Melo, can you give two scenarios that differ only in what is programmed? If you don't do that, they don't relate to the question you are posing.

Does it breed bitterness? Then your faith is being damaged.

Anyway, to answer theloniouslopez' question: I liked Worship II, but I haven't seen it in use anywhere for years.

I had Worship III in the pews at a previous Church. It wasn't terrible and combined with sung propers and Psalms from other sources, it could be used to run a decent program. Yes, some of the word-changes in some hymns could be seen as regrettable, but overall it all could be decent in the hands of the right director.

There is no favourite GIA hymnal - they are all, particularly in the light of certain others - poor in text and music, so, thus, are highly objectionable. If I really had to choose one it would be Worship I, II, III, or IV. Catholics seem to have a serious deficit when it comes to compiling hymnals.

Worship II is the best of an extremely unenviable bunch.

Correct, Francis.
And, the 1940 can now be regarded as a Catholic hymnal because it alone is used at Walsingham and throughout the Ordinariat. I'm sorry that we don't use The English Hymnal of 1906 because it is even better that the 1940.

I would love it if TEH 1906 would be re-set according to more modern music publishing conventions. It’s an excellent hymnal, but it’s hard to read! Though I suppose I’ve only seen scans online and never held a hard copy, so maybe that’s easier.

I have Breaking Bread and it works fine for me. I just only use the traditional hymns and ignore the dreck. I don’t necessarily want to freak people out by switching the hymnal!

I used RitualSong for 20 years. About one third of the psalms were usable, the remainder were awful. It had enough good hymns in it that I didn't have to use the more questionable ones.

Quite a few hymnals have 700+ songs in them. You expect parishes to sing even half that many songs in the course of a liturgical year?

A repertoire of 150 or so songs is ample for any parish to know well and sing. Repetition is important if you expect the congregation to sing.

But hymnal publishers need to create hymnals for a mass market with widely varying needs and tastes, so they pack the hymnals with more music than any one parish could or would use.

I always thought "Whistle a Happy Tune" had better theology behind it than "Be Not Afraid." YMMV.

Mark,

You've mistaken my meaning.

If I have many good choices, even if I use a relatively small number of them in any given year, I have good choices; if I have 20 choices for each place where music can be used at Mass, but I wouldn't use 19 of each set of them if my salary were doubled and all politicians suddenly became honest persons.... I may have a great quantity, but I would not have good choices because, in effect, I wouldn't have any choice at all.

When hymnal publishers are catering to as large a market as possible, and therefore disregard their duty to produce a work of integrity.... they produce to suit flavors in parishes, instead of theocentric texts/music suitable for the worship of God.

MJO

I found my digital copy of the EH... Have you heard of the The Hymnary? Here is Jeff Ostrowski's take on it.

https://www.ccwatershed.org/2018/01/04/pdf-download-1872-the-hymnary/

The St. Michael Hymnal or the Ignatius Pew Missal or the Adoremus Hymnal didn't have enough of the OCP or GIA music that people in most Novus Ordo parishes do love to sing and expect to sing at least every once in a while.

thanks for clarity about the fact that you still sing the dreck.

[Admin note: This is rude. Please review the Forum Etiquette Guidelines.]

They don’t.

Mark,

Let me take an environmentalist's opinion for a second.

While a yearly-changing subscription is wasteful of paper and gives the impression that nothing lasting, enduring, is available, a single non-recyclable hymnal is better because they amount of paper used/misused is smaller. (Republishing the same stuff every year, assuming 700 hymns, is wasteful of 7 times as much paper as having one hymnal with the same 700 hymns not replaced every year.) So, I applaud your movement away from the subscription service. On the same basis, I would argue that printing the Propers one needs and putting them in a binder is better than buying $300/copy books of which one uses about 1/20 of the pages. (Liber Usualis) On the other hand, if the goal is to expand one's use, to encourage (for example) the praying of the Office, then the thousand pages in each volume that one doesn't use this year are not wasted because they are intrinsically good and a long-term investment.

So, I applaud your decision to move in the direction of something more durable and less wasteful. This is where I run into problems, though: if you know in advance that of the pages available something like 1/2 of it is stuff you'll never use because it would represent a movement in the wrong direction, aren't you establishing the idea that your parish should include all that stuff you never use in its next hymnal, and the one after that and..... so on?


I have (somewhere) a copy of the St. Michael Hymnal, first edition, and various editions of the Adoremus Hymnal, and also Worship III, Gather (something or the other), Hymnal 1982, Hymnal 1940, and grew up around Hymns Ancient and Modern and the English Hymnal 1906. Each has a good point somewhere, and some have more than just one good point. None, so far, is wholly satisfactory for use at Mass. Many of them would be useful at non-Mass and non-Office opportunities to worship God.

When the presumption is that vernacular hymnody is a good thing and must be promoted above all else, a false premise leads to many false conclusions.

Not that I want to feed CCW's silly sniping at other hymnals, but if the part-writing is still like this, I would steer far clear of it.

,

What ever happened to "Hymnbook 1982"?

- which "contains all hymns from The Hymnal 1982 with accompaniment but no service music"?

It seems that it would have been appropriate for a congregation looking for a good assortment of traditional hymns.

@sdtalley3

...I don't think it is the Pius X Hymnal, I believe it is The Traditional Roman Hymnal, yes? If those are the voice leadings in that book, that is truly a travesty... best content, worst arrangements...

The “Traditional Roman Hymnal” is published by the SSPX, which is distinct from the Pius X hymnal liked above.

@WGS

I just looked that up and it is available for 19 buckaroos on amazon... since that is the follow-up of the 1940, I would imagine its hymn arrangements are still stellar, but I do not know if the content is very dif.

I have (had) two 1940s. (One of them I slit the cover off and scanned the entirety in on our nifty stack scanner one day.) Most of it is available (high res) on Hymnary.org these days.

@francis

Thanks for the correction, I knew it was affiliated with the FSSPX...Hence I misnamed it.

Well, there's this new fourth version of Gather from GIA now:
https://www.giamusic.com/store/gather-4

I looked at the index, and I wouldn't use it. There isn't a single Mass setting in the hymnal that I would use. GIA's "classic" catalogue is stale at this point, and the new titles aren't worth singing.

Company promo blurb: "The Gather line of hymnals has become the norm by which all other Catholic hymnals are measured."

Really? hahahahaha

I wonder how well this will sell.