I’m playing in this order: tenor, alto, bass, soprano. An exception to this would be if there are parts moving independent to other parts or moving parallel to the melody. Those are always really important too. I don’t like dropping the left hand entirely since it is always really obvious. If you can do just the soprano and the bass and bang a few notes in between, the only people who really will notice are those who are particularly musically inclined or those that are particularly paying attention.
As for playing too fast or too slow, I think that it is much worse to play too slow than too fast. In fact, in most cases I think that hymns should be played at double-time or not at all. Particularly “The Spirit of God.” Maybe the sacrament hymn can be played a little slower since the message is usually extra important.
Agreed on dropping the left hand — it’s very much a last resort. As for the speed, slow is certainly worse than fast, but you’ve got to be careful how fast you go. People need to breathe. :)
Throw in your two cents