Come Holy Ghost

A New Book of Old Hymns:

Contents

Bibliography

Download

Publishing

Technical Notes

ta dah

Creative Commons License
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

Third Edition

Released October 2007. The biggest change in the Third Edition is to bring back the dots and dashes - or episemas and augmentums, or whatever you prefer to call them. Further careful proof reading has eliminated ever more glitches, bringing the book ever closer to perfection. Also a new Large Type Edition.

A New Book of Old Hymns A collection of traditional Catholic hymns with a decided emphasis on Gregorian Chant. The inspiration for this work came from attending the Maternal Heart of Mary Church. The choir brings this music to life.

This work began as one off pieces typed for the Holy Family Education Centre now being run by the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter. Over time it seemed logical to compile the pieces into a book. Selections were made for all the Church's liturgical seasons. Mass XI (Orbis Factor) and Credo I were added as it is they are the most common mass parts sung on Sundays at the Maternal Heart of Mary Church. The usual hymns and prayers for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament are included.

This book has not been trialled as a parish hymn book, but could be used as the basis for such a work. Anyone who would like to take on this project is welcome to it.

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.

Still in the process of getting these up to date with the dots and dashes of the Third Edition. There must be a way to automate this - comment out the \let\augmentum=\gobble line, tex, opusflex, tex, dvips, ps2pdf, tedious work the way I'm doing it. The big file hymnbook.pdf is up to date as of 3rd November 2007. Another illustration of how I would like someone to take over this project.

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

Currently the book is available through Lulu, an American company specialising in self-publishing ventures. Lately I have been making a5 books with colour covers bound with 10mm plastic combs and selling them for AU$10 each. At that price I can offer free postage in Australia.

If you would like to publish this book, or use this book as a basis for your own hymnbook, contact me for encouragement.

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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