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Useful but irritating Review by Ben Jones
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This book contains a mixed bag of alternative last verse organ parts (manuals only) for 200 hymns. Some are quite modal and inventive, others not that different from the original settings. Nevertheless, I would happily use all of them... if only they were in the right keys! Our church normally uses the BBC Songs of Praise (occasionally the New English Hymnal, and very rarely some other books such as Ancient & Modern), but of the 200 here, about 50 are for tunes not in SoP at all, and 60 of the others are in different keys. In vain did I search through NEH, A&M etc. to find the standard settings in different keys: 99% of the time they are identical to SoP. Hence, unless you are good at transposing on the fly (I'm not), you'll find half of this book at worst useless, at best an irritation, as you painstakingly transpose the miskeyed tunes by hand, or type them into Sibelius etc. to transpose automatically. If you're going to go to that much trouble, you might just as well write alternative harmonizations yourself! Still, I do use the book regularly for the 100ish tunes that do work, and others too have told me they enjoy the variety this provides. If you're looking for ideas this could well be a handy first step, as I'm not aware of anything else similar on the market. (Posted on 27/04/2010)
