I was only able to get one copy of the texts and have leant them out to my area NALC dean, who interestingly was deeply involved in the attempt LCMC made to produce a hymnal and service book. It's not bad. He was more in favor of the Common Service tradition than most who participated in the project. Ultimately, to get it finished, it fell on him and one other guy. He felt it was woefully short on hymns, with only about 400, but he said it was getting expensive to typeset the music. I don't really care about the hymns, I'm more interested in the various Rites.
Me too. Hence my desire that LiturgyWorks do a sort of Lutheran BCP that could be used with any of the great Lutheran hymnals presently in use, such as the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal and the 2006 LSB. And since the Common Service is so close to the BCP in many respects, we could literally just fork the source tree in git* (the modularized BCP is implemented using XML which is what makes it modular), and change the base module as needed, actually by writing another module and merging it. The net effect of all of this technology is that we could get a customizable Lutheran “BCP” (I am leaning towards a title such as
Lutheran Prayers and Divine Services) would be remarkably easy. But I need a Lutheran on board to theologically supervise such a project, and I would draft Mark, but between his secular and spiritual life he is fully booked and is doing splendid ministry as the deacon of his LCC parish. I enjoy watching their services on YouTube, especially the ones Mark himself leads.
By the way all of the Eastern liturgical rites’ service books, with just a few exceptions**, can be thought of as hymnals, albeit without included musical notation since there are many different settings, although some are optimized for Byzantine chant and these are annoying to read otherwise, but there are always alternatives since despite its prominence, only a minority of Orthodox Christians use Byzantine Chant, although those that do tend to be fiercely loyal to it, which I can understand, it having the same appeal as Gregorian chant or Coptic tasbeha. This I believe also applies to the Ukrainian Lutherans, since my understanding is they are using modified Eastern Orthodox service books, although they may have rearranged things, so I intend to investigate this.
Also I am sure you’ve heard of the English Hymnal developed around the turn of the century, by which I mean the previous one, twenty years later I still find myself wanting to only use that phrase for the 1900s, by a notable group including Robert Vaughan Williams. Interestingly, what you might not know is that it comes in an edition with musical notation and an edition without, the latter obviously enabling changing the chorales used for specific hymns. I have PDF scans of both versions. From what I have heard, among Western church musicians, the three most universally beloved conventional hymnals are the Lutheran Hymnal of 1941, the Episcopalian Hymnal from 1940, and the English Hymnal. There is also an updated New English hymnal most of which was recorded and is in my library.
*git is a distributed revision control system, originally developed by Linus Torvalds for use with the Linux kernel development community, that is now the preferred system in open source development, very user friendly, and it can be used as a safe for XML files, which represent the best format for storing assets like service books in a manner allowing easy export to print and web applications, and indeed Microsoft Office even uses a variant of XML called OOXML as its default file format. That said most LiturgyWorks contributors never need to even touch this. One of our members, an Orthodox priest with a splensis sense of humor, called the tech “click and pray” and it will be once I put in place a front end, on the website which is still being developed.
**The only one I can think of is the Coptic
agpeya, which contains most of the invariant part of the Coptic divine office, specifically the Hours, and is also the Psalter (albeit some psalms are not included since they are used elsewhere such as Psalm 150 at the end of the Divine Liturgy and others in the Psalmody) and since the Coptic Hours, which are totally invariant except during Holy Week, are not completely sung, but rather parts are read and the Psalms are read silently (and in a congregation different people will be assigned different Psalms to silently pray, with each person usually getting two, while the monks will memorize the entire Psalter and pray them throughout the day, which also used to be common in Byzantine Rite monasteries, but there it was displaced by the Jesus Prayer.