Canonical Hours
The ordinary of the canonical hours consists chiefly of the psalter, an arrangement of the Psalms distributed over a period of a week or a month. To the psalter are added canticles, hymns and other prayers.
Traditionally the canonical hours were chanted by the participating clergy. Some texts of the canonical hours have been set to polyphonic music, in particular the Benedictus, the Magnificat, and the Nunc dimittis.
Read more about this topic: Ordinary (liturgy)
Famous quotes containing the words canonical and/or hours:
“If God bestowed immortality on every man then when he made him, and he made many to whom he never purposed to give his saving grace, what did his Lordship think that God gave any man immortality with purpose only to make him capable of immortal torments? It is a hard saying, and I think cannot piously be believed. I am sure it can never be proved by the canonical Scripture.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)