I'd be delighted if anyone had taken the verses out of the Offertoriale and set them to psalm tones, in the same way as has been done with the Communio. This would be quite useful in a Parish context, where the elaborate melodies of the Offertoriale could be too difficult.

Any chance of an edition of the Offertoriale being uploaded to MusicaSacra?

Thanks for the posting.

Michael, good question.

Dom Cardine marked up his own copy of the Graduale (a Solesmes edition of the Vatican Graduale) with neumes from the St. Gall manuscripts; this marked-up copy (1966) was called the Graduel neumé. Its successor, the Graduale Triplex (1974), followed Cardine, taking another Graduale (the 1974) and adding the neumes from St. Gall and Laon 239 above and below, respectively. This approach inspired Rupert Fischer to do the same with Karl Ott's Offertoriale (Desclée, 1935). Ott's work included verses. Fischer reprinted this work first in 1978, and then revised and reprinted it as the Offertoriale Triplex with Solesmes in 1985. I'd like to see Ott's introduction -- maybe it would give some clue about verse selection.

Hiley has things to say. In his Plainchant, we read (pp. 121-30) that the long verses of the offertory "were sung in the early Middle Ages, but ... fell out of use in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries." They thus "do not form part of the modern Roman liturgy and were consequently not included in such books as the Graduale Romanum and the Liber usualis." Hiley's discussion goes on to examine the melodic nature of these things in some detail, so have a look. Here's how he characterizes them as a whole:

These are purely musical outpourings, where attention to the text is suspended and sheer joy in singing seems to take over, ecstatic and improvisatory (at least when compared to the repetitious schemes found, for example, in many alleluias). It remains unclear, nevertheless, what occasioned the composition of these glorious melodies. They are not assigned regularly to the high feasts of the church year. The contrast with that other great musical high point of mass, the sequence, could not be more pointed.

Perhaps some singers were so virtuosic that literate musicians wrote down their improvisations. Hiley notes that the texts are psalm verses -- perhaps the texts were so well-known that singers simply improvised them. So what we have left, in the Offertoriale is a relatively faint echo of a creative explosion of improvised tenth-century Frankish chant.

Does the offertoriale triplex contain the proper offertories as found in the grad. Rom. in addition to the versicles, or does one need to switch back and forth between books?

If you require the Solesmes markings, you will need to switch back and forth between books; the OT does not contain dots, icti or episemae of any kind.

Here's the post on my blog that highlights the occasion.

To reiterate the query made over a year and a half ago on this thread, what are the possibilities for the Offertoriale Triplex being offered as a pdf here? There are a number of situations in which these verses would be much more practical than a motet or hymn after the antiphon.

Thanks for the link - I wasn't aware of this resource!