High quality liturgical music offered in a highly affordable medium. That’s the quickest way to summarize Cloud Hymnal, a very young, innovative project for sharing newly harmonized hymns and newly composed music with churches around the world through online media. The idea is fairly old, but the medium through which it takes place is quite new.
In the early part of the last century, the British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams set out to write new harmonies for already-existing hymn melodies of the English-speaking world. Like his eighteenth-century German predecessor, Johann Sebastian Bach, Vaughn Williams composed harmonies for hundreds of existing melodies and incorporated existing hymn melodies into his own original works. We on the Cloud Hymnal project see ourselves working in this same tradition of updating existing melodies with new harmonies. As one of the CML interns on the project, I have written new harmonies for five hymn melodies. Currently, I am working on a sixth new harmony for the hymn “Jesus, Lead the Way;” and I am in the process of adding an original composition into the hymnal’s library based on the spiritual “Let Us Break Bread.”
Besides the fact that harmonizing existing hymn tunes is good for music’s own sake, we on the Cloud Hymnal project engage in this practice to provide hymns to congregations at no cost, since all of our hymns are public domain. All a parish must do, now that the Hymnal is available, is log into the site; create a community for its congregation; inform its parishioners about the site; and give them the community password for their mobile device—and they can have access to beautiful, newly composed music.
My participation in this project has been a privilege. I have enjoyed working with Dr. Richard Gard ‘07 D.M.A. and with Julian D. Revie ‘02, STM’s composer in residence, and have had a unique opportunity to hone my skills as a composer and to provide a valuable service to the wider Catholic world. Giving people easy access to great music has been a special blessing to me this year; and, I look forward to seeing how the project develops in the years to come.
