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Views from the Choir Loft

Grant Awarded for Digitizing Over 400,000 Pages of Ancient Solesmes Manuscripts

Matthew Frederes · March 6, 2023

REPERTORIUM is new project that has been awarded a 3 million euro grant by the EU to scan and digitize over 400,000 ancient manuscript images from the Abbey of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes archive.  The result will be made available for musicological study through Oxford’s DIAMM portal.  The project commenced on January 1, 2023.

From the REPERTORIUM website at Neumz.com:

Over two million musical works will be correlated for concordance amongst the Solesmes dataset and external datasets such as the Cantus Index network. Approximately 4,000 novel chants are expected to be discovered and prioritized for manual indexing. A total of 127,000 chants will be manually indexed for OMR DL training purposes. Approximately 2,200 hours of Gregorian chants sung in the Tridentine forms, corresponding to the manuscript tradition, will be recorded at Le Barroux (France). Between 1,800 and 3,000 handwritten operatic aria manuscripts will be digitized from ICCMU’s DIDONE database.

Neumz is a project of the Benedictine nuns of the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Fidélité, a monastery founded by the nuns from the Abbey of Saint-Louis du Temple of Simon, located in Jouques, near Aix-en-Provence.

The nuns have recorded more than 7,000 hours of Gregorian Chant from the Psalter, Lectionary, Collectary, Antiphonary, Responsoriary, and Gradual, and is said to be the only complete recording of all Gregorian Chant in the world.

 

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

Filed Under: Articles Last Updated: March 6, 2023

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About Matthew Frederes

Mr. Frederes is a software engineer, pilot, served as an organist for 31 years, and directed small parish choirs/scholas for 22 years. He and his wife have 12 children. —(Read full biography).

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Corpus Christi Watershed

President’s Corner

    Luis Martínez Must Go!
    Sevilla Cathedral (entry dated 13 December 1564): The chapter orders Luis Martínez, a cathedral chaplain, to stay away from the choirbook-stand when the rest of the singers gather around it to sing polyphony—the reason being that “he throws the others out of tune.” [Excerpt from “The Life of Father Francisco Guerrero.”]
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    Urgent! • We Desperately Need Funds!
    A few days ago, the president of Corpus Christi Watershed posted this urgent appeal for funds. Please help us make sure we’re never forced to place our content behind a paywall. We feel it’s crucial that 100% of our content remains free to everyone. We’re a tiny 501(c)3 public charity, entirely dependent upon the generosity of small donors. We have no endowment and no major donors. We run no advertisements and have no savings. We beg you to consider donating $4.00 per month. Thank you!
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Booklet of Eucharistic Hymns” (16 pages)
    I was asked to create a booklet for my parish to use during our CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION on 22 June 2025. Would you be willing to look over the DRAFT BOOKLET (16 pages) I came up with? I tried to include a variety of hymns: some have a refrain; some are in major, others in minor; some are metered, others are plainsong; some are in Spanish, some are in Latin, but most are in English. Normally, we’d use the Brébeuf Hymnal—but we can’t risk having our congregation carry those heavy books all over the city to various churches.
    —Jeff Ostrowski

Quick Thoughts

    Pope Pius XII Hymnal?
    Have you ever heard of the Pope Pius XII Hymnal? It’s a real book, published in the United States in 1959. Here’s a sample page so you can verify with your own eyes it existed.
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    “Hybrid” Chant Notation?
    Over the years, many have tried to ‘simplify’ plainsong notation. The O’Fallon Propers attempted to simplify the notation—but ended up making matters worse. Dr. Karl Weinmann tried to do the same in the time of Pope Saint Pius X by replacing each porrectus. You can examine a specimen from his edition and see whether you agree he complicated matters. In particular, look at what he did with éxsules fílii Hévae.
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    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

Random Quote

“In all this mediaeval religious poetry there is much that we could not use now. Many of the hymns are quite bad, many are frigid compositions containing futile tricks, puns, misinterpreted quotations of Scripture, and twisted concepts, whose only point is their twist. But there is an amazing amount of beautiful poetry that we could still use. If we are to have vernacular hymns at all, why do we not have translations of the old ones?”

— Fr. Adrian Fortescue (d. 1923)

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Corpus Christi Watershed is a 501(c)3 public charity dedicated to exploring and embodying as our calling the relationship of religion, culture, and the arts. This non-profit organization employs the creative media in service of theology, the Church, and Christian culture for the enrichment and enjoyment of the public.

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