Music of the Sarum Office-English

[noel jones]

From: Gregorian@yahoogroups.com [mailto:Gregorian@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of William Renwick
Sent: Monday, December 27, 2010 9:51 AM
To: Gregorian@yahoogroups.com
Cc: liturgy-l@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Gregorian] Music of the Sarum Office-English

Seasons greetings to all:

I am pleased to announce that the first installment of the English
Performing Edition of Music of the Sarum Office is now available at
http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~renwick/sarum-01.htm

This first installment (over 250 pages!) contains the commencement of the
Psalter. Subsequent installments are planned to appear in January and July
of each year. The complete edition should run to approximately 5000 pages.

The language of this edition conforms to that of the Book of Common Prayer,
the King James Bible, and the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate.

A note about the pointing of the Psalms. The system used here is that of
G.H. Palmer, as found in the Sarum Psalter and other publications. In
essence each of the number 1-8 indicates the point at which the mediant or
termination commences. The pointing has been amended from that found in
Palmer's publications to follow more closely the traditional principles of
text pointing.

The English Edition currently underway is a "Performing Edition"; the
scholarly apparatus is available in the Latin Edition; it is intended that a
Scholarly English Edition will also appear in due course.

Comments regarding the edition are most welcome. I would like to extend my
thanks publicly to several persons who have helped tremendously in moving
this work forward, without mentioning their names here.

I would like also to point out that work on the draft of this edition is
well along; should anyone be interested in a particular piece that is not
yet publicly available, please contact me, and I will provide you with a
pre-publication version if it is available.

with thanks

William Renwick
renwick@mcmaster.ca <mailto:renwick%40mcmaster.ca>
School of the Arts
McMaster University
Hamilton Ontario CANADA L8S 4M2
http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~renwick/wr.htm

[musicus]

Thank you so much for posting this, Noel. It will be of great interest and use to many of us here. (Anecdotally, it was as a high Anglican that I first learned many of the classic chant melodies: from the English Hymnal, in their Sarum versions. The Roman versions still sound wrong to me, and I have to concentrate very hard if I am not to go astray.)