Some more ideas to make a hymn more interesting

Thanks for your question. There are some things you can do with a hymn so you don’t have to just sing it straight from the hymn book. (You might as well have the congregation sing it if you are going to do that.) First of all, there are a number of free arrangement sites you could check out. The links on the bottom of my home page has a few listed. One of them might have an arrangement that you like. If you have a women’s group singing, you could have the women sing the men’s parts an octave higher and then you would have a nice piano accompaniment to go with it. If you only have a few singers, you could leave out one or two of the parts, or even sing the whole thing unison with the different accompaniment.

If you don’t find anything you like, there are some things you can do with the hymn itself. You could have one or two women sing the first verse as a solo or duet. then you could have one part sing the words while the others oooh their part. Another fun thing to do is to have a couple of sopranos sing the tenor line an octave higher above the melody. The pianist can help too by changing the accompaniment just a little bit. For instance, he or she could play the notes of the chord one note at a time from bottom to top softly to give an arpeggio feel.

You could also have a flute or violin or someone at the organ play the alto line an octave higher as an obbligato. Or even a child could do that on a recorder.