News

2022, July 18th : polling results, invitatories, and Draft Zero

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.

2022, April 20th : polling, Office of the Dead, and rubrics

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.

2022, March 17th : new website features, and a bunch of LaTeX macros

Some features have been added to the website:

  • Comments on proposals : the latest comments show up next to the score in the "chant" page (where all the proposals are), and all comments on a given proposal, and the ability to add new comments, are displayed on a new dedicated "proposal" page, accessible from a link next to the proposal in the chant page.
  • A button has been added for users to clone a given proposal for a chant into theirs (a way to submit corrections to another proposal). It shows up next to every proposal in the "chant" page, and on the top of the aforementioned "proposal" page.
  • Sources may now be listed. So far, there are only two sources: Hartker (winter volume) and Plantin 1773, as a proof of concept. A task for the next few weeks will be to add more relevant sources, and add those sources to "Sandhofe" proposals, as specified in the 2002 NR.

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:

  • No title should be alone at the bottom of the page: I think this has been successfully achieved with the use of \needspace.
  • When LaTeX typesets a score, it should detect that it will have to insert a page break, and insert it preemptively, so that labels and indices, that point to the start of the score, point to the top of the next page (the page where the score actually will start) and not to the empty bottom of the previous page. This has also been achieved with \needspace combined with \phantomsection to have arbitrarily placed anchors.
  • Common rubrics should be grouped in the header for standardization purposes, e.g. \tedeumrubric.

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.

2022, February 27th : slow website advancement, Sandhofe typesetting done

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.

2022, February 5th : first website prototype

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.