The Catholic Hymnal Project
  • Pes
    Posts: 623
    Our own Noel is apparently behind the recently-released Catholic Hymnal Project. Starting with 37 Eucharistic hymns set to 60 different, established hymn tunes, this project appears to be very nicely organized and presented!

    (An aside: Noel, I've been reading a lot of "Anglican chant" books lately and note the obvious limitation to major/minor harmony, 3 and 5 quarter-note endings, and so forth. I've also been having a nice time playing through the Nova Organi Harmonia. What do you think of the possibilities of creating a four-part hymn repertoire that is more definitely "modal"?)
  • Pes - the one Anglican chant that I can think of off hand that is (sort of) modal is the haunting one that J Turle adapted from H Purcell. It appears as a setting for De Profundis at no. 697 in The Hymnal 1940. As for modal hymnody: it already exists. Look into the German chorals of the late XVI. & the XVII. centuries. Many of these would be quite moving as settings for Catholic metrical hymns, even with their frequent employment of iso-rhythm. A goodly number are in The Lutheran Hymnal of 1940, and in the blue and green hymnals which replaced it in the late 1970s. Or, investigate the choral settings of Schein, Scheidt, and Schutz, & cet. Even if one didn't find these useful, they would be good examples by which to be tutored in the writing of new modal hymns.
  • :::: Many of these started out as chant melodies and were recast as metrical chorals: e.g., the Advent office hymn, Veni Redemptor Gentium (Attr. St Ambrose) becomes Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, which in turn comes to us as Saviour of the Nations, Come. The harmonisation of this tune, and others, was originally in that curious netherland between modality-tonality and survives in a number of modern hymnals. More often, though, we find that the modality has been leached. :::: There are also the modal metrical tunes of Tallis, Gibbons, et al., most of them gems, most readily found in The Hymnal 1940, The English Hymnal, and Hymns Ancient & Modern.
  • Pes
    Posts: 623
    Very helpful, MJO. Can you speculate on why the Anglicans largely abandoned modal harmony in their four-part chant? It's all major/minor, or nearly so. Was modal too strongly suggestive of Papists in the hedgerows? Did they feel major/minor gave them more opportunities for modulation, i.e. were the reasons more musical than ideological? Etc.
  • Pes - An interesting question for which there is not an abundance of contemporary evidence for an answer. But, no, I don't think there was a fear of 'Papists in the hedgerows' - at least not as concerns this topic. It is most likely that the psalms continued to be sung in England to the old psalm tones, probably in faburden with the 'tone' in the tenor. Faburden was a style, more properly, a procedure, so well known that there was no need to write it down: any competent choir would have known how to improvise it. Thus, there are no (I stand to be corrected) written, modal period, 'Anglican chants' of the Tudor-Stuart era outside a treatise such as Morley's '...Introduction...'. The English tended to be extravagantly conservative in their music until the Restoration, when Charles II. literally commanded that more 'modern' music be written, meaning what was then fashionable at Versailles. Hence, Purcell. The Anglican chant repertory, tonally driven, with melody in the treble, then, basically begins at the dawn of the XVIII. century when modal writing was becoming but a memory or a learned exercise.