The most common untrained "voice" for men from Western/Central European ancestry appears to be baritone (mezzo for women). It's something that may resemble what we might now call a normal distribution, I recall reading in reference sources going back a century, kind of like 20% bass, 60% baritone, 20% tenor. My anecdotal experience is that there's greater than normal presence of tenors among male church keyboardists (true in contempo music, too), with the more classically trained of which sometimes prone to treat baritones as lazy tenors, which can lead to unfortunate results.

I wonder if the tradition of SATB harmonization in Western music tends to create a cognitive bias that leads to musicians assuming that baritones and mezzos are the exception, rather than the rule, when the opposite is the case. A baritone singing T2 or B1 often remains a baritone.

To be more direct: C-C tends to be in the center of the range of baritones and mezzos. It's not the only choice, but it is simple.

Hymn pitch has tended to fall over time. Maybe it's because we do chant, but I think of "the golden octave" as being D-D. I make my Schola sing down to A and up to F, but the extremes are still problematic (they game me a beautiful E yesterday though). I don't really worry about the PiPs; if they can sing at all, they can sing at our pitch.

Richard,

The rules of thumb should, I think, rule out IATBOL and The Star-Spangled Banner for communal use, as sing-alongs. Hymnals aren't designed with trained specialists in mind, but with not-highly-trained capable singers.

I always do Silent night in B-flat...apart from the penultimate phrase, the rest of it actually sits fairly low. I have no trouble asking my congregation to sing isolated Ds and E-flats, provided it's not super early in the morning, and provided it's not the first hymn. Unlike the choir which warms up beforehand, the people in the pews don't really hit their stride until partway through the Mass, IME.

Forgotten to sing? I found that this is because People dont use singing as a language anymore.
The same thing is true for dancing as well. I am the young man at the Dance course I attend. And i am 29 which isnt that young!
What went wrong?

I myself feel that E above middle C is ok.

Do you stand near a bass?

As a childhood Evangelical, in one of the few congregations that retained low- church Protestant hymnody rather than getting on the P&W wagon, I never cease to be amazed how low so many hymns have been dropped in RC books.

For example, I recall singing Crown Him with Many Crowns in E and E-flat, depending on which of our two hymnals were in use. Now I see it in C all over the place. This is only fifteen years ago.

Many, but not all, sang the hymns in four parts, so this probably made for more comfortable singing, but there were also quite a few ordinary people who happily shouted out top Es and Fs on a regular basis when singing the melody.

I think it’s really an issue of the culture of the church community. My father, a cradle Catholic with no musical training, whose first evangelical experience was with contemporary music, jumped in headfirst into hymnsinging when we joined that congregation, and somehow discerned how to sing the bass part to several hundred hymns by the end of our first year. Everyone around him, his brothers and sisters, sang, so he learned by joining them. But then again, we sang hymns at home every night, at gatherings with church friends, at family reunions, etc. and thus had plenty occasion to practice.

And yet without paid musicians of any sort, without a choir or cantor or any sort of leadership save volunteer pianists and “organists”, I grew up in a community that loved to sing, from the children to the nonagenarians.

But the whole thing was inextricably bound up with the narrative of personal conversion and being “saved” from the absolutely evil world, as in the 40th Psalm:

“He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.
And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.”

And also Isaiah: “Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.”

As in postreformation Germany, as in Red Russia, as in the Civil Rights movement, as in the Church in the developing world: it seems to me that the strongest singing comes from zealous hearts, completely at peace with their beliefs, and full of joy that they have seen the light, whatever that may be.

And thus it is when we sing one of the old preconciliar vernacular songs in my parish at Benediction or at some chaplet: those who remember them and the solid ground their faith once had sing them with tremendous joy and make a mighty sound. When the Boomer congregation at the Saturday mass of convenience are asked to sing some perfectly fine Protestant hymn, there’s radio silence, commensurate with the weakness of the said responses and the large number who bolt after communion.

It seems that (leaving aside issues of bad repertory or poor leadership or an intruding cantor) those who own their faith, who recognize they have something personal for which to praise God, are naturally delighted to sing, no matter the notated pitch; and those who are uncertain or uncatechized are unlikely to want to make a sound.

Dropping the pitch of hymns without a connection to an individual’s life probably won’t coerce them to participate.

Do you stand near a bass?

What is that supposed to mean? I dont get it!

Just a joke; it's the neighbors of basses that might have the problem. For a trained and warmed-up bass even F# can be made acceptable. I'm reminded of a transposer mishap in my youth in which I hit what turned out to be an A-b near the end of Minuit Chrétiens and noticed the rest of the choir drop à genoux, clutching their ears.