⌂ SATB Anglican Chant
Anglican Chant
Anglican chant developed from plainchant. It is an art form of great beauty when sung in four-part harmony by carefully rehearsed choirs. Many congregations sing Anglican chant with affection and enthusiasm.
An Anglican chant consists of two phrases, one of four notes in duration, followed by on of six notes. A double, triple, or quadruple chant consists of a doubling, triplilng, or quadrupling of this basic pattern. Because of the fixed design of Anglican chant, a text must be pointed so that certain accented syllables will be sung to particular notes - the second and fourth notes of each section and the sixth note of the final section. The first note of each section, the reciting note, may be associated with only a single unaccented syllable (it may, in fact, on occasion be omitted) or it may be associated with a dozen or more syllables. The musical notation defines the pitch but not the duration of any note.
A Manual for Clergy and Church Musicians, © 1980 by the Church Pension Fund, pp. 55
You can see from the following attachment that singing Anglican Chant directly from The Hymnal 1982 can require more practice and skill than most congregations, let alone choirs, posses. This template allows a simple method of pointing and writing out Anglican Chant so they can be sung more easily. Here is a sample of S39 The Invitatory: Venite/Psalm 95.
The text for Psalms and Canticles may be downloaded from http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/bcp.htm. However, the pointed versions are in The Hymnal 1982. There, two dots over a word imply a slur. A bracket over a word implies a tie. The apostrophes mark bars.
S 39 is a double chant, so you can think of it as an A B pattern that is repeated. For this example, I used an Antiphon for Lent (The Lord if full of com ' passion and ' mercy: * Come let ' us a ' dore ' him.
) The sequence for the entire Venite (Psalm 95 verses 1-7) is in the form A A [Ant. B] A B A [Ant. B] A A [Ant. B]. It is best to end a section in a B. So if you are not using an Antiphon, you would probably program A B A A B A B for verses 1-7 respectively.
Using the Template:
- FIRST, create anglican-init.ly which provides chant like bars. This code was extracted from gregorian-init.ly.
- SECOND Open the template and indicate the key. In this case, d major
- THIRD program the music.
- FOURTH Enter words. Template allows you to specify a dynamic for each phrase. I also include verse number or "Ant." in box for reference during practice. Creat a different lyricmode entry for each antiphonal group and for the antiphon so that antiphons can be inserted in-line.
- FIFTH Sequence the trebMusic and bassMusic in the correct A B pattern. (You must do this for both treb and bass.)
- SIXTH Sequence the lyrics with the inserted Antiphon
When you have done these six steps, you can run LilyPond to check your programming.
