Hi Valerie: Please find mine attached to this post. At the end, I included music from the funeral and wedding masses, which we used to practice. Please share yours on this thread when you come up with it. Thanks!

Edit: I added one in PDF format, in case anyone has compatibility issues with the various editions of Microsoft Office.

Carol, yes, nuts and bolts plus the rest. Chris, I frown on microphones as well, but there is just no way around it with the architecture of the space unfortunately. However, I train people without the microphone first, then show them how to use it as little as possible. The other great thing is that our Ambo and cantor areas are adjustable in height, so it will be great to show them how to use it so they aren't ducking behind them as a fortress. Other than that, these people have had no formation.....I can do it myself, I just thought maybe there was an outline on the history and spirituality floating out there. I find most of the pamphlets and books are woefully inadequate.

Chris -
is this the Thomas Aquinas in California (I can't remember the city)?
We've had a number of youth from Walsingham go there.
Exquisite neo-Roman basilica.
I shudder to think that, for all the beautiful attention to architecture, they probably don't have a real organ in it.
I do hope that I am wrong!

Valerie -
You might find Christopher Page's magisterial tome, The Christian West and Its Singers, the First Thousand Years, to be both interesting and helpful. It is exhaustive, but you are sure to find useful information in it. Also, Edward Foley's brief book on the music of the pre-Constantinian Church discusses the early cantor and his resources. While not exactly useful as a practicum for modern cantors, these books discuss real cantorship in historical context and reveal just what knowledge and vocal competence the modern cantor has to live up to. As for the microphones - it sounds like you are doing the best you can with them. They are only needful in a poorly designed architecture.

the cantor sang from upstairs, thus being invisible to the congregation. None of us had trouble following the auditory clues as to when the end of a verse had been reached, and no one had trouble hearing him because of his location and the design of the building.

Chris, if it were only that easy - no loft :-( My church is a Pizza Hut with a cross on top as far as architecture. So we must overcome being stage right (and yes, I meant to use that terminology).

MJO, thanks for the book suggestions! That is the kind of historical perspective I am looking for - the type I can read and glean a few things from, so they know that hey, we are part of a long history going back centuries and centuries.....(insert song about tradition here......) Plus I love the sounds of the early chant, such as this....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=locW-9S00VU

I want to expose my musicians to these things so they know we are so musically deprived in what we do, so limited, when people only want P&W. We need spiritual depth in our music again.

Duck and cover, run fer yer lives...I hear a train a'comin', a 'comin' down the tracks.... it's
JACKSON, JACKSON, y'say "appliance," some say "simulacra." Jackson say "I am become breath, destroyer of circuitry!"

Ya hadda go there, Padre?

Fear not, Fr Krisman -

Anyone who actually listens to what he or she is hearing can tell the difference between an organ and an organ simulacrum, even of one of the very best of the simulacra. It is so patently obvious when sound is emitted from a speaker system which is filling a room with cleverly 'digitised' 'sound samples', and sound that is emitted from pipes whose languids and reeds are filling a room with living columns of vibrating air from within pipes. The simulacrum, the simulated organ, the synthesiser cannot sound 'like' an organ, it can only sound 'similar' to an organ. Because the sound source between each is quite different and wildly dissimilar the laws of physics will have none of it - for one to sound 'like' the other is physically impossible. Anyone who 'can't tell the difference' either has a tin ear or isn't listening carefully (or is fooling him- or herself). Electronically generated sound and that produced by wind flowing through pipes are worlds apart. The most advanced simulacrum can only sound 'like' a very fine recording played on a very fine speaker system, for that, essentially, is all that it is. All one has to do is actually to listen - to his pipes... or to his speakers.