O O O O O O O

Some of the things that bring me satisfaction are perhaps a bit recherché. Last week I was unconscionably pleased to have done something I’ve been thinking about for at least two years. Just to fill you in in case you don’t know, the Great O Antiphons are little liturgical texts used in Advent. Antiphons are refrains used around psalms and canticles during the Office or Morning and Evening Prayer, often said but intended to be sung; they vary according to the season or the occasion. Uniquely, some time during the 8^th century the custom developed of having a different antiphon framing the Magnificat at Evening Prayer every day in the run-up to Christmas Eve, based around the prophetic titles of the coming Messiah, each prefixed with the exclamation O – ‘O Wisdom’, ‘O Key of David’, and so on: hence ‘the Great O Antiphons’. In the medieval English Sarum Rite an eighth antiphon was added to the original seven, addressing the Virgin Mary – ‘O Virgo Virginum’ – but the modern rites are more Roman than Sarum, so miss that out and stick to the basic list.

The antiphons are sung to a single chant, but as they are prose texts and not verse the pattern is irregular and each one has to be separately scored and adapted to the chant. Now, the English Hymnal compiled by Percy Dearmer in the early 1900s provides a trad-language English text and arrangement for the Antiphons (and, as it follows the Sarum Rite, includes O Virgo Virginum): this may predate the Hymnal and go back to the revival of plainchant in the Church of England in the 19^th century, but I’m not sure. What doesn’t exist, at least in any easily-accessible form, is an adaptation of the modern-language text of the O Antiphons, as included in Common Worship, to the old chant.

So that’s what I did. Surprisingly it only took a couple of hours plonking it all out on the piano, writing, scanning and typing, and here it is. As I say, I’m not sure my sense of achievement is completely legitimate given its tiny scope, but it’s comforting to have managed something, even if it’s only in the field of liturgy (the refuge of the idle, I sometimes suspect).