I've always been impressed with Karl's comments -

“Introducing” new hymns has a second and equally-important process: “solidifying” new hymns until they become “familiar hymns.” This process might well take the form of singing a new hymn for several weeks in a row and to be very intentional about it, including explaining the value of such repetition to the people. After three or four weeks of weekly use, begin to sing it every other week for perhaps a month and then every third week for several months. Most of us do not live in parishes such as St. Mark’s, Philadelphia!

How long it takes for the people to learn a new hymn well enough for it become a “familiar hymn” depends on so many factors:

1. the presence or absence of a choir which the people in the congregation can HEAR with sufficient clarity for the choir actually to be helpful to the congregants

2. the “presence” of the organ tone amongst the people in the pews, a matter of placement of the organ pipes relative to the people but also of the acoustical character of the building to carry the organ tone in lively manner but without too much echo

3. the nature of the congregants, whether largely “senior citizens” or whether younger or middle-aged persons who have a mind-set in favor of congregational singing, as opposed to a mindset based on “being sung to” in church. (The “entertainment evangelism” claims and methods of Fuller Theological Seminary et al of some decade ago makes those folks’ attitudes and procedures about congregational singing difficult, despite Fuller’s claims to the contrary, much as does the presence of a “song-leader” on the microphone at the front of the church and with the organ and organist in the rear gallery. On this last, see Day, Thomas, Why Catholics Can’t Sing.)

4. the ability and intention of the organist to play the hymns to the best-possible advantage for persons learning new hymns in church. (This is so long and complex a topic, that I don’t even wish to BEGIN the discussion!! )

5. the presence of persons, both children and adults in the congregation who have first learned the new hymn as part of the parish’s Christian Education program and thus help to “make it go” when it gets introduced and “rehearsed” for months in worship. The absence of such pre-teaching makes the teaching process in worship much more challenging.

6 the apparent attitude of the clergy toward hymn singing in general, as made evident by what they do to provide a positive example toward the importance of hymn singing.

7. the cultural “attitude” and tradition in the parish regarding hymn singing. In some parishes, hymn singing is implicitly or even subconsciously understood as something for the choir to do and to which one might dare to sing along. (Think here of the old famous story of J. Varley Roberts at Magdelen College Chapel, Oxford) The opposite of this is the strong and very basic assumption current or at least until recent years among Pennsylvania Mennonites that EVERYONE learns to sing his voice part in the hymns, which were sung a cappella in the tradiition of Lowell Mason. (Sadly enough, some Mennonite congregations have now lost this assumption.) I know Anglicans who would sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at every ball game they attend but who “like” to listen to others doing the singing in church while they carry on some level of private/public meditation; they benefit by others’ singing but do not return the favor to those others and carry on something of a “high church” version of “entertainment evangelism,” ala Fuller Theological Seminary. Once again: think of the stories about J. Varley Roberts. (An interesting non-musical version of this problem: an amazingly strong “tradition” at some places of non-communing attendance at Mass in Roman Catholic chucrhes.)

In my “old age” I serve a small ECUSA parish with a small, somewhat nice pipe organ, no choir, very lovely people in many regards but relatively few persons under the age of 50, persons who do love the Lord and the Church deeply, many of them with education no further than high school and some not even that much. A Sunday attendance of 40 people is a pretty good Sunday for this parish. Many of them are converts to the Anglican faith but know and “feel” little of those well-honed attitudes and practices that have distinguished the Anglican tradition for years, at least in USA. The parish leaders often stand at the rear of the center aisle and talk about anything at all, not least of it about Penn State football, before worship begins. Other sit in the pews “carrying on” almost like they were at a basketball game. This past Christmas Eve a year ago, the noise got so bad before the processional hymn that I simply stopped playing the prelude music I’d prepared and no one seemed to notice!!

In a cultural and spiritual environment like this, teaching a new hymn is more difficult than in most other places, and I’ve tended to limit new hymns to two a year, almost always teaching a tune which can be gainfully used throughout much of the year, perhaps in some cases even using other words to a tune which has the same metre, once that tune is familiar enough to sing it by memory while looking at the words of the intended text elsewhere in the hymnal. (It’s actually a good way to help solidify a tune that is becoming familiar.) I find no reason to teach new Advent or Christmas or Easter hymns, given how we have a hard time covering the ones we already know in each of those seasons. So the “challenge” of learning new hymns in such a situation yields best results when the tune can be used throughout most of the year.

This all gets harder if you have an organ built in the ”organ reform movement” manner in which the pitches from about f below middle c to f above middle c — or something close to this range — are made to sound a bit more “pronounce” than pitches higher or lower so as to bring out the inner voices in contrapuntal music — think Bach. That is deadly for clarity of melody line in hymn playing!!! Organists too seldom have much of an idea what and how the people hear of the organ tone and thus why the organ tones does not encourage learning a new hymn tune. And if you have an organist who simply cannot master the techniques required to play the melody louder on one manual, the alto and tenor voices softer in the left hand, and the bass part in the pedals with rock-steady rhythmic life AND to use stops so as to accentuate the melody, then once again learning new hymns is made more difficult by an organ built more for playing Bach fugues than Anglican hymns or Lowell Mason-type hymns, etc. Oh, to play an E & G G Hook tracker with “treble ascendency.”