Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary Veronica Brandt

Thank you Jardin de Dieu for suggesting this post!
Substack is a very helpful platform. I have uploaded the video and it seems to have already made an audio file for the podcast. I hope it appears nicely in your podcast player.


Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

You may have noticed that I have booklets available on how to sing the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Sadly, I haven’t polished these up for publication. They are still rather inconsistent and at times messy, but they are helpful for pointing you in the right direction. Preparing them for publishing feels like an epic quest beyond my present abilities. While this is a noble goal, maybe a similar yet smaller task might help towards the ultimate end. Maybe I can make a booklet for a smaller Little Office first!
The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception shares some similarities and differences. Like the Divine Office, it is arranged by hours and employs similar versicles and collects. On the whole it has a rather different feel, being based around a hymn instead of the Psalms. If you can pick a hymn tune then the hours are pretty much ready to sing. That is, until you get to the last part.
Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The last hour of the day is Completorium or Compline. While the large part of the hour follows the same pattern as the other hours, it ends with a new section called The Commendation or Commendatio. This consists of a hymn followed by the response, Deo gratias, then an Antiphon, Versicle and Response closing with a Collect or Prayer.
The first version I recorded only had the hymn of the Commendation, so it was only recently that I began to puzzle over the Antiphon. The other parts can be sung easily with common tunes. Antiphons are little snippets each with their own melody. There are hundreds of them in the Liber Usualis and the Antiphonale Monasticum, but not this particular one.
Haec est virga in qua nec nodus originalis, nec cortex actualis culpae fuit.
This is the rod wherein was neither the knot of original sin, nor the bark of actual sin.

Some research revealed that this particular antiphon can be found in Vespers for the medieval Franciscan feast of the Immaculate Conception, long before the universal feast was established after Our Lady gave her title to St Bernadette at Lourdes. The two manuscripts containing the antiphon date from the 17th and 18th centuries.
A beautifully photographed manuscript clearly gave all the antiphons for this feast. The neumes are intelligible even after hundreds of years. I transcribed this piece into “modern” square notes and added it to Gregobase.
And here is how it sounds:

Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.



Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

The Livestream this one is from was not my best recording. I’ll consider re-recording.
For now, this should be listenable. I missed a flat sign in the Antiphon “Rubum quem viderat” and I must have been getting tired going by the mistakes, but this remix is a bit better than it was.
Booklets are at littleoffice.brandt.id.au.


Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

Another remix from 2021. Here is the original recording.
I’m using the Monastic Tonus in Directum. I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker.
The booklets are still at littleoffice.brandt.id.au.


Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

This was a fun one to fix. As well as trimming excess audio, I found a wrong note in the Amen of Ave Maris Stella. You can hear the original mistake in this livestream from 2021.
The mistake comes from mentally transposing to make the solfege easier but forgetting to add in a ti-flat (or te). This also crops up in the hymn for Roman Compline for Ferias.
The booklets are at littleoffice.brandt.id.au


Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe

From a recording back in 2021, trimmed back a bit.


Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe