A beautiful morning although at this time of year...

Phoebus is positioned, in this hour of the day (it is just after 0700), precisely to blind my eyes with his brightness as I sit here at my desk. Usquequo exaltábitur is the third responsorium at Matins.

 

The Neumz people sent an email this morning announcing the completion of their recordings of the three year cycle of propers etc at the Abbaye Nôtre-Dame de Fidelité in Provence. Am noting it here since I can't find it on their website.

We did it! Three years ago, the team at Neumz embarked upon the largest, most ambitious recording project ever undertaken, together with the Sisters of Notre-Dame de Fidélité, in Jouques, France. This Easter marks the completion of that effort to record the complete Gregorian chants sung, intoned, and chanted over the three-year cycle of the Novus Ordo. Neumz is the biggest recording project ever completed and the only digital resource combining all of the materials necessary to follow the entire liturgy of the Roman Rite...

The Neumz database now contains approximately 10 thousand unique chants, including more than 600 never before recorded melodies. A total of 17 terabytes of audio material was recorded, spliced, tagged, mixed, mastered, and added to each chant component, together with translations of the Latin texts in five languages, and hand-synchronised to the square note scores. The audio was recorded as an 8 channel multitrack in 24bit 48kHz...

More than twelve thousand subscribers, Deo gratias. 

There is much more in store for Neumz users, including scores notated in the early mediaeval neumes of St. Gall, exact syllable-by-syllable synchronisation of audio to text, lossless master quality audio, the ability to print chants, meditations on the Psalms, office prayer cards, and a Neumz edition of the complete Antiphonary for the first time transcribed by Dominique Crochu into St. Gall notation. Dominique is a leading semiology and mediaeval palaeography expert. This edition will be a precious resource to professional choirs.

The facility to print the chant pieces is indeed something to look forward to, and lossless audio (although I suspect that I won't be able to tell the difference between the present audio quality and that).

LDVM