Hymn Sings to Celebrate the

1932 Christian Science Hymnal

When the 2008 Christian Science Hymnal Supplement was published, my home church was anxious to learn these new hymns, so we held monthly hymn sings after church on Sunday.  After a couple of years, we began to feel we had learned the new hymns well enough, so I began to explore other ideas for hymn sings.

In the Indexes to the 1932 Hymnal, I noticed that some composers and lyricists had contributed many more hymns than others, so I proposed hymn sings that would feature just the hymns of a single contributor.  With that thought, I planned the first hymn sing to feature the music of Lowell Mason.  But then I began to be interested in the composer himself, and I quickly found that he had a very interesting history.  So in that first hymn sing, I shared with my fellow church members details of Mason's life, interspersed with our singing of his hymns.  Following this pattern, I planned 13 more hymn sings.

You can click on the links below to access my notes on the different composers and lyricists.  I must warn you that my notes were based almost exclusively on brief Internet research, so I can't guarantee each bit of information.  Also they were drawn up in the years 2010 - 2012 (I think), so some probably are in need of updating, and I'd welcome corrections.  The documents linked below can be open or downloaded as PDFs.  I've also made them available in Microsoft Word format, so, should you decide to use any of these plans, they can be easily edited.