It just figures that this would be the year I decided to Make An Effort and write new hymn descants for Easter! I had just finished arranging the hymns, prelude, and postlude for the little chamber orchestra we usually have when it became clear that we wouldn’t be having an in-person Easter service. I hope we’ll be able to use the arrangements next year, but in the meantime, I wanted to share my descant for the hymn tune EASTER HYMN.
I left the text out because I went on hymnary.org and immediately got overwhelmed by the number of variants–I knew there were two texts commonly sung to this tune (“Christ the Lord is Risen Today” and “Jesus Christ is Risen Today”), but the “Christ the Lord” text has a bunch of different versions, and it turns out the one I know (from the New Century Hymnal) doesn’t have all the usual verses, and that’s just too much for my pandemic brain to process. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, feel free to use this if/when we have an Easter with church choirs again!
Erin K. Maher, Ph.D. 