There is, indeed some truth in this. There is much old chant being performed in both Latin and English. There is also much newly-composed and commissioned chant that is being sung at chant colloquia, workshops and choral academies given by St Basil's School of Gregorian Chant at UST, Houston, often featuring Fr Columba Kelly. We have workshops about three times a year at UST. The chant is both old and newly composed both in Latin and English and consists of a basic repertory. We teach the semiological method and have very great fun and success with it. Beginners needn't be shy, while at the same time there is much for more advanced chanters. Those interested in taking one of our courses should avail themselves of Dom Cardine's Gregorian Semioloy, and visit our website:St. Basil's School of Gretorian Chant.The next course will be at St Basil's Chapel at UST in late June and early AugustL four weeks at 7-9 pm Tuesday and Thrusday. We meet in St Basil's Chapel (Phillip Johnston, Architect) which has superb acoustics. We always have a good response, learn a lot and sing a closing Sunday morning mass at St Basil's, Check our web site for specific dates and tuition. I will be the instructor for this workshop. Much stress on and study of semiology wil constitute the fundamental teaching system. You will learn how to make basic sence both of square notes and Carolingian neums, and how really to make our chant come alive.

Returning to your desire for newly composed chant, there is much being done now. By writing to the Scholar Shop at St Meinrad's Archabbey you can avail yourselves of most of the XVIII Gregorian masses adapted to English by Fr Columba Kelly, OSB. Fr Columba has also written quite a few of the propers, both original chant and modified ancient chant. Get in touch with him a St Meinrad's Archabbey, Indiana. These are far and away the finest propers available in English, and they may be had on line.

Another source for modern, newly-composed chant are the very fine works of Fr Weber

Then, there is Paul Ford's By Flowing Waters.

Not to be overlooked are The Anglican Gradual, the official book of the Ordinariate
This book provides propers for the three year cycle to solemn psalm tones with traditional Anglican English.

Also in use in the Ordinariate is the Plainchant Gradual, by Palmer and Burgess (a traditional English adaptation of the texts and music of the Graduale Romanum.

A similar source, which uses round noteheads instead of square notes, is Bruce Ford's
American Gradual. It is a complete modern English adaptation of the texts and music of the Graduale Romanum. It may be downloaded.

And then, not to be overlooked, are the new chant compositions by C H Giffen!

I have composed many plainchant melodies, and recently too. I don't think it is a dead form at all. It has many great qualities that are unique to it that would make it attractive to a composer for various reasons.

Some of the finest composers of sacred music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have based major works on Gregorian themes or have been deeply inspired by the chant. Along with the classic corpus of chants, it is a genre that is "ever ancient and ever new",
constantly evolving.

A related thought, or tangent:

We have all studied, among other musical matters, the stylistic evolution of music from renaissance to baroque to classical and so forth. To many who don't share our love of music (as well as many who do) the differences in style are not apparent: music is music, and the difference between Haydn and Mozart are not as obvious as they are to many of us. And if, as in earlier eras we didn't even know the names of the composers, this would be just 'old music' that we happen to like. Here is the tangent: if we were to make a comparative study of chant that was actually of the Franco-Gregorian repertory and that written in our time, what observations might we make as to the differences in style and method between chant of a very early era and that of our own? Some of us are competent to speak to the stylistic differences of chant that was written in the XIIth or XIVth centuries and that of 'Gregorian' times: what similar analytic method would we use to distinguish new chant of our time. What, for instance, are the stylistic differences between, say, an offertory of Fr Columba's or Aristotle's and and its counterpart of the XIth century. It is almost certain that the absence of extended melismae and skillfully portrayed dramatic elements would be glaringly apparent; so also might be the modalities preferred for given chant genres, not to mention daring creative features such as poly-modality, tessitura, melos, etc. Some might assert that, well, we can't have these melismae in English, they just wouldn't work. Personally, I insist that this would be an ill-considered position to take, one fundamentally derogatory of our language. Too, much (but not all) modern chant seems to be influenced by the pervasiveness of modern interpretative approaches to singing historic chant. Most of these approaches would be utterly foreign (if not highly amusing!) to those who did their chanting in the IXth or XIIth centuries when the oral and semiological traditions were not yet things of the past. I suspect that modern chant would have a rather different aesthetical approach were it reflective of chant's semiological and declamatory roots. Have modern composers of chant really plumbed the depths, traversed the gamut, of textual expressivenes that is characteristic of the best of the historic repertory?

Composers of the time had no rules to follow in order to assure their music was authentic to their own age. Which means that in reality they were more creative and daring.
A composer today writing in a Gregorian idiom is bound by the need to write something that reflects our rules about what is and isn't authentic.

I think if one undertook the study MJO suggests, they would find modern imitations to cluster around some mean or average, and that they would be marked by their lack of strangeness.

if we were to make a comparative study of chant that was actually of the Franco-Gregorian repertory and that written in our time, what observations might we make as to the differences in style and method between chant of a very early era and that of our own?

Foremost would be that their works would not necessarily fit into the framework musicologists later discerned, including the modes they tried to "retro-fit" all chant melodies into, no?

(Save the Liturgy, Save the World)

Perhaps sharing my own approach to vernacular chant composition might shed light on this discussion.

The basic criteria I use to determine whether a vernacular chant I compose may be proposed for use in the liturgy are:

Modality
For "original" works, does the melody use the basic dominant-final modal characteristics identified/imposed by chant theorists, as at least a point of departure? In the case of a processional proper, is the melody in the same mode as the Gregorian original in question—so that the composition might be used either before or after the singing of the Gregorian proper?

Complementarity of Text and Melody
In the case of vernacular adaptations of Gregorian melodies, does the melody more or less mirror the Gregorian original while respecting the vernacular text? Does the adapted melody complement or compete with the text it illuminates, especially in terms of accent treatment? If it seems to compete with the text, is it intentional?

Simplicity
Is the melody simple enough to be grasped by a relative newcomer to Gregorian-influenced plainsong?

I restrict myself to composing/adapting simpler melodies because:

1. I accept the desirability of the congregation's sung participation in the proper as stated in Musicam Sacram 33 especially as regards "simple responses".
2. I remain skeptical of the staying power of more complex chant melodies in the vernacular. (N.B. This statement is not an attack on proponents of such forms.)
3. Composers mentioned earlier in this thread have done respectable work with their English-language melismatic adaptations.
4. My situation does not require me to create complex vernacular chant.
5. Composing chant is not a reliable source of material sustenance, and to increase complexity is to expend more time for the same material gain—which is very little. (I suppose if I were commissioned to create more adventurous fare I might entertain the possibility, but not at the expense of ignoring everything else I have on my plate; there are better-qualified individuals to commission anyway.)

At the risk of taking this thread off-topic, I observe that in searching this thread, for whatever reason the word "prayer" has not been used once; I trust that is because the notion of liturgical chant as sung prayer (cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium 112) is so well ingrained amongst the participants that it need not be reiterated internally. But to the outside observer—and this is a public forum—the conversation may unintentionally give the impression of being a stylistic debate.

I recently gave a chant lesson in which attendees learned all of the sung parts of the Mass that pertained to them (sans Gloria and Creed) according to the Roman Missal Third Edition. This lesson was immediately followed by a Sung Mass in English, with the propers sourced from Simple English Propers. More than a few participants told me that they were moved by the Mass, mostly because it was the first time they were exposed to the notion of chant as sung prayer within the context of a completely sung liturgy. I think this notion is still novel enough to the typical modern that any well-chanted Mass, regardless of complexity, will be a spiritual epiphany. (The Mass that convinces me of this is the vernacular Byzantine Divine Liturgy in the crypt chapel proper to it at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in D.C., which I stumbled upon during the CMAA Colloquium in 2005: One celebrant, twenty congregants, two-part chant poorly sung by human standards…and powerful enough to elicit spiritual tears.)