Wonderful hymnology resource

I’ve previously quoted from John Julian’s 1892 Dictionary of Hymnology, because it is available in PDF form on Google Books.

However, now the formatted, searchable text is available on Hymnary.org. For example, here is a listing of hymn compilations from the entry for the late great John Mason Neale:

(1) Hymns for Children. Intended chiefly for Village Schools. London, Masters, 1842. (2) Hymns for the Sick. London, Masters, 1843, improved ed. 1849.
(3) Hymns for the Young. A Second Series of Hymns for Children. London, Masters, 1844.
(4) Songs and Ballads for Manufacturers. London, Masters, 1844.
(5) Hymns for Children. A Third Series. London, Masters, 1846.
(6) Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences. London, Masters. 1851; 2nd ed. 1861; 3rd. ed. 1863.
(7) Hymnal Noted. London, Masters & Novello, 1852: enlarged 1854. Several of the translations were by other hands. Musical editions edited by the Rev. T. Helmore. It is from this work that a large number of Dr. Neale's translations from the Latin are taken.
(8) Carols for Christmas and Eastertide. 1853.
(9) Songs and Ballads for the People. 1855.
(10) The Rhythm of Bernard de Morlaix, Monk of Cluny, on the Celestial Country. London, Hayes, 1st ed. 1858: 3rd ed., with revision of text, 1861. It contains both the Latin and the English translation.
(11) Hymns of The Eastern Church, Translated with Notes and an Introduction. London, Hayes, 1862: 2nd ed. 1862: 3rd ed. 1866 : 4th ed., with Music and additional notes, edited by The Very Rev. S. G. Hatherly, Mus. B., Archpriest of the Patriarchal (Ecumenical Throne. London, Hayes, 1882. Several of these translations and notes appeared in The Ecclesiastic and Theologian, in 1853.
(12) Hymns, Chiefly Mediaeval, on the Joys and Glories of Paradise. London, Hayes, 1865. This work contains notes on the hymns, and the Latin texts of the older amongst them.
(13) Original Sequences, Hymns, and other Ecclesiastical Verses. London, Hayes, 1866. This collection of Original verse was published posthumously by Dr. Littledale.

The online, indexed, searchable version of the Dictionary of Hymnology is a great resource for those tracking the origins and authorship of the great hymns of the past centuries. The coverage obviously stops at the end of the 19th century — but except for Ralph Vaughan Williams or perhaps Healey Willan, that’s no great loss.

New home for CyberHymnal

One of my goals here is not just to provide information on hymns, but where to find such information. On the righthand side of the blog I've been listing links to some well known resources.

In response to my post earlier this month on the TEC/Continuing Anglican property fight, hymn blogger Leland Bryant Ross posted a (slightly off-topic) comment about the current dispute over CyberHymnal. (Last month I linked to Ross’s blog post about Christmas carols, but I don’t link to his blog on the right side because we generally have divergent goals, in opposite corners of the church music 2x2.)

In his comment early this morning, Ross wrote

It is my hope that you will see the parallel between the unfairness of the court's decision, in this matter, and the unfairness of the ISP's hijacking of cyberhymnal.org, and that you will change your links to The Cyber Hymnal™ to point to its true current location at http://www.hymntime.com/tch/ rather than, as you currently have it, pointing to the ISP that stole the domain name from the actual hymnalist.

Actually, I don’t see much of a parallel, but that doesn’t mean that I’d want to see important content hijacked.

From what I can find right now, this looks to be one of those he said, she said conflicts. The new home doesn’t say much about the conflict

Many have asked what will hap­pen to the do­main name “cyberhymnal.org.” the le­gal owner (Word.Net) is un­will­ing re­lin­quish it, so we can’t use the old URL. In ad­di­tion, our site search fea­ture will not be ful­ly func­tion­al un­til search en­gines have had time to re-in­dex the site at its new URL.

Please spread the word about the new URL & ask Web sites to up­date their links! God bless…

The most detailed discussion I could find of the dispute was in a series of reader comments to a Dec. 26 posting to the Reformed Angler, which includes a few readers who say they’ve corresponded with the anonymous (pseudonymous) CyberHymnal founder.

Taking the discussion as face value, it appears that some company at CyberHymnal.org will have the old content (perhaps with new organization), and another company (possibly aided by the original founder) will have the old content and newer content at HymnTime.com. Of course, the former will get all the website traffic and links for many years. The latter is calling itself TheCyberHymnal™ to create a new brand distinct from CyberHymnal.

I don’t know much beyond that: perhaps the full story will come out over time. Given that CyberHymnal.org is offline for now and TheCyberHymnal is developing new content, at Leland’s suggestion I’ve changed the link to the latter.

Gregorian chant resources

Life is hectic at work right now, so I'm going to try to do a series of shorter posts rather than wait for time to do a big long post.

Catching up late last night on my favorite liturgical music blogs (listed at right), I found an interesting post on Hymnography Unbound. Blogress “Ephrem” (like me, a pseudonymous writer) was inviting her Catholic readers to attend a conference:

All the cool kids are going to the Sacred Music Colloquium this June!

This is like summer camp for music geeks. You wouldn't want to miss that, would you?

By the time I read the link the June 2008 conference was history and the website is now promoting the June 2009 conference. I don’t know if it makes sense for a Protestant to attend, but it sounds like a spectacular vehicle for preserving the divine liturgy (lower-case D) in America.

However, I did want to pass along all the other stuff on their website, particularly as it relates to Gregorian chant. Look at the sidebar of the conference web page for

• Two dozen online resources for Gregorian chant and an equal number of teaching resources. For example, there’s a whole article on reading the medieval neumes entitled “An Idiot’s Guide to Square Notes
• Their online bookstore, with titles such as Advanced Studies in Gregorian Chant, as well as online copies of non-copyrighted (ca. 1907) books on church music.
• Their quarterly journal, Sacred Music

Someday I hope to have time to read and comment on all these materials, but I thought I’d pass them along to readers sooner rather than later.

Some other interesting websites

In my free time, I've been researching other sites for topics relevant to Anglican liturgy and hymnody. Here are a few that I've found:

• Music in Anglicanism, a small set of scanned public domain (mostly expired copyright) books and reports about music in PECUSA and the Church of England. It's part of the overall Project Canterbury online archive.
• The Anglican music e-mail list, which seems to be mainly TEC choirmasters asking (or bragging) about what music they're going to perform next Sunday, but also includes resources and pointers to other sources.

Not specifically Anglican are

• Choral Public Domain Library, which archives materials with expired copyrights (90 years old or more).
• The Gregorian Yahoo Group, with both discussion of Gregorian chant and also an online repository of scanned files.