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gbj / venite

Spec and rendering components for the Liturgy Document Format (LDF) used by Venite.app
MIT License
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Notation for Plainchant or Anglican Chant? #215

Open greyspectrum opened 3 months ago

greyspectrum commented 3 months ago

I found a TypeScript library for rendering musical notation. Would you be interested in including notation for plainchant, as well as Anglican chant, as options in Venite for those who prefer to chant the psalms?

I believe the Plainsong Psalter and the Anglican Chant Psalter have the appropriate pointing for the 1979 BCP Psalter. The St. Dunstan's Plainsong Psalter has pointing for the Coverdale Psalter. I'm not sure of the copyright status of the musical notation itself, however.

The Invitatory, the Cantlicles, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Suffrages may also be set to plainchant.

I would be interested in working on this, if it is a feature you would like to include.

gbj commented 3 months ago

The primary issue with anything musical is always copyright. As far as I know even the basic notations included in The Hymnal 1982 are copyrighted and Church Pension is quite restrictive about access. I can't speak to the copyright holder for the Plainsong Psalter.

I'm very open to include this on the technical level, if you have a non-copyrighted version or permission to reproduce a copyrighted one for free.

greyspectrum commented 2 months ago

I found this: Sing the Office. They wrote a short blog post outlining what they were trying to accomplish, here.

They based it off of the CTS Divine Worship Daily Office, but pointed it for plainsong. The source text their using is very close to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, put out by a Roman Catholic publisher for Catholics and others who are interested in praying the office in the Anglican style.

Since this is pretty much a perfect resource, it seems silly to try and reproduce their efforts from scratch, especially since, as far as I can tell, the Church Publishing copyright would be a hard stop impediment to introducing service music from the hymnal.

Of course, since this is basically the 1662 BCP, it's not approved for public worship in the Episcopal Church. It almost seems easier to get approval to use the 1662 BCP than it does to try and deal with the hymnal copyright.

For all of these reasons, it's probably best to close this issue, I would imagine. At the very least, I would find it hard to be motivated to put together a PR that essentially replicates something that is already out there and works.