I’m a big fan of “work smarter, not harder.” Pastoral musicians have quite enough on their plates without making things more difficult than need be. The paschal season is a long one: six Sundays—seven if your diocese doesn’t move the feast of the Ascension of the Lord to the seventh Sunday.

That long stretch of Sundays after Easter can also be an opportunity to use some of the excellent but less well-known Easter hymns. One of my absolute favorites is “Come Ye Faithful, Raise the Strain” ( GAUDEAMUS PARITER). About the only thing you can do to kill it is sing it at dirge tempo.

Five different psalms are indicated for those seven weeks. Here’s a thought: How many settings of Psalm 118 do you have in your repertoire? Could you choose, say, three and alternate them over the stretch of paschal season Sundays? That way you’d keep them alive in the repertoire; and by varying the setting, the assembly (including the music ministry) won’t get bored with singing a single setting for the whole season. Best of all, you have to prepare only two or three psalms, not five.

Or you could alternate a setting of Psalm 118 with a setting of Psalm 66, the common psalm for the season—preparing two psalms is easier than preparing five.

You have to save some energy for that phalanx of feasts to come—Pentecost, Trinity, Corpus Christi—before we can ease into Ordinary Time.