By Pak SocCom

Lahore, Pakistan, 21 July 2024 -- In their celebrations, Christians in Pakistan use a fairly widespread booklet with the lyrics of the hymns, or they rely on memory. However, there are no musical scores for the hymns. To fill the gap, a booklet with 126 of the most popular hymns has been published in freely downloadable PDF format (Creative Commons 4.0 license).

The project came about a few years ago initially only to better involve the young people of the Salesian houses in Lahore and Quetta in accompanying the hymns during the celebrations.

Subsequently, the Salesians decided to make the work available to all, in the hope that it would be to the greater glory of God.

In the preface of the book we read: "The work was carried out in my free time and is far from finished. Other more complete and correct editions will probably follow. Western musical writing has imposed the use of Roman Urdu (writing from left to right) instead of Urdu with the Arabic alphabet. In writing the melody we tried to be as faithful as possible to the hymns as they are normally sung in parishes, but we are aware that some nuances, some melismas typical of South Asian music are impossible to reproduce in Western musical notation. In the harmonization we followed the criterion of simplicity, but without falling into the trivial. We preferred tonal harmonization even where the structure of the hymn is typically modal to accompaniment since in many hymns it is also possible to use the guitar or other non-traditional instruments."

The book can be downloaded at the web address https://tinyurl.com/2am5c6b7

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