Posted on by Adam Bartlett

An Experiment in Sacred Music Resource Production, Part II: Hymns

About about a month and a half ago at the Chant Café we began an experiment in sacred music resource production called “Toward the Singing of Propers”. I’m very glad to report that so far this experiment has been a wonderful success. You can take a look at some of the early fruits of this open source collaboration in the English Propers Text Database that continues to grow every day, and in the Simple Propers settings that I have been offering weekly which use the propers text database as their foundation.

At the end of this post I would like to consider if we might be able to apply the same process to public domain ENGLISH HYMNODY, and invite you to help.

First, let me describe some of the values in the propers project: Anyone who has ever taken on the task of composing a cycle of liturgical texts, for example Responsorial Psalms or Gospel Verses, knows that there is a great deal of work that is involved that goes far beyond the actual work of composing. You might actually spend less than 10% of your time actually doing creative work while the other 90% of the time you are digging up source texts, finding the right verses, sifting through different editions, executing manual tasks of typing and copying and pasting, then there is engraving, formatting, creating pdf and graphics files, assembling bookets, and on and on. If you might have tried doing a cycle of propers you will have run into any other number of problems such as finding the appropriate psalm verses, formatting and pointing these, among a host of additional tasks.

I suspect that it is for these reasons that many projects that begin with great enthusiasm are left unfinished, or at best not in a widely usable or sharable form. It reminds me of James McKinnon’s thesis in “The Advent Project” that the Gregorian composers, the creators of the actual authentic Mass proper itself, undertook a systematic effort on the First Sunday of Advent somewhere in the later 7th century to compose a full cycle of chants, but once they got to Pentecost the effort began to lose steam. He also proposes that as a result the propers for Most Holy Trinity are of a much lesser quality than those composed earlier in the cycle. Whether there is merit in this or not is another point, but I think that the story is telling in that Catholic composers have been dealing with these same issues from the beginning!

So what we have tried to do is leverage web technologies to allow a group to tackle an effort in a way that will always remain infinitely useful to others. This means that people are taking one task at a time that is involved in creating a cycle of propers and executing it for the entire cycle. This assures that the work is done systematically and completely and, bit by bit we hope to have all of the source material ready for anyone to undertake their own projects if they would like. We’ve preserved steps in the production process so that anyone can jump in and benefit from them at any time. For example, there are many steps in between compiling an English text and engraving this in a platform like Gregorio. We have preserved these steps so that others can benefit from work that has already been done. We are using technology to make sure that all data is input into the database only once. There is no need to have to duplicate data and waste all of the energy that is involved in doing this throughout an entire cycle. Software can do this lifting for us. And so, our propers database has compiled incipits, source citations, modes from the Graduale–all information that is needed in an English chant score–and by means of a Google spreadsheet formula this is automatically placed into a ready-to-go Gregorio header. It saves so much time! And it has been done once and will be available to everyone thereafter.

I imagine that this database of texts will be useful in infinite ways in the future. Composers could produce a full cycle of introits in a few weeks, texts, translations and citations of the propers will be instantly available for use in parish worship programs, psalm verses will be ready to copy and paste into your own resources for your choirs. Source files for various chant engravings will be available for your own use or for your own resources. I really think this resource will be highly useful and it can be leveraged in so many other ways as time goes on. And I don’t think that we need to stop with the Graduale propers as translated in the Gregorian Missal, or psalm verses from a modified Douay Rheims. If we are allowed, I would love to see this process be applied to all liturgical texts, Latin and English, OF and EF.

And now to the intention of this post: ENGLISH HYMNS

I think that we could all see the immense value in having an online collection of public domain hymns that are of a quality and dignity that would be befitting of the liturgy. While hymns are always a substitute for the propers of the Mass, the reality is that we probably will continue to sing hymns in liturgy for a good while.

We need a quality online collection of public domain hymns for many reasons, here are a few:

  1. Commercial publishers should not be making money off of the faithful for an engraving of completely public domain hymns. At least half of the content in many of our current hymnals is in the public domain. When it comes to hymnody, most of the time the quality hymnody is in the public domain anyway.
  2. Publishers often change the texts of public domain hymns for the two-fold purpose of A.) modernization or inclusivity, and B.) creating a variant that can be copyrighted and, therefore, sold for a profit. Therefore an online collection of high-quality hymns would alleviate both of these detriments.
  3. Public domain hymns are generally of a higher quality and are more appropriate than many contemporary hymns anyway and therefore could offer parishes an alternative to much of the poorer copyrighted material that is found in today’s hymnals.
  4. If a complete, quality and exhaustive collection of hymns is available online any number of groups or individuals could use them to produce their own collections–hymnals, missalettes, and so on. What is keeping a parish from printing its own custom hymnal with Lulu, or from using them in their worship programs–saving money, and with greater freedom of selection?

The list could go on. Perhaps it can in the comment box.

And so, the question remains: How difficult would it be to arrange a community to build an online collection of hymns, appropriate for Catholic liturgy, in a way that it can grow and be maintained without burnout? What if we organized an effort where many hands can lighten the lifting?

Many have already done similar work. In fact, much of the work is already done, it just needs to be organized. Take a look at a quick sampling of the offerings on the web currently:

Some of these resources are great, some not so great. I get the sense that none of these resources above provide Catholic parishes with a practical resource that keeps them from paying commercial publishers for printed copies of public domain hymns.

In fact, I wonder how many music directors have engravings of public domain hymns sitting on their hard drives that no one has ever seen before other than them and their parish choirs and congregations. I know that I have about 150 myself! Why is this? How many times does HYFRYDOL have to be engraved? How many times has it been? Thousands, I suspect.

What if we applied the same logic and approach to English hymns as we have applied to English propers? What if all of the music directors that read this contribute source files of public domain hymn engravings that they have produced over the years? If we did this I bet our project would almost be done. What if we gathered volunteers to copy and paste public domain texts from the internet into a useable database? What if we collected all of the source engravings that already exist online? Again, I think our project might be done if we did, without having do to an ounce of original work.

All of this work has been done a thousand times before, it just has never been organized for long-term success. The law of volunteer burnout and fear of breaking copyright law, I suspect, are two reasons why this project has not been accomplished.

Would you like to join an effort to organize an effort that will be infinitely useful to Catholics across the English speaking world, and that will remain freely available to future generations of Catholics?

If so, please contact me.

One Reply to “An Experiment in Sacred Music Resource Production, Part II: Hymns”

  1. I am merely a retired music director who has come upon many of the thoughts you express in your post. Our pastor at the time was very concerned about the poor quality of hymns in the book that was currently in the pews. This hymnal was about to "expire" and new ones were to be automatically sent to replace them, all at quite a substantial cost. The books matched up with the misslettes – a "package deal". The director of liturgy, our pastor and I set about the task of attempting to select hymns and prayers for our own little hymnal, but were overcome by the difficulties of copyrights, printing costs,organization of the material, etc. We unhappily abandoned the project. Had we known then what you present in your post about public domain resources, we might have been able to break away from the hold that the piblishing company had on us. We suspected that the publishing companies that supply the majority of Catholic churches in the US with hymnals were raking in a tremendous profit from public domain hymns – and we wanted to get off their gravy train. Ah well, it is up to the next music director, I pray!

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