Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Great resource for music planners

Here is a site that provides, for each Sunday and feast:
  • a list of the readings prescribed by the Roman Lectionary;
  • a commentary on the readings, showing the connection intended by the lectionary framers utilizing the device called “typology;”
  • a quotation from one of the Fathers of the Church about the reading/s;
  • a hymn, based on the readings provided;
  • a translation of the propers assigned to each Sunday in the Roman Gradual; and
  • suggested propers for the Sunday from the Simple Gradual, with page references to “By Flowing Waters” (pub. The Liturgical Press), provided by Dr. Paul F. Ford.


A veritable goldmine.

I would be curious of the opinions of those more learned on the quality of hymn texts.

8 Comments:

At Thursday, January 11, 2007 5:21:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you!
Never saw this one before, and I can't wait to explore it.

Geri

 
At Sunday, January 14, 2007 3:07:00 PM, Blogger ScholarChanter said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

 
At Sunday, January 14, 2007 3:08:00 PM, Blogger ScholarChanter said...

Hmm .. Doesn't have anything until Lent for this liturgical year though.

 
At Sunday, January 14, 2007 7:49:00 PM, Blogger Cantor said...

SC - actually, yes, Sundays of OT until Lent are covered.

I believe the site is fairly new, so not everything (e.g. this past Advent) is up yet.

 
At Saturday, January 20, 2007 1:07:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love the blog that you have. I was wondering if you would link my blog to yours and in return I would do the same for your blog. If you want to, my site name is American Legends and the URL is:

www.americanlegends.blogspot.com

If you want to do this just go to my blog and in one of the comments just write your blog name and the URL and I will add it to my site.

Thanks,
David

 
At Sunday, January 21, 2007 10:07:00 PM, Blogger Todd said...

The people are pros and the content--what I've seen--seems good quality. I've sung today's Ezra hymn in a monastery somewhere once.

Just looking at today's Roman Missal texts I was struck how they seem to be all over the place in matching with the Lectionary. Quite possibly the most serious deficiency to be revealed in Roman Missal: they didn't attempt to align the readings with the orations and antiphons.

 
At Sunday, January 28, 2007 6:03:00 PM, Blogger Puff the Magic Dragon said...

I checked out the website, and after comparing the antiphons listed on the site with my own Graduale I noticed some errors, namely listing antiphons for Year C which were actually for Year A or B. But other than that not a bad little site. IMHO

 
At Saturday, February 03, 2007 4:54:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The hymns are not very well polished. Aside from technical glitches, such as the accents sometimes falling wrongly and some very loose off-rhymes, not to mention syntactical compromises such as leaving out articles which would normally be included in an English sentence, they are almost prosaic, simply recounting and reinforcing the reading.

Even for a hymn-of-the-day, it seems to me that an extensive process of integrating and interpreting the text should occur before the pen hits the paper to write a hymn. Within the very first line--which should be sound-bite pithy if at all possible, think Crown Him with many crowns, or Let all mortal flesh keep silence--there should be three things: an introduction to the theme (praise, awe), an exhortation of some kind (either by second-person or vocative address, use of the subjunctive, or strong statement of some spiritual reality), and the mention of some good reason that all this is important.

For a while I wrote what I thought of as "lectionary hymns." Here are the first lines of some of the Cycle B hymns. None is Crown Him with Many Crowns, of course, but all of them are better than those I've seen here.

14th I lift my eyes to You O Lord
15th Beautiful upon the mountains
16th Hail, the long-awaited Son!
17th The eyes of all hope in the Lord
18th How light the bread of angels
19th O taste, and you will see

The point of a lectionary hymn, as I see it, is not only to tell the story, but to give a convincing account of why this particular story is important.

 

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