Gather Australia was published in 1995. It was a collaboration between the National Liturgical Music Convention and GIA with the support of the Melbourne Archdiocese. The original “As One Voice” was published in 1992 but was independent of the Catholic hierarchy so GA, while it had many of the same songs, looked a more traditional competitor.
Last year I got my edition of GA with chords for most of the songs. The melody line edition is still often found second hand, but accompaniment editions are hard to find and my copy looks as if it was printed to order.
I going to start a survey of songs in GA that are not in AOV and which I have not covered elsewhere. I doubt I’ll ever get back to the volume of backings I used to do but I’ll see where this takes me. AOV has an OCP bias and unsurprisingly GA has a GIA bias so that may make for a fruitful survey. I’m also hoping that I find some local gems that I haven’t come across before.
I hope to get back to the OCP “Guitar Accompaniment Book” and the “Voices As One Vol 2” songs that I have yet to complete, but this might be a more manageable task for now.
I’m going to start in the sections for hymns and songs and the first one that I haven’t yet blogged is the wonderful Marty Haugen‘s “One Ohana.” Ohana is a Hawaiian word for family. It could be used as a children’s song but has liturgical use on the theme of creation and welcoming.
The text is here. If the thought of singing a single word of Hawaiian origin is too hard “one ohana” can be replaced with “one great family”, but that kind of defeats the point of the song.
The sheet music is available at GIA in a collection called “Tales of Wonder”, which was originally a one act play.
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