Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary

This video was a quick one, back to my usual mumbling speedy voice. Here’s the final annotated calendar: Hopefully it’s clear enough to point you in the right direction. Most proper copies of the Little Office will have a section on Rubrics or Instructions which should explain the same information. Here are my source PDFs: * 2025 * 2026 * 2027 I made 2027 so far ahead of time in order to include i...

SpiRItui or SPIriTUi? What’s the difference, who cares and why? This puzzle jumped out at me a while ago. I started listening and assembled a few examples, but it wasn’t until this tripped up one of my choir members that it seemed worthwhile to put an explainer together. Today we’ll briefly look at why mastering this word will help you, what the different endings mean and why Spiritus is so odd in...

https://www.lobvm.com/hours/roman/1962/office-1/la-en/matins/ I finished with the optional collect to make this a standalone hour. Sorry, I didn’t check the other spoken recordings for consistency. Follow up with Lauds if you like: Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

Very similar to the last two posts, just subbing out the Psalms for the 3rd Nocturn. This recording was plagued by bird noises. First take it was Sulphur Crested Cockatoos, second take my voice was audibly much more tired and one chicken was hanging around, making her presence felt. So here you can hear one psalm from the first take and two psalms from the second take and you might guess which is...

I’m copying from the previous post, just changing the bit to make it 2nd Nocturn. Even the audio pretty much does this. It’s a shortcut. Hope it’s not too aggravating. Matins is a bit of a tough one. The invitatory stays the same, so you get the hang of that. The responsories have a bit of variation and in Lent where the Te Deum is not said and instead there’s a third responsory, “Felix namquam”....

Matins is a bit of a tough one. The invitatory stays the same, so you get the hang of that. The responsories have a bit of variation and in Lent where the Te Deum is not said and instead there’s a third responsory, “Felix namquam”. I’m singing the one from the Baronius Press book, which comes from Hartker’s Nocturnale. But here is Matins for Sunday, Monday and Thursday from Septuagesima Sunday thr...

The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a great treasure from the Church’s rich history of liturgical work. Here is a wonderful way to usher in the morning. There are four psalms and two canticles. I sort of munged the different versions as the budgerigars were starting to wake up as I reached the end, plus I didn’t have the words for the Commemoration of the Saints handy, so the recording...

Completorium is known as Compline or Complin with all the different possible pronunciations. I’m using the Roman Little Office of Our Lady in the 1915 version. The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a cut down version of the Divine Office for the Laity or Third Orders. The Gregorian Chant is from the Antiphonale Romanum. The Marian Antiphon, Ave Regina Caelorum is sung in the Simple Tone....

Vespers, Vesperae, Evening Prayer for the time from Septuagesima Sunday through Ash Wednesday, First Sunday of Lent right through to Holy Thursday. The Little Office is not prayed publically over the Sacred Triduum, but if you were saying it privately, this is what you could use. The Divine Office proper to the Sacred Triduum is pretty amazing though and well worth looking into. divinumofficium .c...

The bird noises from about 5 minutes in are Sulphur Crested Cockatoos, which are very common in my part of Australia. Booklets in PDF available: https://littleoffice.brandt.id.au/ Support this channel, either via Substack or Buy Me a Coffee Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

Booklets with all the music can be found here https://littleoffice.brandt.id.au/ Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

Recorded with my H2 zoom microphone, this time using the exercise shed to avoid the budgerigar chirps. Instead we hear some chicken noise - they were fine, I checked. Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

Recorded with my H2 zoom microphone. Used Audacity for noise removal and run the Filter Curve EQ thing. The sheet music is mostly from the Prime booklet at littleoffice.brandt.id.au. The Kyrie is from my Medieval Lauds booklet there - I’ve become accustomed to sing from the 1915 Benziger Bros book as I like the extra Kyrie. You’ll have to imagine the silent Ave Maria at the beginning. You’ll see i...

Firstly, we are now well into the season of “Laus tibi Domine, Rex aeterne gloriae.” Happy Septuagesima! A keen reader found a very old typo in my Little Office Compline PDFs - somehow, long ago, I had typed up “Lumen et revelationem gentium” instead of “Lumen ad revelationem gentium”. That has been fixed in the files at littleoffice.brandt.id.au/#booklets Refreshing the files at Gumroad and Udemy...

Summer Holidays! Lenten Hymns are my main preoccupation at the moment. I have a special bunch of Masses around the feast of the Annunciation this year. Turns out there are quite a few arrangements of Audi Benigne Conditor on CPDL.org, some of them for 3 parts and designed to alternate with the chant. I love this hymn. It’s one I didn’t know back when I assembled A New Book of Old Hymns . Back to t...

This December marks the 4th anniversary of the launch of the course, Sing the Little Office in Latin. If you haven’t signed up already, I’ve just set up a coupon for you or a friend to enrol in the course for free on Udemy: (This coupon starts 12/21/2024 3:23 PM PST (GMT -8) and expires 01/21/2025 3:23 PM PST (GMT -8) or until 100 people have signed up, whichever comes first) For anyone interested...

This is the first time I’ve recorded the little prayer from the 1915 version of the Little Office and earlier. It’s in my Medieval Lauds booklet : https://littleoffice.brandt.id.au/#booklets Here’s the antiphon from Gregobase : Behold the Lord comes, and all his saints with him: and it will be in that day a great light, alleluia. This comes in at the end of Lauds and Vespers in the older editions...

It is finished! Seven tracks for the Day Hours of Advent! PDF Booklets are available here: https://littleoffice.brandt.id.au/#booklets Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

Vespers is beautiful. The CD is getting closer all the time! Only Compline left to knock into shape! Then we’ll need a Christmas album… As always, you can find the booklets at https://littleoffice.brandt.id.au/#booklets Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

Mid-afternoon prayer from the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Roman Breviary. Or “Hora Nona”. As always, you can find the booklets at https://littleoffice.brandt.id.au/#booklets Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

Good old Midday Prayer with the name which becomes a little awkward in English. Sext means the sixth hour after sunrise, which is midday or 12 noon. Funnily enough, the English word Noon comes from the next hour, None, referring to the Ninth Hour. This was the hour at which monks would break fast, but over time it was felt to be too onerous to wait that long, so they started breaking fast at the S...

Here is the third track of the proposed Advent Little Office Day Hours CD. Although the name Tertia designates the third hour, this refers to the third hour after sunrise rather than the third of the canonical hours. This migrated to the Liturgy of the Hours as Mid-morning Prayer, usually prayed at 9 or 10am. As always, you can find the booklets at https://littleoffice.brandt.id.au/#booklets Again...

The second track on the planned Little Office CD for Advent. This is the hour of Prime - the hour which didn’t get carried across from the Divine Office into the Liturgy of the Hours. Prime means “First”, but it isn’t listed first in any books I’ve come across. At daybreak this hour is sung. In the full Office it finishes with a recitation of the Martyrology for the following day - a good practice...

This month saw some tension with the attacks on the Internet Archive in the lead up to a certain election. Fortunately the Archive is back for now and hopefully will stay up long enough for me to get my act together to plan out a survey of their medieval copies of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Nothing like some wonderful online resource disappearing to make you realise how much you...

With the idea of making CDs comes the realisation that I need to re-record the Little Office. With a new Liturgical Year starting in a month’s time, I thought I’d start with Advent. I spent an afternoon recording and several hours editing to get this first track. There are more hours of editing to go, but hopefully they’ll be done by Advent and a new CD can be put together. Booklets in PDF are ava...