Thursday, September 22, 2011

Comparison of Dominican and Roman Chants

As readers known from Mr. Tucker's previous post, Steven van Roode has typeset and posted on the web in PDF form Roman Gregorian music for Lauds, Vespers, and Compline of the Liturgia Horarum for Sundays and major feasts of the Lord. They can be downloaded here at his site. Mr. van Roode compiled his music following the Ordo Cantus Officii (1983), just as I did when compiling the Antiphonarium pro Liturgia Horarum iuxta usum Ordinis Praedicatorum, the volumes of which are downloadable on the left side bar of Dominican Liturgy.

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 We have both done the best we could finding suitable replacement chants when the OCO either specified a chant from an unpublished manuscript unavailable in digital form or where (for reasons beyond me) the it gave a newly composed antiphon text that (obviously) had no Gregorian melody.

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

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

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