Daily Office (Anglican)
[6]: 283 Since the Oxford (Tractarian) and ritualist movements of the 19th century, interest in the pre-Reformation practice of praying the office eight times a day has revived.
[7] The praying of "little hours", especially Compline but also a mid-day prayer office sometimes called Diurnum, in addition to the major services of Morning and Evening Prayer, has become particularly common, and is provided for by the current service books of the Episcopal Church in the United States[8]: 103–7, 127–36 and the Church of England.
[8]: 45, 82–3 After the Venite or its equivalent is completed, the rest of the psalms follow, but in some churches an office hymn is sung first.
As alternatives, the Benedicite from the Greek version of the Book of Daniel is provided instead of Te Deum, and Psalm 100 (under the title of its Latin incipit Jubilate Deo) instead of Benedictus.
The combination of Te Deum and Jubilate has proven particularly popular for church music composers, having been set twice by Handel, as well as by Herbert Howells and Henry Purcell.
At Evening Prayer, two other canticles from the Gospel of Luke are usually used: Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, coming respectively from the services of Vespers and Compline.
These are taken from one of a number of lectionaries depending on the Anglican province and prayer book in question, providing a structured plan for reading the Bible through each year.
This usage is based on the pre-Reformation practice of singing a Marian antiphon after Compline,[17]: 397 and was encouraged after the Reformation by the directions of Queen Elizabeth I's 1559 directions that 'for the comforting of such that delight in music, it may be permitted, that in the beginning, or in the end of common prayers, either at morning or evening, there may be sung an hymn, or suchlike song to the praise of Almighty God'.
[20]: 22–3 Since the services of Morning and Evening Prayer were introduced in the 16th century, their constituent parts have been set to music for choirs to sing.
In addition, the freedom of choirs (and thus composers) to select music freely for the anthem after the collect has encouraged the composition of a large number of general religious choral works intended to be sung in this context.
The sung Anglican Daily Office has also generated its own tradition in psalm-singing called Anglican chant, where a simple harmonised melody is used, adapting the number of syllables in the psalm text to fit a fixed number of notes, in a manner similar to a kind of harmonised plainsong.
