The Historical Hymn Collection was formed in 1964, still under the Folk Music Research Group. The idea behind it was stated first in 1933 by Zoltán Kodály in his study Néprajz és zenetörténet (Folk Song and Music History): living folk music could help researchers swiftly interpret the sporadic written materials for the history of Hungarian music. For Janka Szendrei and László Dobszay in setting up the Collection, the prime aim was to match the folk-music data with historical records and church hymnals of the past. This lay behind collecting and ordering the Hungarian church hymns found in oral practice, in a framework provided by the folk-music archive of the Institute for Musicology.

Compiling the “types” of the Historical Hymn Collection coincided with the development of an overall type system for folk music. The kernel came from copies of folk-music records selected systematically from the overall folk-music system. To this were added data from a nationwide targeted folk-song collection programme. The Collection consists of about 15,000 record cards; half have been sorted into 300 types and half await that.

The Collection led to the so-called “yellow book”, where melodies noted by Szendrei, Dobszay and Rajeczky appear in comparable form in two volumes entitled XVI‒XVII. századi dallamaink a népi emlékezetben (Hungarian Melodies of the 16th‒17th Centuries in Folk Memory). This melodic-history approach can be easily grasped on the books’ pages, where the starting point is always the two-volume Régi Magyar Dallamok Tára (Corpus of Old Hungarian Melodies). However, maintenance and expansion of the Corpus ceased after the books appeared.

The Collection offers the search aids possible in that period: card indexes of text incipits and locations. For transparency’s sake, the archiving and the sorted part of the collection were placed in a computer database in 2010. Among the tasks for the immediate future are categorizing of the unsorted melodies, concurrent expansion of the database and type system, and digitization of the whole musical material. The ideal would be not only to preserve the records themselves, but for them to inspire research into hitherto untouched areas of melodic history.

Also begun in the 1970s, along with occasional transcription of certain items connected with the corpus of graduals, was separate, systematic transcription of the ordinary chants. In the first stage, initiated by Benjamin Rajeczky, transcription of ordinary items from only three Hungarian sources that can only partly be considered representative was completed (see below). The transcription was done by Éva Pintér. This core of the collection did not include the Agnus Dei melodies.

• Futaki gradual (Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, 2429)
• Bakócz gradual (Esztergom, Főszékesegyházi Könyvtár, MS I. 1 a-b)
• Gradual from Kassa/Košice (Budapest, OSzK, Clmae 172a-b)

Sizeable expansion and development of this material for publication purposes was begun in 1993 by Zsuzsa Czagány, Gábor Kiss and Ágnes Papp. The aim was to review the Hungarian ordinary sources comprehensively and compare them with international catalogues (by Melnicki, Bosse, Thannabaur, and Schildbach). Attention was not confined to gathering all variants. It soon became clear from dealing with the genre that no full picture could be obtained of the variants or even the corpus of chants used in the country without processing all accessible sources. Regular discoveries of hitherto unregistered chants led to a recognition that international ordinary catalogues could not offer a faithful picture of the region, because of the small number of Hungarian sources in them hardly typical of the tradition. Gábor Kiss gave on behalf of the working group a lecture on early experiences with cataloguing, to the Cantus Planus meeting held in Eger in 1993:

• „A Repertory of Mass Ordinaries in Eastern Europe”, in Cantus Planus, Papers Read at the 6th Meeting, Eger, Hungary, 1993, ed. László Dobszay (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Musicology, 1995), 585–600.

Thereafter Gábor Kiss continued the work as his specific subject. The expansion involved systematic transcribing and cataloguing of all Hungarian sources found in domestic and foreign libraries. (All of these, which vary in the degree of care taken in transcribing them, are held by Gábor Kiss; much of the material is also available in computer-transcribed form.) Based on the experiences and the fact that the source materials for the region found in international catalogues are uneven, plans arose for publishing a catalogue of Central European ordinary chants. Extensive research began with the aim of familiarization with the ordinary traditions of neighbouring countries (the Bohemian lands, Poland, and Austria). The resulting catalogue and corpus covered over 100 sources each containing data and transcriptions of over 200 ordinary chants, i. e. over 2000 chants. Plans include preparing and presenting a computerized musical transcription of the repertory. Alongside several studies recounting experiences gained, the catalogue appeared in the Monumenta Monodica series in 2009: Gábor Kiss, Ordinariums-Gesänge in Mitteleuropa. Repertoire-Übersicht und Melodienkatalog. Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi, Subsidia Band VI (Kassel–Basel, etc.: Bärenreiter, 2009).

As with the antiphons and responsories, collection of the chant repertory for the Mass, including their complete corpus of proper chants, began in the 1970s. Almost all the melodies for them were transcribed by Erzsébet Borvendég under contract. The corpus shows in alphabetical, table form all the introits, graduals, alleluias, offertories and communions of graduals available in Hungary up to 1990, and those of some foreign sources shown for comparison. This collection, made to assist in research, was not accompanied by a plan of publication. It consists simply of a synoptic table arranged by function and in alphabetical order. The practice in the similar table for the responsories accompanies the main form only with indications of the differences, whereas here the full chants from each source appear. It should be noted that those planning the collection process did not aim at completeness, but they did seek to present a full picture of the chants of the Mass repertory. So the processional antiphons, ordinary pieces and other chants appearing in sources for the Mass are also included.

Once computerized musical transcription of the antiphon and responsory melodies  was complete, a start was made on computerizing the transcriptions on paper of the propers of the Mass. The long-term aim is to make the whole material available to researchers in searchable form.