Prompted by some of my thinking on the place of the Lesser Propers in Anglican worship and due to a thread on the Ship, I took another look today at the Anglican Gradual & Sacramentary,
I come away with three convictions on the matter:
- The author put an awful lot of hard work into it.
- It is (as the author/editor states) an idiosyncratic work. Were I to have done it I would have made some different choices and would have followed them through in a different manner. Nothing necessarily against the work there—I’d just do it different.
- The one overt critique I will make is, the format chosen is a serious issue. While I recognize the desired output, a set of Word/PDF docs is simply not the technology to use for this kind of project.
have you seen Mr. Burt’s ANGLICAN USE GRADUAL:
http://anglicanhistory.org/music/gradual/gradual.pdf
I have and have commented favorably upon it.
(For those unfamiliar, it’s the texts from the current Roman Gradual in traditional English set to the Rossini psalm-tone propers with an occasional appearance of a more complicated setting. IOW, it’s absolutely perfect for the Anglo-Catholic church that shies away from too much Latin and doesn’t have a schola capable of tackling the propers as written.)