Teaching the chant of the Byzantine Catholic Church
The draft version of the new hymnal is complete (for now) and has been sent to the Inter-Eparchial Music Commission for their review and improvement.
Here is the version that was submitted: Hymnal – draft – 2019-11
Formatting will be cleaned up a bit more before publication. In the meantime, if you find any errors or infelicities, please let me know and I will make sure they are fixed in the final version.
If you look at the liturgical calendar on the MCI website, you will sometimes seen two sets of music for Vespers, with one of them labelled “samohlasen.” What does this mean, and which set of music should you choose?
Continue reading “What are “samohlasen” and “podoben” melodies?”
After a year of work on the Hymnal Project, and a great deal of input from cantors (thank you all!), the first formatted draft of the new hymnal is available:
I think you will be happy with the results; there are some new additions, many old favorites, and I THINK we have corrected most most of the places where the music seemed a bit off. I have incorporated all comments i have received to date, including some very valuable feedback from the annual Labor Day pilgrimage to Mount Saint Macrina.
If you are interested in our paraliturgical hymns and spiritual songs, I would greatly appreciate it if you could:
Initial versions of all entries are pretty much settled EXCEPT for an alternate, somewhat more complicated version of Rejoice, O purest Queen (Radujsja Carice), which was requested by cantor Joseph Ferenchick, it can be found in English and Slavonic after page 59 (and if we use it, several other hymns like O Father Nicholas would likely change to the more intricate version).
In three weeks, I plan to send the hymnal to the Inter-Eparchial Music Commission for their review and any changes, so please let me know what you find before then! Also, if you have questions about anything in the draft hymnal, please leave them in a comment below.
Several cantors have reported single-note errors in the following hymns
All the faithful come before you
Christijane, proslavl’ajme
Sing with joy and pray together
Palomniki Uniontowns’ki
Virgin Mother, Intercessor
D’ivo Mati zastupaj nas
which have been corrected in an updated version of the “New Marian Hymnal” on the MCI website:
https://metropolitancantorinstitute.org/blog/sheetmusic/New_Marian_Hymnal.pdf
The corrected version has a date on the title page of August 31, 2019; if you find errors in your copy, please check the updated version to see if they are already fixed!
The 1984 Marian Hymnal marked an important milestone in our church’s music; it was the first major collection of these hymns, with music, in English. As part of the work on the forthcoming hymnal, the MCI has prepared a “new” Marian hymnal for experimental use:
New Marian Hymnal
New Marian Hymnal (camera-ready booklet)
See the Discuss links on the Hymnal Project page if you have any questions about particular hymns – and if you have suggestions for improvement, or hymns that should be added, please comment below!
(Note that the formatting, and even some words and music, may very well change when the Music Commission goes over the draft hymnal; for example, with English and Slavonic side-by-side, there is really no need to include both titles on each page. In the meantime, please do not use the music publicly, or at large gatherings such as pilgrimages, unless you have made sure that everyone has access to the “new” versions, and had had time to learn them!)
This is the LAST of the Marian hymns we will be looking at for the proposed hymnal – and Some Changes Have Been Made. Read below to find out why!
The text for Tam hde v nebi, the Slavonic original of this hymn, was printed in 1974 in a small booklet from the Sisters of Saint Basil the Great, Uniontown, PA, titled Pisňi vo čest’ Materi Božoj Neustajuščoj Pomošči – in other words, hymns for services to Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
One verse was printed (with an English translation) by Fr. William Levkulic in 1978. This hymn was NOT included in the 1985 Marian Hymnal, so I have had to rely on an unattributed manuscript for music.
This hymn, whose first verse describes the Annunciation, is an enduring favorite in our church, and appears on some of our earliest recordings of the Divine Liturgy – in spite of the fact that it doesn’t seem to have been included in any of the usual collections of hymns from Europe.
This hymn as 26 verses in the Užhorod Pisennik (1913). Is anyone willing to summarize them for us?
This is one of the best-known of our Marian hymns, and since there’s little reason to make any substantive changes, I’d like to take a look at notation, and when to use (or not use) time signatures in the new hymnal.