John Boe was a professor of music history at the University of Arizona for several decades, best known, perhaps, for his work on the Beneventanum troporum corpus. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at Northwestern (1969) on "The Ordinary in English: Anglican Plainsong Kyrials and Their Sources."

I believe that this dissertation is an indispensable resource for those of us who are working on adaptation of Ordinary chants to English words.
The text fills 1266 leaves and is accompanied by a full volume of musical charts.

He compared all the available English-language adaptations of the pieces found in Winfred Douglas's Kyrial (the "St. Dunstan edition") and compared them, tracing the sources used by each adapter and comparing the techniques of adaptation employed.

His most important conclusion was that a significant number of ordinary chants, and not only the simplest, were based upon "set-forms"--a convenient label for musical phrases that undergo predictable mutations in response to changes in the length and accentuation of the text. These encompass much more than the obvious examples (psalm tones, preface tones, lesson tones). The implications of this conclusion, hardly warranting challenge, are far-reaching.

Reproductions of the three-volume work are available from ProQwest (formerly University Microfilms). It can also probably be obtained through Interlibrary loan; but anyone doing extensive work in this field will wish to own it.