In the Gospels, Jesus points out to his disciples a woman giving only a mite as an offering at the temple, worth about six minutes of an average daily wage. “Truly I tell you,” He says, “this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.” (Luke 21:3-4)
The Rev. Dr. Bill Gartig was perhaps thinking of this story when he named his personal website One Man's Offering . With what those who came to know him through this offering will recognize as his characteristic humility, he wrote that his intent for his website was to easily share “things [he thought] potentially helpful to pastors and to teachers of religion.” For many people, until the site went offline sometime following Fr. Gartig's death in 2018, One Man's Offering was the introduction to learning how to chant the Gospels, Eucharistic Prayers, and other portions of the Anglican service.
Perhaps as a sign of how monumental Fr. Gartig’s work was, it has taken two people to replicate and expand upon it. The Episcopal Chant website was built on the foundation of One Man's Offering as well as on the technological contributions of several others, which we develop further to bring these resources to the church of the twenty-first century. Building blocks of Episcopal Chant include:
gabc
notation
, a text-based scheme for the transcription of Gregorian/square-note chant; developed by Élie Roux and other monks of the
Abbey of Sainte Madeleine du Barroux
jabc
, a project of Benjamin Bloomfield; his project includes a tool for the syllabification of propers chants and a demo for interactive square note playback that we have expanded, in hopes of easing learning to chant via hearing the end product on demand
Additional thanks are due to the Rev. Greg Johnston, developer of the Venite app , for his advice.
An important aspect of Fr. Gartig's website was not the depth, but the breadth of the resources available. One Man's Offering was many priests' and lay leaders' first exposure to the great array of chant resources that the Church has cultivated for centuries. We hope that our site may become a clearinghouse for resources in that way – of resources from the grassroots for clergy and lay leaders alike, situated smack-dab in the center of the Prayer Book Catholic tradition which is our heritage.
In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy , the future Pope Benedict XVI wrote that, in hearing music and singing in church,
we [can] have a sense of what gloria Dei , the glory of God, means. The mystery of infinite beauty is there and enables us to experience the presence of God more truly and vividly than in many sermons. But there are already signs of danger to come. Subjective experience and passion are still held in check by the order of the musical universe, reflecting as it does the order of the divine creation itself. … Art in the liturgy has a very specific responsibility.
It is our hope that these new, old ways of worshipping God may fulfill that responsibility and bring us ever-closer to the foot of His throne, as an offering of the whole world joined together in song.
Soli Deo Gloria
January 18, 2024
The Feast of the Confession of Saint Peter, Apostle
Dallas, TX and Kent, OH
Q: What resources are available on Episcopal Chant?
A: Episcopal Chant provides the majority of Fr. Bill Gartig's content from his old website, One Man's Offering. That content includes the Gospels from the RCL eucharistic lectionary and BCP 1979 special days, as well as several sung-through eucharistic prayers, blessings, and dismissals, and occasional seasonal items.
Expanding on Fr. Gartig's work, Episcopal Chant provides newly-pointed items ready to chant: the Epistles from the RCL eucharistic lectionary and BCP 1979 special days, items from the Book of Occasional Services that have historical special chants, and many other things. We invite you to explore!
Q: What resources are not available on Episcopal Chant? (Where are the tones for the regular parts of the Eucharist, the proper prefaces, etc.?)
A: While the 1979 Book of Common Prayer is in the public domain, the Altar Book , where many pointed chants to the BCP's texts can be found, is not. Therefore, we are unable to republish and distribute these chants ourselves. (The question of whether the pointing of a public domain text according to a fixed method that may only produce one "correct" result can be copyrighted itself is an interesting one, but we are unequipped to decide it ourselves, so we stay on the safe side by omitting such items here.)
The most cost-effective way to obtain a hard copy of the Altar Book chants is to purchase the loose-leaf editions of the Altar Book's pages for the Holy Eucharist and for Proper Liturgies for Special Days.
At the time of this writing (early 2024), the Altar Book is also available for free virtual consultation, library-style, at archive.org.
We also encourage readers to spend some time enjoying the "S" section at the front of Hymnal 1982, which contains many options for service music that we also do not reproduce here.
Q: What about chants for texts that aren't in the BCP or related books (like those for minor propers, items before the Eucharist, and other special additions)?
A: We agree with you that these are lovely! However, the general aim of Episcopal Chant is to provide chant resources for texts that are authorized for liturgical use by The Episcopal Church, to encourage common prayer and an appreciation for our core shared liturgical resources.
Authorization is sometimes not black-and-white — so we also include some items that have been authorized somewhere, whether by General Convention or locally. While many uses exist informally, we generally prefer to include items whose authorization has been formalized in at least some way that can be substantiated. We think this "paper trail" will help Episcopalians see how our liturgical life, including occasional new additions to it, are a communal endeavor.
Q: What about texts from provinces other than The Episcopal Church?
A: In a fraternal spirit, we are happy to include chants for occasional authorized texts from other provinces of the Anglican Communion, much as Fr. Gartig did. You can find these on our Other Provinces page; or feel free to suggest us some more .
Q: I've never chanted or read square notation before. How can I learn?
A: We want to help! We think the best way to get started is to hear the chant while looking at its square notation, so you can get a sense of how melody you hear is related to what is written down. Look for the icon throughout Episcopal Chant: this indicates that an interactive playback version of a given chant is available. You can start, stop, speed up, slow down, forward through, and pitch up or down a chant as you like, all while watching how the melody moves through the notation.
This guide to reading square notation from the Liber Usualis may also be helpful, particularly for those who know how to read music. Readers should feel free to dip in and out of this resource as needed -- don't feel intimidated by its length!
Q: The playback isn't working quite right for me. What's going wrong?
A: Coding this part of the site was tricky. You may need to "clear out" the playback engine a few times by pressing play and stop, and it might help afterward to select a note and click the "Chant from here" button. We also find that playback seems most reliable on the Edge browser.
Do you have technical experience and want to help us solve the Javascript puzzle behind the tricky behavior? Contact us!
To the extent possible under law, the editors of this work have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to the parts of the work for which they would otherwise own the rights. This work is published from: United States.
Some content hosted on this website was created and published by Fr. William (Bill) Gartig and was originally hosted on his long-term website, One Man's Offering . Fr. Gartig died in 2018 and his website went down sometime thereafter. To our knowledge, the rights to Fr. Gartig's content remain with him and his estate; we make no claim to own them. We are re-hosting his files here because we were inspired by his great gift to the Church and, since Fr. Gartig himself published these files freely and encouraged their download and use, we believe keeping this content published and available for parish use is in line with the spirit of his work.
We have marked Fr. Gartig's content as belonging to him throughout this website. If you are a member of Fr. Gartig's estate and our re-hosting of his files goes against your wishes, please contact us.
If any other rights have been inadvertently infringed upon, the editors ask that the omission be excused and agree to make the necessary corrections in subsequent editions.