EFARIOUS. The word nefarious is defined by the dictionary as: flagrantly wicked or criminal. I would love to know how many readers experienced the same nefarious behavior I did while attending college. Each semester, we were forced to purchase outrageously overpriced textbooks. Each of them cost as much as $130.00—which is the equivalent of $342.36 in today’s currency. When the semester was over, we could sell our books back to the university, but usually only received about $8.00 (!) for each book. To make matters worse, each year the self-same textbooks were published in a “new edition.” The content was virtually identical, but all the formatting was altered, which meant the page numbers no longer corresponded. It’s insane that the perpetrators of this nefarious scheme were never prosecuted. (I really hope this situation no longer exists.)
The Opposite • When one encounters such nefarious acts, it’s easy to lose faith in humanity. Contrariwise, every so often one discovers people who—far from being nefarious—are generous, unselfish, and magnanimous. An example would be the professors at the LEMMENSINSTITUUT, who (at the height of WW2!) produced more than 3,000 pages of Gregorian Chant accompaniments. In an attempt to imitate this same spirit of generosity, we release today a professionally-scanned version of NOH Volume 5:
* PDF Download • KYRIALE ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENTS (191 pages)
—Volume 5 • Nóva órgani harmónia ad graduále júxta editiónem vaticánam.
The following graphic shows the difference in quality between this professional scan and the version I created during the 1990s:
A few photographs of Volume 5:
“As It Was Intended” • The edition by the LEMMENSINSTITUUT does not follow the illicit elongations of Dom Mocquereau. Rather, they present the official edition as it was intended to be sung by its creators.1 The LEMMENSINSTITUUT marks each MMV (“Melismatic Mora Vocis”) with a tiny little dot. I am preparing an edition that contains little arrows to help singers notice the MMVs. My teacher found the MMVs very annoying to discern. I remember him laughing heartily, saying: “Those who followed the pure VATICANA had to place their noses next to the spine of the book to see whether the required width was actually there.” To him, such a procedure seemed absurd. Indeed, the bishop who baptized our children would often ask me: “Jeff, was it really true that singers had to place the plainsong books next to their noses to determine instances of morae vocis?” Indeed, in his 1939 textbook, Josef Gogniat confirms this method. In the following image, the spine of the book is placed close to one’s nose:
Do you see how this “Gogniat-Spine-Nose” method makes it easy to see whether there is blank space equal to (or exceeding) the width of a single note-head?
1 This may have something to do with the fact that the LEMMENSINSTITUUT is located in Belgium, which is the country where Abbat Pothier took refuge with his monastery during the French anti-clerical persecution.
