The Liber Responsorialis de Tempore has been presented at the 2024 Rencontres Grégoriennes in Strasbourg, France, on Oct. 26, and generated a lot of interest. We thank all who have purchased (relatively cheap!) copies and therefore have entered into the moral obligation of providing feedback and corrections. In other news, the project has transitioned to be under the scope of the association Musicologie Médiévale, which was the crucible in which the restitution work on the Hartker Responsories, on which we are largely based, was initially performed. Matthias remains project leader and Dominique remains head musicologist. This patronage will allow us to petition government entities for funding via the association, to benefit from the association's network, and acknowledges what was already a state of fact.
It has been a long year: Matthias has been ill several months, and Dominique has been very busy with the Repertorium Project, but both have managed to publish a very imperfect, but decently usable temporal part of the Liber Responsorialis. Deo gratias! As the previous post hinted, the Invitatoriale and Festive Psalter have been published in the summer and fall of 2023, respectively.
In the light of the experience acquired typesetting the Liber Responsorialis, it is probable that the Invitatoriale and Festive Psalter will receive significant revisions, but not before long, in part to let those who have purchased them finish their years-long proofreading, and in part because steady work is ongoing on the sanctoral part of the Liber Responsorialis.
An unexpected but massive contribution by a German priest ("mattiacus" on this website) will allow us to publish the Tridentine weekly psalter before the end of 2024, God willing. This book will complete the pars diurna of the Tridentine psalter published by the esteemed dr. Gerhard Eger, who might contribute to our pars nocturna as well.
Once this book is out, a deep dive into the sanctoral responsories will be necessary, and this news feed will probably not be updated for a long time while we work on those pieces.
The current state of the Nocturnale Romanum PDF as found in the GitHub repository could be considered to be Draft Zero, although it is, by any standard, entirely unusable:
In better news, it has been decided that the body of the Nocturnale Romanum would feature hymns that use the medieval text instead of the text revised by Urban VIII. An appendix will be published with the more recent hymns, for priests who worry too much about what satisfies their obligation. The hymns' text has been proofread, and every hymn has received the melody it has in the 2019 Liber Hymnarius (LH), or, by default, the melody it has in Sandhofe's NR corrected according to the 2019 LH; all those carry rhythmic signs carried over from the 1983 LH.
The systematic work started in summer 2022 on invitatories has been interrupted for a few months, but is now close to the finish line: all invitatories must now be assigned psalm tones, and there is some debate on whether to use the ones from the 2019 LH, or critically revised tones, musically and historically better, which would differ by only a few notes, possibly causing much confusion.
Last but not least, the last few months have seen a lot of work on the antiphons of feasts. In order to keep morale up, it has been decided to publish a book containing invitatories, hymns, antiphons, psalms and versicles for Sundays and major feasts: the musicological work for this book could be completed before the end of 2023.
The polling results are in the Anonymized raw results spreadsheet, and some graphs, analysis, and further reflection is avaiable in the Project preliminary design review (PDR) report.
Draft Zero, i.e., the reprinting of Sandhofe's book, minus proofreading, plus some corrections, minus the scores that are copyrighted under Sandhofe's name, is almost complete : the ferial psalter is still missing.
It will not have the Tridentine psalter, unfortunately, which definitely will be included in the future book(s).
By the way, there is a good possibility that not one, but two books will be published: one with rhythmic signs, pointed psalms, no ancient neumes, and lots of repetitions to avoid page turns (that is, a practical edition) covering only Sundays and major feasts; and one without rhythmic signs, with ancient neumes, fewer repetitions, and possibly variants or at least references to source manuscripts (that is, a critical edition) covering all days in the liturgical year.
This possibility is still under consideration by the steering committee.
Meanwhile, a good chunk of work has begun with the invitatories : critical transcriptions of the Liber Hymnarius, cataloguing of formulas for reuse in new pieces, cataloguing of available tones for ps94 and their variants. This bit of work should be over by Fall 2022.
Please answer one of the polls (poll in English ; poll in French) to help us make the right editorial choices for the book(s). These polls will stay open between one and two months and then the steering committee will examine the results and draw the conclusions regarding matters of size, fonts, musical "grammar", and so forth.
Some great work has been done on the Office of the Dead, with restitutions from the Vaticana, by Dom Gajard, by Dominique Crochu and from the Graduale Novum being listed on the website.
Overall rubrics typesetting is about 50% done, which is slower than expected, but will allow us to release Draft Zero before the summer break. Draft Zero will not be a usable book by any means, but a working basis for the largest number of people to be able to submit corrections.
Some features have been added to the website:
Website roadmap: make a few things prettier, especially comments, connect the database to GitHub so that every proposal submission/edit generates a commit, and we will be good to go. I am very interested in feedback on the website.
On the typesetting side of things, we have arrived to a pretty robust set of LaTeX macros which allow for an almost completely automated generation of the book. Specifically:
LaTeX roadmap: find a way to make a score's title show up correctly when using \nameref, finish the rubrics, and insert dummy pieces for scores that are copyrighted and cannot be commited to GitHub, to get a realistic layout.
Rob Leduc has finished typesetting all the scores in Sandhofe's NR02. Most of them are on Gregobase. This is a major advance towards v0.1 of the book. There is no overstating how mindblowing this work is.
On the website front, proposal submission and edition have been implemented as well as automatic GABC compilation and PNG conversion for display on the website. The website source code is also on GitHub.
Roadmap: GitHub connection with proposal edits; proofreading of all the scores in NR02 typeset by Rob; LaTeX skeleton of the books.
The focus for this first LaTeX skeleton will be indices and labeling, so that all scores can be properly referred to with their (starting) page.
Roadmap: implement chant views, implement proposal submission/edit, connect proposal submission/edit to GitHub. The website GitHub repo should be set up this week as well.