Thursday, September 22, 2011

Liturgy of the Hours in Roman Gregorian Chant


It has been brought to my attention that Steven van Roode has typeset and posted on the web Roman Gregorian music for Lauds, Vespers, and Compline of the Liturgia Horarum for Sundays and major feasts of the Lord. He has compiled his chants following the Ordo Cantus Officii (1983), just as I did when compiling the Antiphonarium pro Liturgia Horarum iuxta usum Ordinis Praedicatorum, which includes the chants of the whole year for all the Hours. His downloadable files are linked on the left side bar or my be found directly here at his site.

In my project, I substituted, of course, Dominican chants for the Roman ones, except in the rare cases where there was no parallel chant. We have both done the best we could finding suitable replacement chants when the OCO either specified a chant from an unpublished manuscript unavailable in digital form or where (for reasons beyond me) the OCO gave a newly composed antiphon text that (obviously) had no Gregorian melody.

Readers may wish to compare our Dominican hymn, respond, and antiphon melodies with the Roman ones using this resource. It is interesting to see how the two different chant traditions preserve in different forms what is essentially the same melodies. The difference choices in melodies for hymns and the ordinary are also of interest.

I commend Mr. Van Roode for completing this project and for his beautiful typesetting.