Thursday, January 8, 2009

Jandel Antiphonal Scans Improved


I am happy to announce that the PDF scans of the two volumes of the great Antiphonarium S. Ordinis F. Praedicatorum published in 1863 at the direction of Master of the Order Vincent Jandel, O.P., have now been vastly improved through the hard work of Bro. Corwin Low, O.P., of the Western Dominican Province House of Studies in Oakland. He has my profound gratitude for this project.

These books contain the complete music for the Dominican Office in its medieval form, including the night office with all its long responsories. This is the only printed edition of the complete office ever done.

The pages of the scan are now all clean, straightened, and searchable! And they are now about 1/3 the size of the former scans: about 45 megs each. You may download or consult them at their links on the left side bar.

3 comments:

Bro. Corwin Low, O.P. said...

Thanks for the kind words Fr. Augustine. I should mention something about the ability to search text in these books. I used Acrobat to OCR (optical character recognition) the scans. There are several reasons why something might not scan properly:

(1) the original scan was not clear;
(2) OCR is notoriously poor at recognizing ligatures (e.g., fi, ffi, ffl, ae, oe, etc.). This should not be a problem but it is;
(3) Some typefaces are difficult. These are usually limited to display faces or other fancy fonts. But it can also be with non-standard characters, such as those used in liturgical books (e.g., The R and the V with a slash in it--for responses).

Br. Corwin, OP

Anonymous said...

Hi Father, Brother,

Just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work, and also to let you know that it's bearing some fruit. We had a youth retreat last weekend at which we sang compline in Latin as best we could...in my ignorance, I cobbled together the Psalms, Responsory, Nunc Dimittis, et al from the Gillet Antiphonarium according to a 1972 English Breviary. The kids and adults - most of whom had never encountered Chant notation before - loved it and learned very quickly.

Father Vincent is doing wonderful things up here. Please continue to support him in prayer and counsel.

In Christ through Mary,

Anonymous said...

Dear Mario,

Thanks for the kind word. Actually you could have saved yourself some work and your retreatants some eye-strain! The entire Compline in Dominican Chant for the Liturgy of the Hours (1972) in Latin is on the side bar where you also found the Antiphonal. It can also be downloaded in booklet form for double sided printing and stapling to make a booklet.

Also, I do suggest that if you want to cut and paste, use the Gillet (1933) antiphonal--it is much easier to read than that 19th century Jandel version.

God bless you and please promise Fr. Vincent my prayers.