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This is a hymniary, a collection of hymns: songs meant for use in worship. This is not the only hymniary you can find through just about any search engine, but, at least when I started creating it, there were none others like it yet. Even before accumulating a large number of titles (while writing this, there are still only five), what I am offering should make this site worth perusing.
Each Song is available in an array of settings:
I'm tired of the "Worship Wars". I mean, it's all good music. I'm tired of people who think one kind of music is easier to praise God with than another kind of music. People who don't like the pipe organ, or the drums, or the harmonica in worship are all tiresome! I want to add to the tools that worship leaders can use to get the different worship camps to make harmony together.
This is something I was already doing. I started out just wanting to transcribe a couple
of songs, (Peace be Still
and Whispering Hope
). for my own use. I was thinking, maybe
of doing something with them and maybe presenting them to the music director at my church to be
used for worship sometime. Then I got interested in how Lilypond works, and the things it can do.
I am wanting to offer old hymns and songs in a small variety of settings so that experienced church musicians can easily fuse new music and old. Face it, it is rather daunting to play hymns on the guitar or banjo out of the hymnbook. I grew up with people who did just that. My father, who preached in Mato Grosso, could, and did play his guitar in church out of the hymnbook. It seemed it was natural for people to do that there.
Perhaps, as I was a child, and did not know much about music, yet, I may be simplifying things a bit in my mind. I don't know if he transposed in his head, or played as writ. I do remember my older brothers, a very good guitarist and an ok guitarist, arguing about the merits of learning all the chords in all key signatures. In my early adult years, when I played a lot of banjo, I found it was easy to play in any key. (Well, the fifth string was a bit problematic, but it was do-able.)
However, I encounter people who seem to have preferences in what key they play in. It's not that they are regressing to the days before the tempered tunings which so delighted J. S. Bach, but some keys just seem more idiomatically easy for them. (I admit that I find playing in key signatures that include all the black keys easiest on a keyboard.)
I can't remember what I was doing, but one day I found that I had transcribed about fifteen hymns in Lilypond. I think I just wanted them to look different than they did in the hymnbook. I also wanted to find a project that would keep me busy as I approach my doddering years. This project will never be finished, so it fits the bill.
I am limited by time. It takes one to three hours to transcribe a hymn from an old hymnbook. It takes about that long to create a keyboard arrangement that is playable, and pleasing to most persons. It may take that long to create the re-voiced arrangement. That's really not a lot of time. I could easily do a song every day, except that this is a hobby, not a job. I have a full-time, physically demanding job (which pays my bills rather well at the moment.) I have personal demands on my time. I also do, or try to do my share of volunteer work at my church and other places. This leaves me with sometimes months where I spend less than fifteen minutes a day on this project.
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Stephen Riddle
