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 of the Little Office.

The history of this little piece is worth reading. When the Little Offices emerged, there were three main ones:

* All Saints

* The Faithful Departed

* Our Lady

Saying all of them as well as the Divine Office proved too much, so different orders generally went with either Our Lady or the Dead. The Little Office of the Saints survived in this little Commemoration in the Little Office of Our Lady. Then in 1962 the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary was pared down a little bit more and the commemoration was removed, along with the little “Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison”.

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It is finished!

Seven tracks for the Day Hours of Advent!

PDF Booklets are available here: https://littleoffice.brandt.id.au/#booklets

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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

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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

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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 Sixth hour, but the name None carried across and now we have Noon being the middle of the day.

As always, you can find the booklets at https://littleoffice.brandt.id.au/#booklets

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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, for the keen ears, you might notice how similar the hymn is between the Prime and Terce recordings. I clean forgot to sing Memento when recording Prime, so I cut and paste from Terce. This also made me realise that there were other parts I could reuse, so you may notice some other similar bits and pieces. Also, they will probably all sound fairly similar as the recording was done in one sitting. There was a whole lot of cicada noise outside, which fortunately doesn’t seem to have been picked up - although now I come to think of it, I’m editing the tracks with cicada noise outside, so I might be blissfully unaware of its presence in the audio.

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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 even if the Little Office doesn’t require it.

As always, you can find the booklets at https://littleoffice.brandt.id.au/#booklets

Keen ears might hear how I mistakenly used the incipit tune beginning for the last Gloria Patri in the Psalms in the recording. I hope you forgive the mistake made in some sort of surge of gladness to be nearing the end of the track. These recordings aren’t perfect, but I hope they help.

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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 depend on libraries like that.

Many of you went ahead, against my warnings, and ordered copies of the prototype CD of the day hours of Office 1. The third track on the CD was a bit patchy, so that was re-recorded, this time making sure to record a “Laus tibi Domine” so that I could make a version ready for Septuagesima. I’ve uploaded the two versions of Terce to the podcast here. This seems to be the only Septuagesima recording on the podcast so far. If you see a track listing on the back of your CD sleeve you should have the updated Terce.

Advent is zooming closer and closer and I have made a recording that I should be able to edit in time - maybe even make an Advent CD available with enough lead time for people to receive their copy!

Lauds for Advent is ready. Again, I recorded the “Laus tibi Domine” for the very occasional event when Office 2 is sung for the feast of the Annunciation during Septuagesima. This will happen in 2025. The Annunciation is only one day of the year, so I’m not sure if it warrants a dedicated CD. Still, it would be good to have on the podcast.

This photo helps illustrate some of the craziness of this month, which might go some way to explaining why this October update is coming out in November. Back in June we bought four one week old chicks from a farming family who drives an hour to come to our local Latin Mass. The cute little chicks grew into four handsome roosters and this became a bit of a problem. We learned a whole lot about roosters and how to work with their instincts to rule their terrain, but everything culminated in “inviting them to dinner”. This was a very moving experience. The family kindly gave us three young hens, which we are hoping will start laying soon.

That explains the rooster in the shot, on to the thing in my son’s hands. The lizard is a Blue Tongue Lizard which is fairly common in Australia. They’re slow-moving and like eating snails, so they’re generally a Good Thing to have in the garden, but it still makes me jump when I almost step on one in the living room. We had a few hot days where one such reptile must have thought the cat door looked like the entrance to a nice cool cave. Between discouraging the cats from pestering it and guiding it back to the great outdoors, this brought some extra excitement to our Spring. It seems to have moved on to a less populated backyard somewhere else now.

So I guess that’s it from me. Back to editing the remaining tracks for the Advent album!

God bless,

Veronica

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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 available if you would like to follow along.

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I have started tagging all the recordings here. The front page of this Substack gives the opportunity to list posts sorted by tag. Somehow, up until now, I have neglected to post recordings for Septuagesima! This will be the first hour in plenty of time for next Septuagesima, 16 February 2025.

Septuagesima Sunday is an old preparation for Lent. The name means “70th” and it is roughly 70 days before Easter. 64 days by my count. The reforms of the Roman Calendar last century thought they could dispense with this antiquated idea. Modern people are much more organised now and can launch boldly into the rigours of Lenten penance without the customary few weeks our forefathers took for easing into the extra prayer, fasting and almsgiving. There’s nothing forbidding a little extra penance in the lead up to Lent, so for any listeners out there who find Lent surprisingly sudden, you might like to mark Septuagesima Sunday on your calendar and see if it helps you prepare for Lent.

Since the Little Office of Our Lady missed out on these reforms, it still includes provisions for Septuagesima. The main difference is avoiding all alleluias. The opening verses swap Alleluia with Laus tibi Domine, Rex aeterne gloriae. And for most of the hours, that is it!

Theoretically, I could take this adjusted beginning and tack it on to all the existing recordings. But on the other hand, it would be satisfying to re-record each hour, with all the subtle differences of each rendition. It will probably come down to how much time I have to complete the project.

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