Come Holy Ghost

A New Book of Old Hymns:

Why

Contents

Bibliography

Download

Publishing

Technical Notes

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.

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A New Book of Old Hymns

The treasure of sacred music is to be preserved and fostered with very great care. - Sacrosanctum Concilium, Vatican II

More recent work can be found at hymni.wordpress.com. To buy a copy, visit Brandt Bookshop.

Why?

A New Book of Old Hymns

The editor loves hymns. From an early age her favourite poems and prayers came from the pages of the parish hymnbook. In time she ended up going to a Latin Mass where all the hymns were in Latin. Now some people don't mind listening without understanding. The music is beautiful and you can always think up your own prayers. BUT, humans have reason and language to communicate ideas and hymns are part of that communication.

Finding out what was sung proved harder than expected. The overwhelming majority know little Latin and are satisfied with the overall ambience of peace and serenity. Thus began the research into these Latin hymns, unearthing many old favourites. Matching the gregorian hymns with their modern day translated versions proved an absorbing adventure. Some hymns turned out to have no standard translation. The editor found the majority of latinists very reluctant to translate. A good translation is a very demanding project, but even poor translations can help and many were only too happy to refine a translation once it had begun.

In short, what you have here is a collection of hymns for you to enjoy. They cover all the liturgical year, from Advent through Easter, right through to the November season for the Holy Souls. There's the default Sunday Mass ordinary, Mass 11, plus Credo 1 and some hymns for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. It's a handy book to have at a Extraordinary Roman Rite Mass, or anywhere ancient Latin hymns might come up. I've seen Sacris solemnis printed on a nylon shower curtain, so you never know where a book of Latin hymns with English translations might come in handy!

To the best of my knowledge this book is clear of copyright. Let me know if I'm wrong about that.

Contents

Here is a list of the contents of the book. Each piece is being made into its own printable pdf, omitting page numbers and running headings. This may give a sample of the book, which can be downloaded as one big pdf (1.3Mb). The TeX files will hopefully help anyone learning to use OpusTeX.

Note: The pdf, TeX and midi files are my own work. The mp3 links go to the recordings of Monastery of St Benedict in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Thanks go to Luís Quiroz for all his work in recording and putting them up at Christus Rex.

Bibliography

Download

The book can be downloaded free from http://lulu.com/brandt The source files (including pictures) have been made into an archive: hymnbook.zip (~413k). Along with the fonts mentioned in the Technical Notes and a working installation of TeX and OpusTeX, the archive file should be all you need to compile the hymnbook yourself. Once you can compile the hymnbook, then you can change it. Note that OpusTeX is no longer being maintained. Gregorio is being used for all future work.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.

Publishing

See the Brandt Bookshop at Lulu.com.

Technical Notes

The book was produced using TeX for the general typesetting and OpusTeX for the music - especially the gregorian chant. The illustrations were edited with the GIMP then converted to eps vector graphics using potrace.

The main text font is Donald Knuth's Computer Modern Roman. Headings are in Peter Wilson's Humanist Minuscule from the bookhands package in the CTAN. Drop caps are in Priory from Paul Lloyd Fonts.

The midi files in the contents listing on this page were made using abc2midi. The music in abc format is all in one file: hymns.abc. They are not polished, little more than a stilted melody. Recordings in mp3 format can be found at Monastery of St Benedict in Sao Paolo, Brazil. They are amateur recordings made in the church. They also seem to have a very comprehensive coverage of all the music you'll hear around the year on Sundays. They cover much of the content in the New Book of Old Hymns.

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Last updated: 12 Dec 2011