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Views from the Choir Loft

PDF Download • “Sunday Vespers”

Jeff Ostrowski · August 7, 2018

AST SUNDAY, we began singing Sunday Vespers. From now on, we will do this each week as a parish. Vespers is actually pretty complicated if one remembers to place in all the rubrics, starting pitches, parallel translations, and so forth. I find my solution fully adequate…but quite ugly.

UPDATE (21 September 2020):

Mr Bloomfield has solved all these problems!

*  PDF Download • “Vespers for Sundays & Holy Days”
—465-page booklet can be downloaded or purchased.

Each week, I will think about how I can make the booklets more beautiful. After a year, I believe I will have found a layout I consider worth printing. Until then, if you want to get your parish singing Sunday Vespers, feel free to use our version:

* *  PDF Download • SUNDAY VESPERS (Testing)

Everything except the Magnificat remains the same each week until Advent. Therefore, I had to create this sheet for 5 August 2018. 1 As time goes on, we will also add organ accompaniment. We will also employ special versions for the hymn.

* *  Magnificat • 24th Sunday after Pentecost

* *  Magnificat • 6th “resumed” Sunday after Epiphany

* *  Magnificat • 5th “resumed” Sunday after Epiphany

* *  Magnificat • 4th “resumed” Sunday after Epiphany

* *  Magnificat • 16th Sunday after Pentecost

* *  Magnificat • 17th Sunday after Pentecost

* *  Magnificat • 18th Sunday after Pentecost

* *  Magnificat • 19th Sunday after Pentecost

* *  Magnificat • 20th Sunday after Pentecost

* *  Magnificat • 21st Sunday after Pentecost

* *  Magnificat • 22nd Sunday after Pentecost

ORRY TO SWITCH TOPICS, but if you look in the Summit Hymnal (published in 1983 by the Dominican Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary) you will find on page 517 a “combination descant.” The editor says one can combine their harmony for HALTON HOLGATE with the popular hymn tune called MONKLAND. They provide both, so there’s no possibility of melody variants.

A member of the Brébeuf Hymnal editorial team first brought this to my attention, and we got excited. The Summit Hymnal is one of the better hymnals…but—alas!—this turned out to be a lie:

* *  PDF Download • Copyrighted Descant “Fail”

But it doesn’t work. What a huge disappointment—it would have been spectacular if it worked. The Summit Hymnal editor even copyrighted what they call the “Tune-Descant combination.” But it’s a lie.

It just doesn’t work; they break all the rules of writing descants and several parts sound terrible.

87994 monk writes


NOTES FROM THIS ARTICLE:

1   Each week, I must create a similar sheet—unless I can successfully convince each choir member to purchase a copy of the Liber Usualis.

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

Filed Under: Articles, PDF Download Tagged With: Vespers Last Updated: July 31, 2021

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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 Michigan. —(Read full biography).

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Corpus Christi Watershed

President’s Corner

    “Yahweh” in church songs?
    My pastor asked me to write a weekly column for our parish bulletin. The one scheduled to run on 22 June 2025 is called “Three Words in a Psalm” and speaks of translating the TETRAGRAMMATON. You can read the article at this column repository. All of them are quite brief because I was asked to keep within a certain word limit.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday
    Some have expressed interest in perusing the ORDER OF MUSIC I prepared for Pentecost Sunday (8 June 2025). If such a thing interests you, feel free to download it as a PDF file. Because our choir is on break this week, the music is relatively simple.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Truly Great Processional” • (Pipe Organ)
    I stumbled upon this live recording of a PROCESSIONAL I played on the pipe organ in 2002. It’s an excerpt from a much longer composition by Sebastian Bach. In those days, there weren’t sophisticated recording devices allowing one “fix” wrong notes. (Perhaps they existed, but we didn’t have machines like that.) So it was necessary to play the entire piece from beginning to end. If you’re a church organist, feel free to download the PDF score. I suppose it’s only a matter of time until some joker uses “artificial intelligence” to play music at church … but there’s something so satisfying about playing an organ in real life.
    —Jeff Ostrowski

Quick Thoughts

    Antiphons Don’t Match?
    A reader wants to know why the Entrance and Communion antiphons in certain publications deviate from what’s prescribed by the GRADUALE ROMANUM published after Vatican II. Click here to read our answer. The short answer is: the Adalbert Propers were never intended to be sung. They were intended for private Masses only (or Masses without music). The “Graduale Parvum,” published by the John Henry Newman Institute of Liturgical Music in 2023, mostly uses the Adalbert Propers—but sometimes uses the GRADUALE text: e.g. Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June).
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    When to Sit, Stand and Kneel like it’s 1962
    There are lots of different guides to postures for Mass, but I couldn’t find one which matched our local Latin Mass, so I made this one: sit-stand-kneel-crop
    —Veronica Brandt
    The Funeral Rites of the Graduale Romanum
    Lately I have been paging through the 1974 Graduale Romanum (see p. 678 ff.) and have been fascinated by the funeral rites found therein, especially the simply-beautiful Psalmody that is appointed for all the different occasions before and after the funeral Mass: at the vigil/wake, at the house of the deceased, processing to the church, at the church, processing to the cemetery, and at the cemetery. Would that this “stational Psalmody” of the Novus Ordo funeral rites saw wider usage! If you or anyone you know have ever used it, please do let me know.
    —Daniel Tucker

Random Quote

“A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous since blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they are necessarily reflected in his theology.”

— Josef Cardinal Ratzinger (Interview, 1985)

Recent Posts

  • “Yahweh” in church songs?
  • “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday
  • “Participation” • Recovering its Receptive Dimension
  • “Breathtaking Photographs” • First Mass of Father Michael Caughey, FSSP (Muskegon, MI)
  • “Truly Great Processional” • (Pipe Organ)

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