It is at this time of year that I wonder ‘What is it about the hymn Brightest and best that attracts tunes with awkward intervals?’.
What I think of as the standard tune, ‘Epiphany’, is straightforward enough. But I have also sung it to a tune offered in the English Hymnal, the Bach chorale ‘Liebster Emmanuel’ which is the only hymn tune I can think of offhand with a diminished fourth in it (easy enough if you’re used to singing Purcell, of course). It has an octave drop in the middle of one line too, but this is harmless enough compared with the next possibility.
If you go to Bath Abbey in Epiphany you may well be invited to sing the hymn to the tune ‘Bede’ from Hymns Ancient and Modern, which is one of the hardest tunes for the congregation I’ve ever encountered. (I discount occasions such as the wedding where the congregation sang ‘Wachet Auf’ in Bach’s arrangement, top G’s and all!). There are plenty of notes in this one, often more than one to a syllable (and the lines of the hymn have 10 or 11 syllables each). Any member of the congregation who attempts to sing along and gets as far as the third line will usually be shaken off by having to sing two intervals of a seventh and one of an octave! If this sounds rather unvocal, it’s because the tune is adapted from an instrumental work by Handel (I believe).
You can find MIDI versions of the first two tunes at:
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/b/r/brightes.htm
On Saturday I went to hear Bath Baroque doing a miscellaneous programme with a loosely applied ‘royal’ theme. Two of Handel’s Coronation Anthems were sung by some of the Exultate Singers, including one or two former Brandon Hill Singers known to me.
Lazy American that I am, I am amazed that British Anglican congregations sing out of a hymnal that puts the words in a different place than the music. And making it worse, sometimes the words move on to another page, so one is flipping back and forth. I found this particularly difficult in Chichester where we sang a hymn with a tune by Wagner. It was definitely not what I think of as a singable tune for a congregation, but it was made more difficult by the printed disconnect between words and music.
We are spoon-fed words and notes together. For those of us with short-term memory problems, this is quite helpful. I find this difference in hymnals is more awkward than driving on the left side of the road.
We solve this one at church by having some words-only copies of the hymnbooks, to be superimposed on the tune if we’re singing a tune in another part of the book, or from the other hymnbook we have in the stalls. Some people still have the trusting faith that the words of any hymn are identical in all hymnbooks (or aren’t bothered by singing different words from everyone else!)
Our plainchant psalter doesn’t reprint the tone over a page-turn, and you can be sure that this will happen if it’s one of the more infrequent, complicated tones or if there are various anomalous verses over the page.