Part I:

I set myself a project this summer: to play through the entire New Century Hymnal, more particularly to learn any tunes I didn't already know. It has been great fun and I'm very excited about this resource: it has a wealth of wonderful new tunes and texts as well as thoughtful and contemporary words to familiar tunes. I jokingly referred to it as "the hymnal we love to hate", but it has won me over, and I'm looking forward to sharing my findings with you. I will write on a different subject each month: this month it is "stats and numbers".

Did you know that when we sing any hymn, Nancy writes the date it was sung in an office copy of the hymnal? I went through her NCH and counted the dates we had sung each hymn. Some of what I discovered really amazed me. There are 617 hymns (slightly fewer tunes, since some tunes have more than one set of words) in the NCH. Of these, 8 (1%) have been sung 15 times or more since the hymnal was first introduced in 1995; 17 (3%) sung 11-14x (x = times); 52 (8%) sung 7-10x; 130 (21%) sung 4-6x; 233 (38%) sung 1-3x; and 177 (29%) never sung at all. So while it may seem that the NCH is "new" and "unfamiliar", we have actually already sung 71% of it! How does this compare with the good old Pilgrim Hymnal? From that source we sang 272 of 496 hymns--only 54%!

So we can pat ourselves on the back: our utilization of the "new" hymnal is much greater than I expected!

For fun, here's a trivia question for this month (answer in the next issue): what hymn do you think is the most frequently sung hymn in the NCH? Here are some clues: the four most popular hymns of NCH "Top Eight" were brand new and do not appear in the Pilgrim Hymnal! And of the "Top Eight" two share the same tune! Email me what your guesses are and I'll try to come up with a prize for the winner!