Hi Richard

So, which actual neumes represent those durations?

Francis, here is what I use. The square is long and the diamond is short (breve and semi-breve, if you want to call them that). The rectangle is a double long, and the tiny notes are grace notes, which add no time and come before the beat. The jagged comb-like thing is the qualisma, which indicates a slide or very light grace note between the two notes that it connects.

I've developed this based off of historical notation systems, combined with ideas of what would be most intuitive for someone who has never learned any notation before (whether child or adult). I'm inclined to say that in simple measured music (hymns, and especially the measured chant) measure lines are not completely necessary. The are just one more thing on the page, and often you can "feel" the measure in the music just fine without them. Polyphonic music is a different story though. I'd like to get this notation to work for polyphony etc, but I've mostly just been using it for chant. What's really lacking is a good system of rests, and how to show dotted duration (1.5 length). It just hasn't been a priority yet, but maybe soon.

Here are the examples:

Here is an accompaniment for the Golden Arrow with a couple of other pieces as a medley.

http://www.myopus.com/preview/AdorationOfTheHolyFace.mp4

New item... hybrid blending modern chant notation with organ accomp... I don't see where this is even practical or desirable.

Using Gregorian Notation based upon suggestions by Richard and OMag, here are two examples. One uses the vowel rule of placing the neume, the other uses a mathematical preference to duration of note, which is how modern notation is rendered.

Personally, I am not sure that bastardizing the chant notation in this way is a 'beautifying' addition. I think the smaller modern note heads which I created for this purpose tend to look better, but I would have to live with them for a while I suppose.

added an image to this one

Francis, here are the recordings you asked for. The notation I use isn't meant to convey nuances (unless perhaps the grace notes and qualismas could be considered nuances). The idea is that a steady beat is kept, and the nuances are in the dynamics and tone, which are unwritten, but arise from basic musical considerations (tasteful rise and fall, location of strong beats in music, etc) as well as the beautiful expression that comes from piety in praying the text while singing it (sort of how you could have a hundred people all singing Holy God We Praise Thy Name together, and there's no durational nuances, but if the people really mean what they are singing, it will come out in ta beautiful way).

The qualisma and grace notes might be seen as nuances, but even if they aren't sung as exactly the same length by everyone, it still turns out sounding fine, because it's a very subtle different, and there value is subtractive, not additive (they steal their time from the following note) so everyone should come in on the following beat together regardless. And the grace and qualisma are more frequently part of the chants sung by the trained schola anyway, as opposed to the chants for the congregation.

I don't think my untrained voice does these chants justice, but hopefully you still get the idea (also, the restoration of the Hodie Nobis needs some more work, but I'm singing it as notated anyway).

Yes, I did try to have a thick stem (the virga) indicate dotted (1.5) duration; that was from Advent 2024, I haven't really played around with non-chant music in the notation since then. The thing is, I don't want people to be confused between the ligature stem, which is thinner, and the thicker augmentation stem for dotted rhythms.

I engraved these using Gregorio in LaTeX, with a customized font that I pieced together myself in FontForge. I am frequently continuing to make small tweaks in FontForge

I'm opened to suggestions, although it will probably just take more field testing and wider application over the next few years for me to solidify what'll really work for my endeavors.