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Views from the Choir Loft

PDF Download • Extremely Rare Hymnal (1952)

Jeff Ostrowski · September 28, 2015

249 Sancta Missa HANKS to Corpus Christi Watershed, many Catholic hymnals have been made available for free & instant download. Several of these—such as Westminster’s DAILY HYMN BOOK—are incredibly valuable. Others are interesting mainly from a historical point of view. 1

The following probably falls into the latter category, but I still think you’ll enjoy it:

    * *  PDF • CANTATE OMNES HYMNAL (1952)

Will you help us continue our work? I have more hymnals I’d like to upload—including rare English hymnals I bet you’ve never seen—but we need your help.

A young lady here in Los Angeles is willing to scan these books, but I can’t ask her to do it for free.

    * *  Donate to Watershed

There’s a $5.00-per-month, $7.00-per-month, $10.00-per-month, and so forth.

Of course hymnals are only part of our work. None of our contributors—including myself—is paid a salary. But when our website malfunctions (for example) that costs money. You already know about the wonderful blog articles by our authors and probably noticed improvements to GoupilChant. However, there’s another project I’d like to complete if we can get enough monthly donors, and I just know you’ll love it! (That’s all I can reveal at this time.)

ALLOW ME TO MENTION just one more project. We’ve been creating rehearsal videos—about 25 so far—to assist choirs. Our goal is to eventually create about 150. To demonstrate what I mean, let me show you a lovely piece by (surprise!) Fr. Carlo Rossini:

    * *  PDF Download • Rev. Carlo Rossini “VERBUM SUPERNUM”

EQUAL VOICES : YouTube   •   Mp3 Audio

SOPRANO : YouTube   •   Audio

ALTO : YouTube   •   Audio

TENOR : YouTube   •   Audio

BASS : YouTube   •   Audio

If you don’t like the breath marks, you can ignore them. 2




NOTES FROM THIS ARTICLE:

1   The group who created the Cantate Omnes Hymnal still exists, and asserts on their website: “In the 1950s, our founders published the Cantate Omnes Hymnal—the first vernacular hymnal for Catholics in the United States.” In light of the link I mentioned above, this statement is absurd.

2   Anyone who has ever directed choirs in real life realizes there’s no such thing as “correct” breath marks. Breaths will depend on numerous factors: skill of the singers; acoustics of the building; tempo; contrapuntal considerations; number of singers; and so forth. A great singer like Matthew J. Curtis is capable of things an amateur singer is not. It’s kind of like the edition of Bach containing fingerings by Hans Bischoff. These can be quite valuable; yet some pianists ignore them—and that’s just fine.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

Filed Under: Articles, PDF Download Tagged With: Roman Catholic Hymnals Last Updated: January 13, 2020

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Jeff Ostrowski

About Jeff Ostrowski

Jeff Ostrowski holds his B.M. in Music Theory from the University of Kansas (2004). He resides with his wife and children in Los Angeles.—(Read full biography).

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Corpus Christi Watershed

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Surprising Popularity!

One of our most popular downloads has proven to be the organ accompaniment to “The Monastery Hymnal” (131 pages). This book was compiled, arranged, and edited by Achille P. Bragers, who studied at the Lemmensinstituut (Belgium) about thirty years before that school produced the NOH. Bragers might be considered an example of Belgium “Stile Antico” whereas Flor Peeters and Jules Van Nuffel represented Belgium “Prima Pratica.” You can download the hymnal by Bragers at this link.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • To Capitalize…?

In the Introit for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, there is a question regarding whether to capitalize the word “christi.” The Vulgata does not, because Psalm 27 is not specifically referring to Our Lord, but rather to God’s “anointed one.” However, Missals tend to capitalize it, such as the official 1962 Missal and also a book from 1777 called Missel de Paris. Something tells me Monsignor Knox would not capitalize it.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • “Sung vs. Spoken”

We have spoken quite a bit about “sung vs. spoken” antiphons. We have also noted that the texts of the Graduale Romanum sometimes don’t match the Missal texts (in the Extraordinary Form) because the Mass Propers are older than Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and sometimes came from the ITALA versions of Sacred Scripture. On occasion, the Missal itself doesn’t match the Vulgate—cf. the Introit “Esto Mihi.” The Vulgate has: “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in domum refúgii…” but the Missal and Graduale Romanum use “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in locum refúgii…” The 1970s “spoken propers” use the traditional version, as you can see.

—Jeff Ostrowski

Random Quote

“Iconographic tradition has theologically interpreted the manger and the swaddling cloths in terms of the theology of the Fathers. The child stiffly wrapped in bandages is seen as prefiguring the hour of his death: from the outset, he is the sacrificial victim, as we shall see more closely when we examine the reference to the first-born. The manger, then, was seen as a kind of altar.”

— Pope Benedict XVI (2012)

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