If you are just here for the Pdf files, see the Pdf directory. Currently contains complete organ and cantor scores for Weeks 1-4 in Ordinary Time, as well as psalm tones.
“Like Burning Incense” (LBI) is the name of an antiphonary for the Liturgy of the Hours (aka Divine Office or Breviary) created for the Monastery of the Blessed Sacrament in Michigan. This repository is a partial digitization of that project. This repository contains Lauds and Vespers, or Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, from LBI where each antiphon and accompanying Psalm/Canticle is completely written out for the organist, so that the organist doesn’t need to memorize the two harmonizations for all 50+ psalm tones. Because the music for a chanted Psalm is just a single psalm-tone repeated throughout, a computer program can automate much of the creation of an organ accompaniment for each Psalm.
The original handwritten project is available at Dropbox here.
(Quoting from the original Antiphonary:)
Monastery of the Blessed Sacrament
Cloistered Dominican Nuns
29575 Middlebelt Road
Farmington Hills, MI, 48018NAME: We have given the name LIKE BURNING INCENSE to this Antiphonary.
CONTENTS: Musical settings for all the texts of the four-volume Breviary (with the exception of the Office of Readings).
COMPOSER: A trappist monk who is extraordinarily gifted. He wishes to remain in anonymity.
STYLE OF MUSIC: English chant form.
PSALM TONES: These are indicated at the end of each Antiphon by a little musical formula or pattern. A sheet explaining the method of pointing the text of the psalm as well as how to interpret the psalm-tone pattern is enclosed.
PRICE: There is no charge for this music. Some communities have wished to offer donations to help with the expenses of printing and mailing, etc. These we accept with deep gratitude, but we do not ask any monetary return for what we are so privileged to share.
PSALMS: We do not print the psalms. All of us simply use our Breviaries for the singing of the psalms. Here we marked the accents when we received our Breviaries. However, after a rather short time, we found that it is not necessary to mark all the accents -- one becomes so used to them. From there on we marked only the “unusual” accents. (Please see the Psalm Tone explanation sheet regarding these.)
OUR WORK ON THIS PROJECT: As you will notice, we have been graciously given the copyright on this music. Our aim in accepting this copyright is to protect the music from being taken over, perhaps by some rather unscrupulous publisher. Father does not want his music in the hands of a publisher to be sold. Father has sent on to us all his manuscript copies of the music. Our work is to retype texts AND notation, make masters for printing, and then collate and send on the music to all on our mailing list. This work must be fitted into our monastic schedule; and so progress is rather slow. We would want all of you to understand our situation in this regard.
Files for this repository were created using Lilypond and LaTeX. Given the file
name A2-Vespers-1-Ant-Organ.ly, the “A” stands for week 1 of the Psalter (B,
C, and D would be weeks 2, 3, and 4). The “2” following “A” stands for the day,
where Day 1 is Sunday, Day 2 is Monday, etc., through Day 7, Saturday. Day 0 is
the first Vespers of the week, or Saturday night. The next part of the name
indicates either Lauds or Vespers. The “1” following Lauds or Vespers can be
either “1”, “2”, “3”, “Ben” (Benedictus), or “Mag” (Magnificat), depending on
which of the four psalms/canticles for that office is found in the file. Next
is either “Ant” or “Psalm”, and finally “Organ” or “Cantor”. So the file above
contains the organ score for the first antiphon of Monday Evening Prayer, Week
One. The file A2-Vespers-1-Ant-Cantor.ly would contain the cantor’s score for
the antiphon. And the file A2-Vespers-1-Psalm-Organ.ly would contain the
organ score for the psalm attached to the antiphon. These files just contain
the scores. The notes are imported. For the antiphon, the notes are found in
the notes subdirectory, and for the psalm, the notes are found in the
/psalmtones/notes directory. Separating the notes from the scores allows the
notes to be imported into different files. More information on the directory
structure:
psalmsdirectory: contains folders of all the psalms and canticles. Each folder contains a.txtfile of the unpointed text of the psalm and an.ilyfile containing the organ score. Because all the LBI psalm tones are two lines long, the structure of the organ score is constant no matter which psalm tone is being used. Therefore, each psalm/canticle needs only one organ score. However, the text of the psalm needs to be pointed differently depending on the psalm tone. There are seven different ways of pointing the text depending on which psalm tone is being used. If the first line of the psalm tone has a total of 3 beats, and the second line a title of 2 beats, then the pointed psalm text can be found in the32subfolder of the given psalm. Given the different feasts and commons, any given psalm could end up being pointed in different ways throughout the liturgical year, since the psalm tone for the psalm depends on the antiphon.psalmtonesdirectory: contains the psalm tones. The root portion of the folder contains the organ scores for the tones. The notes for the tones are in thenotessubdirectory. There is a pdf of psalm tones organized by psalm-tone number (something I assigned), and there is a pdf of the psalm tones organized by the structure of the tone. Thus all the tones that have 3 beats in the first line and 3 beats in the second line are grouped together. This is helpful because the antiphons in the original project are followed by an unreferenced psalm tone. It is easier to find the right psalm tone when you know you are looking for a tone with, say, 3 beats in both lines.- the
scriptsdirectory contains scripts that were intended to automate certain things - the
skeldirector contains “skeleton” files, or templates when creating new antiphon or psalm files - the
officesdirectory contains the master files for each individual office. - the
latexclassesdirectory contains LaTeX.clsfiles, which are common preambles for the different document types - the
offices/ordinaryTime/directory contains aMakefileto facilitate building the project (Just weeks 1 - 4 in OT at this point). - the root directory has
lbi_defs.ily, which contains project-wide default settings
When going through the original Psalter, I couldn't always find the right Psalm
tone, so in a number of cases I subsituted Psalm tones. See the file
corrigienda.txt for more on this.
- Gospel Canticles for Sundays in Ordinary Time
- Proper of Seasons
- Proper of Saints