This is only Catholic Worship Book 1, because there has since been a CWB 2.
It was a Collins/EJ Dwyer publication in 1985 under the auspices of the Liturgical Commission of the Archdiocese of Melbourne and was approved for use in the dioceses of Australia. There was a Full Music Edition and a People’s Book.
The preface by Archbishop TF Little noted:
Full, conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations: the Church sets its sights on that target. The very nature of liturgy calls for it. The celebration of the paschal mystery demands it. By baptism it becomes a right and duty for all Christian people. It is the aim underlying all reform and promotion of the liturgy…
The Catholic Church does not have a long history of singing a wide range of Engish hymns… By offering hymns for all types of celebrations a repetoire will be developed and the diverse needs of the liturgy in English be better served.
There were settings for the Mass, now redundant, Psalms and Gospel Acclamations and music for the Sacraments and other Rites.
For now, I’m just going to look at the hymns section, looking for songs that haven’t been covered here from other sources. There are a surprising number of songs that I haven’t come across before.
I have been unsuccessfully looking to buy a Full Music Edition for some years, so I am working from a People’s Book, which is melody line only. Many have hymn tunes also found in Together In Song, which has chords so I could use them to make backings on BIAB. Others had hymn tunes I could find music for at Hymnary and derive the chords from the organ music. When that failed I just did my best to come up with my own chords for the melodies and got by.
This collection is, of course, out of print, however the People’s Book at least is available on second hand sites.
This is one of the hymnals that I’d like to keep around for study purposes.
The hymn editors worked on lots of these hymns, so the first lines may be misleading.
I’m not too fond of hymnals suffering from the hymn disease of confusing editorial decisions making hymns slightly harder to sing by changing a few words here and there.
We had this situation today, where we were singing hymn 128 out of the New Catholic Hymnal. Let All Mortal Flesh is a lovely hymn, but it was switched around to let just the mortal men keep silence. That particular choice dated really badly.
As one of those pesky traditional-minded young people, we shouldn’t do this confusing hymn. Some of us memorise our favourite hymns to sing when we are carrying a processional cross. (And sing the lyrics they know, loudly)
The good news is that our local basilica used to have these, replaced them with As One Voice, and eventually went back to CWB when AOV wore out. It’s a long lasting hymnal – I see it on lots of shelves, waiting to be opened up and sung from again.
Thanks for your viewpoint, Gio, I’m grateful for lots of different perspectives. I am a grumpy old left wing post-modern Catholic, so I am certainly not the future of the Church!
I like hymnals because you find surprises – hymns that never became popular but have ongoing usefulness and beauty.
For practical reasons, projection and buying sheet music online as individual sheets is probably unstoppable, though.
A cynic might say that editors of hymnals have to justify their existence by fiddling with texts, but “Let All Mortal Flesh” is a translation of a very ancient text that predates English by a millenium or so. They may have had good reasons from a translation point of view to change the words, but as you say, if you have a version learned by heart, it is jarring.
I think there is a place for the best songs from AOV and both CWB’s, but I am most encouraged by new music from young people, in whatever style they find resonates in their assembly.
New texts to familiar tunes is a great approach used by many lyricists eg John Bell. If you write your own then the editors can’t get you.
cheers
Geoff