Greetings all,
I thought I'd share with you my new edition of Psalm 45, "The Queen stands at Your right hand, arrayed in Gold" in case it is of use to anyone. This is once again in keeping with my recent theme of basing all my psalm settings on ancient chants that treat the same text. In this case, I really had to do some digging; there's nothing on gregobase that references the refrain, however I could find a spate of medieval manuscripts which dealt with this text. I finally settled on this one: http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/sbe/0611/214v (Antiphonarium pro Ecclesia insidlensi, c. 1300-1314) as the source of my inspiration since it was an early book, but late enough that I could actually read the notation.

I took the incipit, "Astitit" and combined it with "vari(eta)te" at the end, so the overall arch of the antiphon is respected in terms of both its notable opening and its final cadence. I did, however, change how the notes were grouped to make it flow more easily in English. I have to be careful that my settings don't get too florid otherwise the congregation won't sing them.

The first half of the verse is inspired by the formula for "regina a dextris" and the second half of the verse is "tuis" (it should be noted that the medieval scribe was very sloppy here, and I did compare the notation of this manuscript to others. It seems he offset repeated notes halfway between the lines and spaces making it really neither one nor the other.)

Since I'm currently battling a sinus infection (pray for me, I had a fever for 7 days), I couldn't sing it in my demo video, so it's organ only, but you can hear a rendition of it done on the organ here: https://youtu.be/-VAeMha7ZIU.

Since it is conceived of as chant-like (and hence the verses sound formulaic), I essentially wrote it for melody plus accompaniment, but knowing full well that members of my choir will want to sing it SATB, I notated it in a way that it could be adapted as well.

Cheers,
James

PS--just in case anyone is curious, I created this score in Dorico 3.5. Everything seen here, including the picture, was done in Dorico. The only thing I adjusted outside of Dorico was to nudge the two short barlines halfway through the verses over a few pixels since currently Dorico defaults to having them right aligned which I don't like.