Byzantine Chant

This week Cycles of Grace: Hymns from the Great Feasts arrived. It's a two-CD set that features Byzantine chant in English and it covers many of the great feasts of Christ and the Theotokos that one would find in The Festal Menaion. You can find it here: http://www.liturgica.com/cart/musicInfo.jsp?catNo=AB074&hostname=null . Here is a link for The Festal Menaion: http://www.stspress.com/detail.aspx?ID=506 .

I have listened to CDs of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, but they were in Greek or Church Slavonic. And while I could follow along with the translation and found the chants beautiful, I found that the material wasn't, how can I put it?, sticking. Hearing the troparia and kontakia for the great feasts in English, albeit King James English, has surprised me because I find I am much better able to remember the texts and internalize them. I was afraid that hearing them in English might sacrifice some of the dignity, but that has not been the case, I'm glad to say. And since the structure of Eastern prayers is so different from that of the prayers in the Western Church (less linear, less goal-oriented, and more caught up in the great mysteries of the faith, in my view), I believe that I am in some ways relearning prayer.