Consider The Lilies Sheet Music

Getting Your Hands on Consider The Lilies Sheet Music

I've been around sheet music long enough to know that some hymns are harder to find arranged in ways that actually work for your instrument or ensemble. "Consider the Lilies" falls into that category. It's a well-known hymn tune, but the arrangements you'll find online vary wildly in difficulty, and a lot of them aren't optimized for the instruments people actually play. The melody comes from the traditional hymn text based on Matthew 6:28. You'll see it published under a few different tune names depending on the hymnal. Most commonly you'll encounter it set to the tune "Ellers" or sometimes "Hyfrydol." This matters because if you're searching for sheet music and only looking up the lyrics, you'll pull up a dozen different musical settings and have no idea which one your congregation or group is using.

Consider The Lilies Sheet Music

Here's what I've found after going through several sources over the years. The most reliable arrangements come from public domain hymnals and church music publishers who've done the work of transposing and adapting. Free versions exist on sites like Hymnary.org and MuseScore, but quality varies. MuseScore in particular has a lot of user-uploaded arrangements, some accurate and some full of wrong notes. I once printed a version from there and spent twenty minutes figuring out why the alto line made zero sense harmonically. Turns out someone had transposed the soprano line down an octave without adjusting the key signature properly. I ended up cross-referencing with the hymnal and re-reading from the original. If you need something clean and print-ready, I'd recommend looking at arrangements from Church Publications or Hal Leonard's hymn arrays. They typically cost between $2 and $6 per arrangement. For solo piano, the slower tempos work fine with basic chord voicings. For choir, the part books are worth the extra cost because the spacing and page turns are already marked. Doing it yourself takes about an hour per four-part arrangement if you're careful with Finale or Sibelius.

Where to Actually Find Quality Arrangements

Schirmer's library has an arrangement that works well for intermediate piano players. It keeps the melody prominent and doesn't overcomplicate the accompaniment. If you're arranging for a small worship team, the key of G major tends to work best for vocal ranges without making the guitarists struggle with barre chords. I usually transpose down to E major when I need to accommodate lower voices or players who prefer fewer sharps. JW Pepper and Church Music Supply both carry printed copies. Digital downloads from those vendors arrive within minutes and are usually PDFs you can print directly. Sheet Music Plus has user reviews on many arrangements, which helped me avoid a particularly bad orchestral reduction once. The reviewer pointed out that the trumpet part was written an octave too high and impossible to play. I checked and confirmed it before ordering anything else from that arranger.

Common Problems and How I Deal With Them

The biggest issue I run into is tempo markings. Some arrangements call for a slow, contemplative tempo while others mark it allegretto. The hymn works at multiple speeds depending on the context. If you're using it as a communion processional, slower is almost always better. For a closing hymn, you can push it a bit more. I learned this the hard way when a congregation sang one arrangement so slowly during a wedding that the pianist had to hold a sustained chord for eighteen seconds between phrases without any indication to breathe. Another thing that trips people up is the time signature. Some editions print it in 4/4 while the original tune sits more naturally in cut time. If you're reading along and feeling like the beats are awkward, try counting in two instead of four. It makes the phrasing flow much better and matches how most singers naturally phrase the lines anyway. For those wanting to create their own arrangement from scratch, start with the melody in the hymnal, add a bass line that follows the root movement, and fill in the inner voices with standard harmonic progressions. The chord changes usually happen once per measure or every half measure. Don't add passing chords unless the melody requires them. This approach took me about forty-five minutes for a workable piano solo version.

Free printable options exist but they're hit or miss. Hymnary.org lets you view and sometimes print scores directly from scanned hymnal pages. The images are usually clear enough to read at small sizes, though you'll want to print at least 150 DPI for anything smaller than 8 by 10 paper. If you need larger print for older musicians in your group, scan at higher resolution and scale up before printing.