Since we briefly touched on this in another post, I am beginning a post on it, not knowing whether or not anyone else is interested.

I use some Anglican chant in the Roman Rite masses for which I play and conduct. Last Good Friday, in particular, I used Anglican rather than Gregorian chants. They were a bit easier for my choir to handle. I have attached a basic set of instructions for Anglican chant, keeping in mind the key principle that "Good chanting is just good intelligent reading in musical tones." Often, the unaccompanied chants are written in neumes on a 4-line staff just like Gregorian. chant instructions

I have some friends who are active in the Anglo-Catholic community and sing in their church choir. I will ask them for links to Anglican chant resources.

My friends are responding nicely. Here is a link to a site called Christian Classics--Ethereal Hymnody that includes subsidiary links to the Psalter and hymn books, as well as instructions for singing Anglican chant.

In addition, I have received links to several You Tube videos of Anglican Chant, including Attwood's setting of Psalm 50 ; Psalms from Westminster Cathedral ; and the Great Litany .

I see the Ethereal Harmonies instructions sent by my Anglican friend is the same as those provided by ByzanTN. This appears to be the "go-to" site for such things.

Those instructions came from "The Hymnal, 1940." It may very well be one of the best hymnals of all time.

One thing that struck me about the Anglican chant is how easy it is to pick up, and how well it adapts itself to simple harmonization, both of which make it excellent for congregational use,

Very true. I find it easy to learn and congregations to sing. The Anglicans mastered chant in English long ago. Being out of touch with Rome, they still have all the hundreds of sequences suppressed by Trent.

Certainly as a 12 year old singing in the choir in a Village Church I found it very easy to pick up the Anglican Chant .

Some 6 years later I found myself again in the Choir of an English [ Anglican ] Church and the ability to Chant came back almost instantly . There seems to be a sort of logical pattern to it.

Anglican chant is beautiful. I show examples of it to those who tell me chants don't fit English.

The You Tube links I posted are just a handful of the examples out there for those who want to hear for themselves.

That setting to Psalm 50 is interestingly similar in sound to many songs we sang in my Methodist church. I would imagine that Charles Wesley, being an Anglican (and a Methodist at the same time), when composing his hymnody drew often from the musical heritage of the Anglican tradition, which would explain the resemblance I noted above.

Alexis

One of the Irish Presbyterian groups has a well-earned reputation for excellent Psalm-chanting. One might investigate this form of chant.

Fr. Serge

There are some sound files floating around of a weather report and a traffic code sung in Anglican Chant. They're worth a Google.

Dave

One should also look at Early American psalmody, which has much in common (believe it or not) with Orthodox psalmody. Listen to some of William Billings' settings, sung a capella, for instance.

Ah yes - the King Singers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z2jwDcb9wI

[ hope that works ]

I love that! I have seen it before, but never tire of it.

"Being out of touch with Rome, they still have all the hundreds of sequences suppressed by Trent."

The more important question is...do they sing these sequences...
I have not heard them sing any suppressed sequences.

It is a great shame that sequences were abandoned I feel that for the latin rites they are the closest form of music to our byzantine troparia and hymns. It is my hope that within the western rite of the Orthodox Churches they will restore the usage of sequences and tropes and also adapt them to the english language. At the present time te western rites are using too many 19th century protestant hymns that give me the mother goose nursery rhyme feeling. Surely a sequentia and prosula is the more correct form of hymnody for the western rites. They are very easy to sing along with for a congregation and they tend to have lyrics which directly describe the theological events of the day more clearly than the introits/gradual/offertories tend to. They really are especially complimentary and harmonious toward the eastern theological and musical traditions as far as I know.

While I admire anglicans music to a certain extent...I would far rather use the st meinrad psalm tones or other more gregorian ones without falsetto. I feel the snglicans music can have certain unbecoming effeminant qualities, a lack of mysticism/monasticim.

I thoroughly enjoy Anglican music and find it highly refined and elegant. I also like Gregorian, but some of it can grate on modern ears. One of the problems with Gregorian is that the "authorities" don't agree on what it is supposed to sound like. Those chants were largely replaced by polyphony for quite some time before Solemnes resurrected them. Of course by then, no one really knew how they were originally sung or what they sounded like. If you really want to see discord and disagreement, get 4 Gregorian experts together.

As for sequences, there are approximately 5,000 of them. The texts of some are in the Analecta hymnica medii aevi. hymn texts To get the music would require going somewhere like Catholic U. and doing some extensive research. Some sequences have survived in the form of hymns in modern hymnals. Some can be found in The English Hymnal, 1936 and other editions.

It is going to be interesting to see what happens to those psalm tones and other psalm settings now that the U.S. bishops have approved the Revised Grail Psalter as the psalm text to be used at mass.

There is always Old Roman chant, the latest reconstructions of which show strong Byzantine influences.

I have heard the story for many years that those early chants grew out of Jewish temple music. Fact or fiction? Hard to prove, but interesting. However, it seems the eastern and western chants were more alike than different in the early days, pre-schism.

Nobody really knows, in part because musical notation was primitive at best, and we don't know how to read the few bits of sheet music that have survived (not that this hasn't stopped musicologists from giving it the old college try). There are in fact numerous threads that contributed to the different families of liturgical chant, including (probably) Jewish synagogue music (particularly for psalmody), pagan temple music, and the ceremonial music of the Roman court (the latter particularly in the East), to which elements of the folk tradition were added in different places. A short treatise on the subject is Foundations of Christian Music: The Music of Pre-Constantinian Christianity, by Edward Foley (Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN) 1996.

Finally had a chance to examine the music and listen to some of it. Beautiful. Must find time to give it a good study.

BTW (and off topic): I remember a long time ago visiting a church that had done something similar with simple, elegant chants of the KJV Psalms. Absolutely stunning. Most were sung with organ. A few were a cappella. If anyone has knowledge of audio recordings of the KJV Psalms (in simply settings) I'd appreciate it.