The Books

Every hymn here is read from a printed hymn book, page by page, and each hymn page shows the page it came from.

Hymns Ancient and Modern, 1861

The first music edition, printed in London by J. Alfred Novello, with W. H. Monk as music editor. It gave the Church of England many tunes still sung everywhere, several printed here for the first time. We read from the copy at Princeton Theological Seminary Library, scanned by the Internet Archive: see the whole book. Tune names, metres, composers and harmonizers come from the book's own Index of Tunes.

Why it is free

• India: free when every writer of the tune, harmony and words died before 1 January 1966.
• USA: free when it was first published in 1930 or earlier.

A book printed in 1861 passes both: everything in it was written by then. We never read from modern hymnals, and words appear only when the words themselves pass the same rule.

Still to come

Later printings that are also free: Hymns Ancient and Modern of 1868 and 1875, Bach's four-part chorales, the Genevan Psalter, and Catholic books such as St Basil's Hymnal of 1889, each checked against the same rule before any hymn from it appears.