First hymn, 2nd verse, last word: http://musicasacra.com/books/hymns/pbeh_abide_with_us.pdf "...to living faith be stir -"

Bravo!!!!!!!

Will there be a pdf file that will contain the text and melody alone?

Bravo!!!!!!!

The first hymn I clicked on was "Holy God." I was hoping there would be no repeat, and that the verse "Lo the apostolic train..." would be included. But, alas! I mention this not to nit-pick, but to show just how easy it will be to nit-pick. Too easy! So I think we should approach this valuable resource with an attitude of acceptance, except of course in the case of egregious errors.

Noel,

I think it's great to have only one book for the hymnal. What I hope will be available online is a melody with text to reproduce in worship aids.

Thanks for all your work.

Wonderful and excellent! I could volunteer some new hymns if there is time.

And Francis, and others, new hymns are definitely a goal of this project, submit, submit, submit...the response so far has been...restrained.

Wonderful work. Are you after PDF contributions, or must they be in Finale format? Quite a few of us will have Sibelius.

I was unable to edit the error spreadsheet, even though I had logged in to my Google account, and so could not report that "Soul of my Saviour (A)" is actually a copy of "The Eternal Gifts of Christ the King".

ps sorry if I missed instructions that would have made this comment redundant.

only English hymns. Ordinaries we already distribute online and we will make all those live as soon as ICEL says it is ok.

I am shocked to see "Bread of the world, in mercy broken" included in this collection. The theology expressed in the second verse strikes me as unambiguously Zwinglian.

In 1968 I took an organist's position in a small Anglo-Catholic parish. The "letter of agreement" that I received from the priest said, "The choice of hymns is yours; but we do not sing Hymn #196 at St. James." ("Bread of the world..." was Hymn #196 in THE HYMNAL 1940, the Episcopal hymnal then in use.)

For now we are just posting what we can without any tribunals. that stage will come later.

XML is lovely but unfortunately all kinds of formatting is lost in the translation, and you know what a dud that movie was.

And Bruce, there is some really bad music that Catholics have loved over the years, I think we all agree.

Bread of...the Malcolm Archer anthem is "a token" while the original is "the token" so that helps it a bit, unless there is another problem.

Or you could spend $9.95 on Notepad and save us a lot of work!

According to the product website, it does export and import XML.

I would wager money that the reason new hymns are not submitted is because they go to the Commons.

If your hymn is sent off to Hope and they buy it it is theirs and it goes in a file. It may or may not appear in a hymnal. If it does not, there is nothing you can do.

If it goes in a hymnal and people like it, they are going to steal it rather than buying the hymnal it is in. So you are going to have pirated copies all over with your information on the pirated copy often left off.

If, however, you add it to our list under Creative Commons 3.0 people may take it, share it, copy it and do anything except sell it. They cannot print a sell a hymnal with your hymnal in it without our permission. That's the 3.0 provision.

Now suddenly your hymn is out there being shared, people like it it gets popular and one of the bug guys wants it in a hymnal. What did that cost you?

Or it could be locked in a file at ABC music publishing. Kept dark, like a mushroom.

The PBC is the best example. You can download it for free. So that mean NO ONE is going to buy the book, right?

What's the latest count of sales of people who ARE BUYING A FREE BOOK?

I would like to offer my tremendous support for the work that has been done thus far on the PBEH. I know that it feels like you're being battered from every front, guys, but it's important to know that this is a ground-breaking work and contribution to the cause of Sacred Music.

I pray that all of us will continue to support you in this work, and offer up our constructive contributions with the spirit of love and helpfulness. Sure, we may each have observations and even quibbles with the finer points, but this pales in comparison to the magnitude of the overall work.

My acclaim to all involved, and never let us doubt that this will change the world, despite all the faults and failings that us mortals might include in the first edition. We all know that it's impossible for rev 1.0 of ANYthing to be perfect; even God took 6 days. ;-)

thank you for the support! yes, the PBC has sold 8,000 copies. There are no controlled experiments in a world of forward motion and ceaseless change, but I would be willing to wager that we never would have sold 1000 had it not been free online.

As for new hymns, we've yet to actually solicit any outside this forum. time will come.

The best part of this forum is the ability to edit your messages!

Ask >•<

Thank you, everyone who is working on this project. It will be a great gift for the Church!

This is a guess on my part: the correct answer to virtually all questions of the form "Will the hymnal include feature X?" is probably "It hasn't been decided for sure yet."

After all, the PBEH project is only in its information- and hymn-gathering phase. Screening the hymns comes later.

This is probably a good time to start collecting thoughts about what features the book should include. There should be a process about screening the feature requests too.

At my own initiative, I've created a spreadsheet for tracking feature requests. Anyone may edit it.

If you want the hymnal to have a certain feature, consider (ahem!) volunteering to create it.

I don't know whether the editors have even defined a decision-making process yet for the book's features.

Here's one way to organize them:

1. features to be included in the printed book;
2. "official" supplementary material from the PBEH project (on-line downloadable documents);
3. "unofficial" supplementary material contributed by other talented and erudite persons interested in the project: these are also on-line downloadable documents.

Features in all these categories will be of value to people, but the editors will have to make distinctions among them. The book's size and cost limitations will affect what features go into print. For the downloadable features, editors could select some as "official" and leave some as "unofficial", based on the availability of volunteers and the quality of work produced.

There should also be some consideration for ongoing development of the project: collecting additional hymns over time, adding more companion material. offering downloadable errata lists,

Will there be an index like
Barlow and Morgenstern "A dictionary of musical themes" ?

That would be sooooo useful for when parishioners ask, "Why don't we ever sing THAT song?.... you know, the one about that thing?... where the tune goes along all like this and then it sounds different and then it's the same again but not quite? You know the one, why don't you ever play that? It goes [imagine monotone here] nah -na-na-nah-nah-naaah!"
(And it could be anything from REPTON to PANGE LINGUA to WAYFARIN' STRANGER.)

Save the Liturgy, Save the World!