IMSLP Forums

Hi all,

The Church of England has a beautiful, distinctive service called Choral Evensong. It's sung in cathedrals (usually daily), major churches, numerous college chapels and an increasing number of smaller churches. After a while in the doldrums, the service is now picking up popularity again: see https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/ ... res-survey , https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/ ... er-radio-3 , https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig ... cathedrals , https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religi ... nsong.html and so on. The Choral Evensong Appreciation Society group on Facebook has 15,000 members!

As well as hymns and anthems, there are three distinct musical components to Evensong: the Preces and Responses (short prayers, usually sung by SATB choir unaccompanied); a Psalm, sung in the Anglican chant style; and the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis (long, often intricate settings to the words of the Book of Common Prayer, usually sung by SATB choir accompanied by organ). The latter are often known as the "Evening Service", or informally as "Mag & Nunc"!

IMSLP has an increasing number of Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis settings. I'm actively seeking out-of-copyright settings - there are hundreds, possibly even thousands - which I can buy, scan and upload.

However, searching for them on IMSLP can be a bit of a lottery. Some are titled "Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis". Others are titled "Evening Service". Some are in the Canticles category, some in the Magnificats category, and so on.

Would it be possible to consider a dedicated category for this? I'd suggest maybe calling it Evening Services, defined as "choral settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis to the words of the Book of Common Prayer".

Richard

Dear Richard:

We follow the MLA rules for category tagging. Unfortuntately, "evensong" is not one of their allowed genres, nor is its counterpart, matins.

MLA tagging is by title, which is why "Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis" gets 2 tags - one for magnificats, and one for canticles, because the nunc dimittis is a canticle.

I doubt they would consider a new tag when there are tags already exist for the components within the evening service.

But I do realize that it might be difficult to search for the specific combinations of these that would be together in the evening service, since there are other works that are individual magnificats, or individual canticles.

However, if you go to the search box at the top R of the screen and type in "magnificats canticles", the first two in the list will be individual magnificat pages and individual canticle pages, but after that, you will get pages that contain both tags, most of which will be what you are looking for.

I hope that helps. B

Thanks - that's interesting. I'm not too worried for myself (I'm fairly adept at searching), but it would be good to be able to point less savvy users at an easy-to-use list. I'm loth to use CPDL because their site is fairly prehistoric and their licence is terrible. Will give it some thought but I'll probably end up building an external list.

That probably would be your best bet to list workpages on.