All Saints’ Day can be observed on Sunday, November 2, this year. The appointed Hymn of the Day for All Saints’ Day (Year C) is “Jerusalem the Golden” (CW21 889/890). The tune of 889 is THAXTED, which is well-known as the final hymn at the National Conference on Worship, Music, and the Arts. The tune of 890 is EWING, which is well-known as the tune for that text in TLH.

The Foundation worship planning resources also recommend “Afflicted Saint, to Christ Draw Near” (867), and “There is A Higher Throne” (885). “Afflicted Saint” is new to our church body; “Higher Throne” appeared in Christian Worship: Supplement (2008). Both are easy to sing but should be introduced if the congregation is not familiar with them.

Another hymn from the Church Triumphant section of the hymnal might well be used on this day: “Blessed Are They” (886), which some may choose to sing during an In Memoriam section of the service in remembrance of the faithful departed from the past year.

There would still be room in this service for the hymn that is the appointed Hymn of the Day for Years A and B: “For All the Saints” (880). The Foundation resources recommend it. The text, of course, is most fitting for the day, and the majestic musical arrangement by Ralph Vaughan Williams (RVW) is loved by millions. The syllabification is improved in CW21. It varies somewhat across the eight stanzas and is the standard way that this hymn is presented in upwards of 90% of published hymnals.

Congregations that regularly sing with organ accompaniment can look forward to belting out “For All the Saints” on All Saints’ Day right along with the organ pipes or speakers. Worshipers singing out of the book will notice the Unison and Harmony markers in the pew edition. RVW wrote two settings of SINE NOMINE for these dual purposes. On the left-side page, singers can enjoy hearing and being musically escorted by the walking bass part for stanzas 1,2,3,7,8. They should sing only the melody. On the right-side page, singing in parts is fostered by the harmonization of stanzas 4,5,6.

CW: Accompaniment for Hymns provides two alternate organ settings in addition to the primary setting printed in the pew edition. These alternate organ settings are best utilized for those stanzas marked for unison singing in the pew edition (1,2,3,7,8).

Not every congregation, however, has or makes exclusive use of an organ for worship.

Instruments Other Than Organ

Long ago, I memorized how to play Bernard Schumacher’s arrangement of SINE NOMINE (The Lutheran Hymnal, 1941, hymn 463) on the piano. It is a chorale-type arrangement, similar to the RVW setting that’s labeled harmony. However, if this magnificent hymn were also to be accompanied by guitar (to those who feel it shouldn’t be I certainly grant the right to their opinion), there would need to be a different keyboard arrangement. What follows is a quick word about why that’s necessary.

Hymns written in a chorale style regularly have a different chord on each successive beat. Keyboardists learn how to play such hymns on the organ or the piano. Accomplished guitarists could play these rapidly-changing chords, but it’s not the way a guitar is intended to accompany group singing.

Music that is idiomatic to the guitar tends to have a slower harmonic rhythm, allowing for a strumming pattern or arpeggio to be played on each chord. Most classic hymns are written with frequent chord changes, often every beat. Some guitarists can do this but will only be able to produce one or two strums per chord and produce an unnatural sound for the instrument. While it may be technically possible to play straight from the hymnal, even the best guitarist will probably struggle. An accompaniment with less frequent chord changes—one or two per measure—is more in keeping with how the guitar is typically played in liturgical music.
~ Kevin Becker, Christian Worship: Guidebook, to be published in 2026.

In a few past presentations, I have referenced the hymn tune EWING (“Jerusalem the Golden,” CW93 214) as an example of a keyboard setting in which the chord changes with almost every beat. It can be played on guitar with matching chords, but it’s not pretty. So, with apologies to RVW (since I long held his SINE NOMINE arrangements to be sacred ground that one should not be trampling), I went ahead and wrote a keyboard arrangement meant to accommodate guitar chords and shared it with a few friends, making use of it locally this past Easter Sunday. With All Saints’ Day now on the horizon, I’d like to share it with you as a way of saying a few things about liturgical ensemble arrangements in general.

SINE NOMINE for Liturgical Ensemble

The sanctuary where I lead worship each week has a Kawai baby grand piano. We could fairly easily make use of a digital keyboard with an organ sound, but the sanctuary piano is a fine instrument and it is currently used each week. That being the case, we add other instruments as we are able. These have included guitar, flute, violin, and viola.

A staple of chorale-type music for hymns is that the melody is the top note in the right hand. Singers will hear the melody being played almost all the time. Hymns written for piano may have each melody note in the accompaniment, but fairly regularly they may not. If the piano is the only instrument being played, it is best to make sure that the arrangements include most if not all of the melody notes.

Alternatively, remember that those who make up the liturgical ensemble need not be only instrumentalists. Vocalists (possibly mic’d and, if so, hopefully mixed with other instruments channeled through a soundboard) are not singing to or in place of but for and along with the assembly. Especially when a liturgical ensemble keyboard arrangement does not include all the melody notes, the voice of the vocalist(s) is an instrument that can provide the melody for the congregation to sing along with.

That being understood, here is a computer-generated recording of a liturgical ensemble arrangement of SINE NOMINE (keyboard and bass guitar). Familiarity of the tune also contributed to the decision of not fully representing the melody in the keyboard setting. Of course, any monophonic instrument (trumpet, flute, clarinet) could also play the melody that the assembly sings. The arrangement includes an intro/outro/bridge, all of which are largely identical. Especially if all eight stanzas are sung, variation can be provided by the descants (see below).

The next instrument added to this ensemble arrangement is the guitar. Here is a video of how that might sound (recorded piano/bass track and acoustic guitar).

Kevin Becker (Grace Downtown Milwaukee) added to this arrangement three pairs of descants for various additional instruments. (The pairs are meant to remain paired; they are not mix and match.) While the sample recordings (first pair / second pair / third pair) all feature a flute sound, they can be played by any instrument fitting for worship. Note in the third pair how Kevin chose to turn RVW’s walking bass into a high instrumental descant.

If you’d like to consider or perhaps plan to sing a liturgical ensemble arrangement of “For All the Saints” for this coming All Saints’ Day, this arrangement is available at NPH on Musician’s Resource.

A Personal Choice to Go Paperless

The last section of this article is aimed chiefly at guitarists, but all are welcome to read to the end, especially those who have made the move (perhaps long ago) to play off of a tablet or device.

While copyright restrictions made it impossible to provide all of the CW21 accompaniment music in a digital format, digital versions of accompaniment music (properly purchased/acquired) can be a very helpful way to store, organize, and play for worship. Apps for storing/notating music and generating setlists, as well as blue tooth page turning devices and other innovations have become very attractive to those who love to embrace all things digital. Certainly, personal preference will dictate which path a musician will choose—digital presentation on a device or hard copies on a music stand.

I am not writing a commercial for a certain platform, but I have come to appreciate Ultimate Guitar (UG) as a way of preparing/displaying guitar music that I play for worship. Rather than waxing on forever, you are welcome to check out this file of a personal tab in UG, the one I generated for the “For All the Saints” arrangement sampled above. (A similar chord chart for this particular liturgical ensemble arrangement of CW 880 is included in the downloadable file on Musician’s Resource.)

In a free UG account, you can create/store your own personal tabs.¹ These can be created from scratch or you can find the hymn/song already posted and edit as needed. For a nominal annual fee, a pro UG account eliminates ads and makes available a number of nice features. Among the most notable for me are . . .

• auto scrolling with adjustable tempo (used during worship and events)
• playlists (click the “next” arrow to move through a setlist for a service or event)
• transpose (adjust the chords and capo setting to what works best for you)
• favorited and personal tabs always available offline
• shareable tabs
• download any tab to pdf

A chord chart approach which includes only lyrics and chord name may be preferable for some. If you would like to see more of this format in the files available on Musician’s Resource, drop us a note anytime.

(If you’re wondering about copyright infractions, familiarize yourself with the verbiage on the Ultimate Guitar site. Any song that appears publicly has been approved by the company and UG is reportedly among the first to have “done this right” by compensating copyright holders. By way of examples of modern hymns, of twenty-one Getty Music pieces in the CW21 suite, eighteen are already present in the UG platform; five out of five of the CW21 Papa/Boswell collaborations are present in the platform.)

This article in Devote Yourself was contributed by the team that previously created and distributed Worship the Lord. View past worship-related articles at worship.welsrc.net/downloads-worship/worship-the-lord.

¹ In Ultimate Guitar:

A “tab” is the basic unit or file, and it can come in several formats:

• Tab (tablature) – fret-based notation for strings (e.g., guitar, bass)
• Chords – lyrics with chord symbols above the lines
• Pro Tab – interactive tab with timing, playback, and often multi-instrument support
• Official Tab – professionally transcribed, usually accurate and formatted well
• Drum, Bass, Ukulele tabs also exist as separate types

On UG, all of these fall under the umbrella term “tab”—they’re just different versions or types of a song file.