Shalom!

(click image to open a printable, copyright-free jpg)

This is an 8-voice round to be found in the Evangelisch-reformiertes Gesangbuch, the hymnal widely used in the Lutheran Church in Switzerland. The hymnal also gives a German underlay - Der Friede des Herrn geleite euch, schalom, schalom (bis), roughly The peace of the Lord be with you.

I am sure I will be told that I've got the next bit all wrong (probably by a Welsh Jacobite...), but the Hebrew text seems to translate, minimalistically, as "Greetings, boys; greetings, girls; bye-ee!"

But, as they say, whatever.

It is great fun to sing, and a useful training exercise for congregations as well as choirs - do it first as a four-part round and only then, if there enough voices, do the full 8-voice job.

So as not to breach the typographical copyright of the hymnal, I've reset the music and anglicised the transliterated Hebrew text, and I waive my typographical copyright, so print, copy, and sing away!

The Orange Brick - revised???

In an article in our parish mag earlier this year I listed a few of the glaring errors in the settings of the music of some of the hymns in the orange brick - or, to give it its proper title, Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New, from the Kevin Mayhew stable.

This is what I said then:

The peculiarities of the Orange Hymnal are not only to be found in the texts of hymns, but also in the music they're set to. Have a look, for example, at No 190, Forty days and forty nights ... in the fourth bar of the tenor line there is an A-flat. But it shouldn't be an A-flat, it should be a G-sharp. True, it sounds the same, but it jumps off the page because it is a musical illiteracy...

Or No 4, A great and mighty wonder, where not only is Michael Praetorius's well-known setting so simplified as to lose all its character, but there is also another blunder - the alto in the last chord of the first line should be a C, not a D.

Or in No 638, The day thou gavest, there is a misprint in the bass in bar 4: D instead of E.

Or in 184, For the beauty of the earth, where Geoffrey Shaw's tune England's Lane has suddenly acquired a B-natural in the melody (bar 6) instead of a B-flat.

This is what he wrote:

but this is how it appears in the Orange Brick:

You can just about understand how somebody with a little musical knowledge might have spotted the consecutive fifths in that bar and tried to disguise them (and produced notational nonsense), but nobody can justify changing Shaw's B-flat to a B-natural.

So when I read on the Kevin Mayhew website that the orange brick had now been completely revised and reset, and that it was now a fiver cheaper, I thought I'd better order a copy and check.

This is what the website promised:

This latest edition – Complete New Anglican Hymns Old & New is entirely revised and reset, and foreshadows the development of liturgy in the years to come...

Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New is beautifully produced – a clear typeface, excellent printing and strong binding. In this new edition, the music has been set in a slightly larger page format, and bound in such a way that it falls open beautifully in the hand, or to set on the organ/piano music stand.

Let me say at the outset that this is not a new edition - it is a reprint with a few errors corrected.

It has the same ISBN as the original (although it is now presented in full on the verso of the title page, so the check digit has changed) and the same publication date (2000). Only if you knew where all the errors were would you be able to compare the original and the reprint. The only discernible differences between the old and the new is the weight (1.76kg the old, 1.72kg the new) and the little KM logo on the spine. I can't detect a "slightly larger page format", whatever that's supposed to mean, but certainly some pages are printed a couple of millimetres higher.

So - "entirely revised and reset?"

I don't think so.

Certainly some errors - though by no means all - have been corrected. The first three I cited above have: others, including the Geoffrey Shaw, haven't. Indeed, while one setting of Aus der Tiefe (Heinlein) in hymn 190 has been corrected, the more elaborate (and musically much superior) original version hasn't, and it's on the facing page. For heaven's sake, who's doing the proof-reading at Kevin's publishing kibbutz - monkeys?

Other errors, which I didn't list in the original article for reasons of space, remain - for example in No 188, last line, first bar, the D in the bass should be an F.

There are other errors, no, howlers, in the music, and misprints in the texts, but I'm blowed if I'm going to tell Kevin where they are, because my church has already spent a small fortune buying his Product, and those of us who can actually read music long to go back to EH or A&M, which, although they didn't include Graham Kendrick's inspiring ditties, weren't riddled with gaffes.

Orange Brick, Mark 2

I see that, not before time, there is now a revised edition of Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New, with bigger pages and over a fiver cheaper.

Order (online) before 19 December and get a further fiver off the full music edition - with postage £16.99.

I imagine Kevin has taken my (free) proof-reader's comments to heart, corrected all the howlers and ditched the rubbish.

I've ordered my copy. I await its coming.

So there!

My series of articles early in 2008 drawing attention to certain editorial failings in our hymn book didn't go down too well in some quarters.  I was accused of disliking modern hymns (which I don't, necessarily - some of them are good, and some are abysmal, for exactly the same reasons that some Victorian and Edwardian hymns are abysmal, and has anyone looked at Moody & Sankey lately?), and I was accused of being nasty about a hymn book which the PCC approved and which cost us a heck of a lot of money.

I was actually more concerned about sloppy editing than matters of musical or literary taste, which are personal and subjective - the hymn book is riddled with errors: typos in the texts of hymns, and wrong notes in the music.  It is because the hymn books which our churches buy have to last us a long time that it seems to me important that publishers get the words and the music right. It is a simple matter of paying a proof-reader.

And I was concerned, too, about the Americanisation of the English language in this hymn book.  "In your arms I would lay" might make sense to an American, but to me it sounds like a line written for a hen to sing.

So it was with a sigh of relief that I came across these words:

Something stinks to high heaven about the way commissions are doled out to composer-liturgists (often possessing only the most modest talents) who then rake in fees via their private companies while also acting as official advisers to the Church. These individuals use diocesan workshops to flog their music and hymn books to parishes. Congregations have no idea how this cosy system operates. Let them find out by means of an independent inquiry into the commissioning, sale and circulation of liturgical material.

(full text of Damian Thompson's article here).

Incidentally, I tried to get Damian Thompson's permission to use his words.  So far he has not replied to my e-mail, but he's probably busy fighting the Devil and the divisions in the Roman Catholic community  (divisions? sh! Not supposed to talk about them.)

So I'm jolly well using them anyway.