My first impulse was to recommend Bruce Ford's American Gradual, which is the music of the Graduale Romanum excellently adapted to modern English.

But then I read that you wanted something simpler that would incorporate congregational participation and I thought of Fr Columba Kelly's introits and communions which would more or less converge with what you describe that you want.

Then I noticed that you are working on your own versions with the prospect of publishing them. I'm sure that there are many who would be interested in your work.
Could you put some examples of your work up here for us to see?

Could you post a sample Introit setting? I would be interested.

Very nicely and tastefully done.
I especially like your fine sense of syllabification.
Also the flowing chant-like melodies.
And, especially, that each verse has its own distinct melody.
Many thanks for posting this.
(I suppose that this is unavoidable in what passes for 'modern' English, but, as one who was reared on Coverdale and Prayer Book English, the word 'you' stands out like a sore thumb - especially when it is drawn out over a series of notes. It will never sound right - but that's not your fault.)

Very beautiful. Are you planning on doing communion antiphons too?

The Introits got done first because of my (then) pastor's request that the congregation be able to sing the opening and closing songs, which pushed me from thinking about composing my own propers for congregational participation to actually composing them.

M. Jackson, one thing at a time. The Psalms and Alleluias are trickier because the Responsorial Psalms and Gospel Acclamations that are typically used are from the Roman Missal and owned by ICEL, not the Graduals, Tracts, and Alleluias in the Gradual Romanum and Gregorian Missal. Especially for the Graduals and Tracts, there would be a lot to consider for if and how to allow for congregational participation since those really are intended for a cantor/choir while the Responsorial Psalms and Gospel Acclamations are intended for congregational participation.

That said, I do have most of a draft (though it needs a lot of heavy editing before being publishable in any form) of Alleluias based on the melodies in the Gradual, using one Alleluia refrain for each mode with varied verses based on the gregorian chant for the day, using the RM texts. I do hope to eventually add verse options for those who would prefer the GR texts instead or use both.

JMJones, congratulations on the new baby. Of course your obligations to your family come before a bunch of music nerds you talk to online :). However long it takes to finish this project, I'm sure it will be well worth the wait.

Ha! Chord symbols are so tacky (and folksy [and guitary]).
Why not a figured bass.

Indeed it is too easy for the trained professional church musician to overlook the needs of communities lacking in resources. The 1996 compilation of Office hymns Hymns for Prayer and Praise by the English Panel of Monastic Musicians has this in the instructions -

None of the harmonizations should be too hard for amateur singers and players. Howvever, in all cases the bass is sufficiently strong and complete to enable keyboard players of limited ability to settle for playing the melody and bass alone.

That meets a need of many small monastic communities.

I like the concept of FB but I find it more difficult in practice than chord symbols. I suspect this is the case for most people since very few are actually taught to play FB. Many music schools simply reference it in history class but unless you take harpsichord lessons, you probably never touch it. FB is a discipline and speciality unto itself whereas chord symbols are common across multiple instruments and genres. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of chord symbols in liturgical music... I cringe every time I look one hymnal where every single page has a special note in bold with an asterisk at the bottom that says "*When playing with guitarist, use the provided chord symbols instead of the accompaniment provided." Barf. That said, I've also taken chant scores and written in a few chord symbols for myself so I could planned-improvise an accompaniment to them so I understand the use here.

As for the concept of these propers writ large, I am very intrigued and think this is very nice. One quibble I have, however, is the style of modern notation. I concede that I've been contradicted in this before on the forum, but I find beamed notation terribly difficult to read when dealing with chant. It's all rather busy. I much prefer a modified modern notation that is stemless, at least where the melody is concerned. I find the advent 1 example a chore to read the notes even though I like the arrangement. Since it is chant, it is ultimately unmetered, however this style of notation was developed for metered music, hence the uncomfortable marriage, IMHO. It is much easier to feel the natural rhythm of chant when not dealing with stems; or at least when I look at advent 1 I find it all too instinctual to look at the hierarchy of eighths, quarters, and dotted quarters and try and measure them out relative to one another in normal mathematical terms as would be required for metered music.

I'm attaching examples of what I mean by 'modified modern' notation.

To JMJ, keep up the wonderful work. And I should also mention that the congregational/simple aid is fantastic.

Addendum: I stumbled across Richard Rice's entrance antiphons and I find this edition eminently readable. https://stmichaelhymnal.com/files/DownloadableMusic/Entrance%20Antiphons%20-%20Part%201%20of%203.pdf Take my comments with a grain of salt. I note, however, that he only uses two note durations (eighth / quarter) and maintains regular beaming. There is also more gracious spacing in this edition. Perhaps it's a combination of these three things that I find difficult in the original post.

If you wish to show the Solesmes-style groupings into two or three notes with modern notation, either provide ictus markings or horizontal brackets above the notation. Beaming is unnecessary.

a_f_hawkins, that is excellent! I think I will include a similar suggestion in my introductory notes.

I would include in my concern not only people who are lacking in resources, but also people who have not had much exposure to sacred music as the Church's documents describe. I was at a diocesan music conference a few years ago, and the speaker's topic was to dive into the Church's documents about music. She mostly talked about the idea of progressive solemnity in the Ordinary Form and was trying to get people to sing the dialogues, acclamations and Responsorial Psalm instead of just hymns, and she had to tell somebody who plays an electric drum set that this might not be an appropriate instrument for Mass, trying to get people just barely kinda sorta in bounds. Her primary resources were "Sing to the Lord" and the GIRM. I mentioned the propers, and practically everyone in the room seemed sure that this was impossible. One very talented music group sat with us at lunch and noted that they tried to do the Latin propers out of the Graduale Romanum for a bit, but it didn't go over well. I'm looking for ways to meet people where they are and tug a bit in the right direction.

On stemless notation, I am using abc for engraving. (Gregorio is based on it and possibly more familiar to some of you here.) I have looked and looked, and I'm pretty sure that there's no way to hide the stems. I would prefer to not use stems on the simple versions but haven't found a good way to do that.

I initially wished that I could use stemless notation on the main version, but the stems have grown on me for the purpose of showing the rhythm of speech. It's not that I want every few syllables accented, but the barring of notes together shows the little bit of accents natural to the syllables.

I think that there is also a tendency in those who are not used to chant to read each filled-in note head as being a quarter note at 76 beats per minute or less, and the whole chant is painfully slow. My hope (and my limited experience) is that people see the eighth notes as encouragement to keep up the pace a bit more rather than following a bias that has chant slow and boring.

I can certainly add some more space if that would be helpful and keep it less busy.

I'm also looking on brainstorming ideas for a title.

JMJones, you certainly aren't inventing anything new in this regard and can leverage this to your advantage by looking at some of the previously published examples floating around. There has been a decades-long history of transcribing chant to more modern forms of notation. One example (perhaps the example) is the Organi Harmonia https://www.ccwatershed.org/nova/ which is partly why I advocate for the stemless version.

To your point about being able to sense the flow of the line, ironically, this is precisely why I prefer stemless notation as I feel that the beams obscure it. We can certainly agree to disagree on this though; I'm sure it's largely a matter of habituation for each of us. One approach is to actually group the notes closer together and clump them into neumes. This is how the book Chants of the Roman Missal (LitPress / ICEL) as well as a few hymnals handle it. CotRM is eminently readable. I'm also noticing a modern trend to use reciting tones rather than 30 notes of the same pitch in a row. This is something (may I claim becoming a new "standard"?) that I've adopted in my own editions recently; my choir and cantors have a much easier time singing on reciting tones. This, I admit, is a step away from true gregorian tradition (as are beams), however it makes it much easier to sing with natural speech rhythm and spot when the pitch is actually supposed to change.

I also believe more of the modern hymnals use stemless notation than don't; some better than others. A laudable example is the Lumen Christi Hymnal which does a great job condensing notes into readable "neumes" (see the Salve Regina pg 124). Less successful (and it's probably examples such as these that have turned you off from this system) are hymnals like Ritual Song and By Flowing Waters which are stemless but the notes are fairly spaced out making it difficult to read. In such cases I definitely agree with you. I also think that your point about singers perceiving the 8th note rhythm as a laudable one worth considering. A solution, as I said, is reciting tones; then they read the pitch once and simply focus on proclaiming the text naturally rather than slaving over a perceived or imagined rhythm.

However, as I mentioned, there are also hymnals that have used stemmed notation to varying degrees of success. One example of stemmed notation is found in the Saint Peter Gradual (which curiously uses stems and slurs in tandem...). (And don't get me started on the Adoremus Hymnal which is a hot mess; square note, stemmed, stemless, different fonts... it's a wreck. I mean no offense if anyone on this forum was associated with that project, but I've never seen anything like it.) At any rate, it is sufficient to state that both stemmed and stemless notation each have their varying camps and histories and are both established methods, so I don't think it's necessarily a misstep to use one or the other even though I've obviously advocated for stemless (and I will give it a rest with this post, lol). I do think that adding more generous spacing in your posted edition might make things a tad easier to read, as you suggested.

One last post script: Behind Bars is considered the definitive book on music engraving in the broader classical music world. This tome is jokingly referred to as "the bible" by many music engravers and Ms. Gould takes the official stance that the old-style one-stem-per-syllable/word system for general classical vocal music is not to be used since it obscures a singer's ability to properly read rhythms. While chant transcriptions don't fall strictly into this category, they do stray dangerously close. It seems almost comical to get this into the weeds about music engraving choices, but if you end up publishing your whole opus (and I hope you do!), you also want to make sure that it doesn't end up being hampered due to unique editing choices.

PPS: the struggle is real, and I suspect that many of us here have also had to go to battle with all of these difficulties in our own transcriptions. As you can tell, I nerd out on this just a little bit, but this is largely due to the fact that I've been working through all the same problems for the last few years making transcriptions for my choir. So please take all of my comments in the spirit in which they are intended: hopefully helpful. I do not mean to detract at all from this wonderful project!

I cringe every time I have to read any edition where every word has it's own eighth stem. At least with chant you're dealing with a more/less regular and predictable rhythm. With other rep you are not.

The ICEL chants as set on their web page are the easiest for me.

Which programs can produce this style?

...but I do like the fact that I have each refrain, antiphon, Psalm verse, and doxology beginning on its own line to make it easier to find your spot.

Definitely. This is something I try to do too; it helps very much. Sometimes I will indent the start of each verse too (assuming the verse takes more than one line).

AF, I know for sure you can reproduce the ICEL style in Dorico.

I really do appreciate all of you who are acting as a sounding board for me here. I am at a point that I'd like to make some decisions about what I am doing going forward with an awareness of not letting perfect be the enemy of the good. It would be easy to stall out trying to come up with the perfect solution that doesn't exist.

@a_f_hawkins

That is accomplished in Sibelius with the (option-command-arrow) to close up gaps in the notes to more resemble chant neumes... however, as a rep for sib for years, and a power user, i don't recommend any modern notation for chant... use square note notation.

Here is an example of setting English using the good ol' system...

Another REALLY good reason for doing this is that the text does not get broken up and spaced out since the text dictates the placement of noteheads.

M. Jackson, I think that there are competing goods here, and I while I am a perfectionist myself, I know myself well enough to know that at some point I'm going to have to publish, and despite my best efforts, it won't be perfect.

I recently read JRR Tolkien's "Beowulf," written about a century ago and not published until very recently by his son because he struggled with getting it into a publishable form... and so did his son, but he finally gave us that imperfect gift anyway because it was a gift worth giving to the world. I'm not looking to assign one of my kids the career of cleaning up and publishing what I couldn't clean up and publish myself.

Here are a couple more samples from what I'm working on for a congregation book. As the Nativity one shows, sometimes the refrain for the congregation comes from the end of the antiphon rather than the beginning. In practice, this works well as long as the refrain is repeated at the beginning and end of the antiphon.

In the Easter season, I set all the refrains as "Alleluia!" which comes back multiple times throughout the antiphon. My recommendation is to intone the refrain in the beginning and then have it come back every time there is an alleluia in the antiphon.

Using these at my own parish, I was giving everybody a handout with just the refrains on them, and this worked well until Easter, when everybody got confused about having the refrain come back more frequently. This was fixed by me altering our handout to say:

Cantor: Alleluia
All: Alleluia
Cantor: I am risen, and I am always with you;
All: Alleluia
Cantor: Your wisdom has been shown to be most wonderful, alleluia,
All: Alleluia
Cantor: O Lord, you...
Cantor: Glory to the Father...
All: Alleluia

This worked for my purposes, but I don't like that it would tie a music group into doing it exactly that way. I'd prefer to leave open the option for needing to add more verses, add another refrain before the doxology, etc. Does this method of presenting the information provide clear information while giving the music group freedom to use the piece to meet their needs, or do you have any other feedback?

Capitalize the refrains, and what is your opinion on changing the punctuation at the end? Most would be proper complete sentences on their own (except those that begin with a conjunction and would be a proper ending to a sentence).