I was planning to have a look at The New Living Parish Hymn Book and in researching that hymnal, came across an interesting article by Veronica Brandt on the history of Australian hymnals currently in use, from which I borrowed this diagram.
I’m sure it’s not meant to comprehensive and it certainly isn’t wholly accurate – AOV was first published 1992, for example and there was the Sing Alleluia supplement to the AH in 1987, between it and TIS. At the time she wrote only AOV and CWB II were still in print, but CWB II is now unavailable and I believe AOV is digital only but I must ask, it may be print on demand.
I can’t agree with her unsubstantiated claim that AOV was only successful because it was cheap. What was actually cheap was staying with older hymnals and using public domain tunes or chant. I would suggest AOV was a success because it filled a need unmet by the institutional Catholic church in Australia, it was well curated by people with a musical sensibility who were prepared to do a mountain of work getting the selections and the style correct with no guarantee it would get them anywhere, and parishes who were prepared to pay for the pew hymnals and sheet music books. As I have commented already here, AOV Vol 1&2, provided enough usable hymns for most Australian parishes so that many have never moved beyond it. It did actually include some traditional hymns, despite Brandt’s protestations to the contrary.
She doesn’t mention the little blue loose leaf hymnal, the Living Worship Hymnal, from the Liturgical Commission in Brisbane, that was used widely. My second hand copy is heavily adapted with some pages lyrics only, some music and large jumps in the numbering system.
At Star of the Sea, George Town, Tasmania, before they used AOV they used the “green book”, which was in fact the Praise to God: Parish Hymn Book, published by the Dominican Hymnal Committee and edited by Nicolas Falzun OP. I have borrowed the accompaniment edition which is the revised edition with a supplement from 1990, only two years before the first publication of AOV. I haven’t been able to find copies second hand anywhere. If someone has copies they are looking to offload, let me know.
These pages let you know what is in the hymnal. Most were extracted from Catholic Worship Book 1, the Australian Hymn book, the Celebration Hymnal (available in pdf on the internet), Glory and Praise, and the New Living Parish Hymnal.
One thing about the New Living Parish Hymnal is the arrangements by John de Luca, who took some of the simple folk arrangements and added some sophistication, so I will get back to that, but I thought in the interim I would look at songs from the Praise to God collection that I haven’t covered here, that the Dominicans found from outside the main sources. There seems to be a lot of folk mass era pieces to go along with the traditional hymnody.
Much of the original version is just organ music, with only occasional guitar chords, but the supplement has a lot more chorded arrangements. It’s a bit of a hodge podge of styles really and some pieces are melody line only. In the hands of our late and much missed organist though it was quite enough.
On the plus side it was very well bound – our parish’s copy has had the cover replaced but the original stitched binding appears indestructable. There are are also instances when they have created their own arrangements, but mostly there is a lot of cut and pasting going on. You can understand when AOV arrived in 1992 with a consistent and usable style, that it made this collection look amateurish indeed.
I find it interesting that the Dominican Fathers, when assembling this collection and even into the supplement in 1990 were only just catching up with 1960s folk mass era. There was, however, a laudable attempt to collect Australian songwriters like Frank Andersen, Brian Boniwell, Leo Watt and Father Kevin Bates that were being used in parishes along with very early Trish Watts and Monica O’Brien songs. It is these songs that were outside the major sources that I wish to look at first from Praise to God.