Come Holy Ghost

A New Book of Old Hymns:

Why

Contents

Bibliography

Download

Publishing

Technical Notes

ta dah

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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

Hymnbook production is on hold while permission to print is sought under the Code of Canon Law no. 826. New work is being posted at hymni.wordpress.com

Who needs another hymnbook?

A New Book of Old Hymns

This book is not your average hymnbook. There is no organ edition, no melody/harmony versions. Its just a book of hymns that deserve to live.

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. 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. Not to be put off she did her own research and found 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 even very learned people very reluctant to translate. Even poor translations can help and many were only too happy to refine an existing translation.

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 whole book is here as one pdf of a5 pages: hymnbook.pdf (~1.3M). The source files (including pictures) have been made into an archive: hymnbook.tar.gz (~377k) or for Windows users 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.

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

Publishing

The Code of Canon Law requires permission from the Local Ordinary before publishing a book of prayers like this. If you would like to be notified when the book becomes available please contact me.

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: 26 Mar 2010