Seasonal booklets based on the Kyriale
  • StPatricksSongs
    Posts: 7
    The Green Booklet v4.02 (for after Epiphany and Pentecost)


    Three goals of the booklets:

    1) To help people to pray along with the 1962 missal, by providing the full text of the Order of the mass, including all responses, and some of the more noticeable movements of the priest.

    2) To establish a standard cycle of music for the Ordinary of the mass.

    3) To bring forth more of the riches of the Kyriale.


    Key features of the booklets:

    - The first and last page give easy access to the music for a weekday/feria mass.
    - For the rest of the booklet, the music for Sundays is placed at its time within the mass.
    - Because the booklets present the entire Order of mass, they can be used as a bookmark for your missal, or with a single printed sheet that presents the proper prayers and readings.
    - Following the mass, there are Marian antiphons and music for Adoration and Benediction, which also follow a seasonal cycle.


    Any type of feedback is welcome
    Thanked by 2irishtenor ian_udell
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 3,647
    Sunday should be first. Most places will not have a weekday high Mass, and I highly doubt that they’d have one on a ferial day.

    It’s Sundays of the year: Ordinary Time is not used, and there is no connection as there is in the new Mass other than the customary chants and the texts of the office used in common. Only the collects and readings ever transfer from winter to fall whereas OT resumes awkwardly after Corpus Christi. Now of course per annum is the real name for OT but…

    If it’s for the 1962, I’d completely omit that English Credo.

    Use a standard slashed V and a slashed R (for Deo gratias and in the ordinary) not the //. The character exists in Unicode. Use it.

    Use a font that has the Maltese cross (the custom is to put the cross after the first words (Our help; Father etc.) for the sign of the cross.

    You should annotate the chant to tell people when to sing: there will be different customs but the Asperges should never be sung by all in unison in full. The Agnus should always be reintoned by cantors. (Mass XVIII is a disaster if this doesn’t happen.)

    If you want to have two Kyrie choices, put the seasonal annotation first.

    Personally English only is not that helpful, but it also has stuff that is recited silently with no context like in a missal to signal where one is at in the Mass.

    The Te Decet Laus should be omitted or moved to after the Divine Praises as an alternative to Holy God.

    I don’t think that this would be a helpful booklet for Christ the King, unless your parish doesn’t know Mass VIII or IV, II etc. but only knows XI. So I’d omit that preface.

    I would not use red text for anything said out loud. Real small capitals would work. (Only use the ones from your typeface.)

    The Amen after the Canon is sung and should have a slashed R before it. Same with the response to the Pater Noster, to the embolism, and to Pax Domini. In these cases it might be helpful to print the chant (because while the collect tone varies, this won’t ever vary, and in theory the tone here is not the one for after the ancient solemn collect tone ad lib).

    X is not obvious for striking the breast.

    The dagger for the tiny sign of the cross on the head, lips, and breast really should be after Sancti, then Evangelium, and secundum. It’s explicitly not made at Initium (the priest signs the altar or if it is a proper last Gospel for the pre-55 the book).

    At this point I would include Benedicamus for weekdays and the gesimas. There is too much pre-55 interest to do otherwise if you intend to distribute this. The Institute would need that for the gesimas.

    For the gospel dialogue, you have thou etc. elsewhere but you here.

    The Marian antiphon and the different suffrage and benediction versicles should just be in normal font with the slashed V and R. It’s custom. Not using it is idiosyncratic and confusing even to me since you have no directions.

    Standard notation would be appreciated for the O Salutaris (and surely the organist has access to the harmonization?).
    Thanked by 1tomjaw
  • Palestrina
    Posts: 595
    StPatricksSongs, I think this is an excellent concept, especially since it integrates the liturgical music itself into the ‘Missal’ and sends a polite message to the congregation that it has a role in singing the Mass.

    What program did you use to typeset this?
    Thanked by 1ian_udell
  • StPatricksSongs
    Posts: 7
    Everything so far has been done with LibreOffice and the Source and Summit online editor.
  • ian_udell
    Posts: 21
    StPatricksSongs, how did you manage to indent some lines in the Credo? I've been wanting to know this for a while in GABC
  • Palestrina
    Posts: 595
    Might I suggest that you try to work with LaTex (etc) instead? There will be a wider range of options available to you, and the season-to-season variations will be significantly easier to implement.

    I think the fundamental concept is excellent but I don’t think you’ll ever be able to please everyone because of the variability in liturgical practices around the place. Having it all coded will make things easier for others to customise foe their own purposes and contexts.
  • Palestrina
    Posts: 595
    This very worthy project has been on my mind for a few weeks now.

    A further question has come up in my mind: is it necessary (or even preferable) to have all the texts of the Mass set out in this booklet, or might a smaller selection be made? I am reminded of FSSPMusic’s apt observations about perceptions of chant as ‘mood music’ and wonder, for instance, whether a brief explanation of the overlapping texts when the Introit and Kyrie are sung in lieu of their complete inclusion might be a better approach. There will be other parts in the Mass where a similar approach might be helpful too (e.g. omission of the priest’s private prayers of preparation for Communion).
    Thanked by 1tomjaw
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 3,647
    I am a weirdo but: I have stopped including the Secret at Masses where there is a booklet. The hint is in the name! I don’t bother with dialogues besides the sprinkling, the dismissal, and the Marian antiphon (we do the versicle and collect) either. Those are memorized. Or people don’t care/can’t follow. The thing is that my exceptions are short and are all out loud. I have seen booklets for high Mass with the Orate fratres. You can’t hear it and might not even see it being recited quietly, as the priest hides behind the deacon!

    So I would omit those parts of the ordinary that are not sung as well.
    Thanked by 1tomjaw
  • GerardH
    Posts: 680
    Agreed to both above. As an infrequent attendee of the TLM (and in those instances usually providing the music), Mass books which include pages and pages of silent text are quite unhelpful. Include only what is obviously occurring - i.e. the music - and perhaps a brief explanatory note as @Palestrina suggests
    Thanked by 1tomjaw
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 3,647
    the only other alternative is to print an ordinary separately and then refer to it with cross-references; for example, if you prepare a booklet for the entire Mass of a special occasion, then put the introit, and then cross-reference Ps. 42 etc. between two horizontal rules, so that it is subordinated to the chant.

    You can do this for the silent parts like the Canon as well, and in this case, the secret should get printed as it typically is in a handout. But it’s definitely a project that I’d do in LaTeX so that the labels and multiple typesetting passes take care of the references (we hope: you need to proofread). I have considered this for weddings and funerals if something more robust is required and you can print a longer booklet, the length of a fundraising banquet booklet for example.
    Thanked by 1tomjaw
  • StPatricksSongs
    Posts: 7
    After many hundreds of hours of work over the last three years or so, I think it's time to close up shop on this project, or at least take an extended break.  Because the truth is, despite their usefulness, I can't even get people to use these at my own parish, and sharing this file here was a sort of last attempt to find some encouragement (that I didn't waste all this time and effort.)  I figured, if anyone could see the merit in this project, I would find them here.  But after two weeks, it seems no one here would actually want to use this booklet.

    My experience with the booklets is that every single newcomer I have given them to has found them much easier to follow along with than either 1. a missal with five ribbons or 2. the standard 50-60 page booklet we were giving them before.  They are particularly popular at weddings, where there's lots of people who've never seen the 1962 missal before.  But wedding guests come and go.

    I made these for the people who stay. In theory, these booklets could passively teach people to read neume notation, and they could be used with both the new lectionary cycle, and new feast days on the calendar.  They make having a daily sung mass easy (not just Sundays.)  All this opens the door to more possibilities than the old missals alone. But the people who stay in the parish don't care to use them, so those doors stay closed.  The people at the parish, the choir etc. the people who could get the most use out of them, usually do not even try them out.  So it seems that instead we will just keep rotating Missa de Angelis, Orbis factor and Mass 17 forever, which as a byproduct makes people bored of them, not because they are boring, but because the whole weight of the year is put on three mass settings (out of 18.)

    There are a lot of suggestions given here as feedback, but unfortunately nearly all of them would take dozens, if not hundreds of hours to implement.  Some of them require a top-to-bottom redesign of the entire idea.  Not that these are bad ideas, it's just that it becomes something different than what I'm trying to accomplish.

    For example, I would not want to remove the priest's prayers.  So often I have heard that the Offertory for example, was this horrible reform..  The removal of the prayers at the foot of the altar...  That it's a tragedy that the Roman Canon isn't said more often in the current missal...  So I present the text of the mass here in full, so that people can pray along with these ancient prayers.  I do not substitute with my own explanations or summaries, and I agree wholeheartedly with the Church that praying along with the priest is the best thing a layperson can do at mass, not the Rosary, not some other prayer.

    For myself personally, having the priest's prayers laid out for me so easily transformed my experience of the low mass.  There are many prayers throughout the mass that I treasure reading again and again, whereas with a missal I am just flipping pages back and forth until I give up.  With these booklets, you stay on the same page for two, three, four, five minutes, and the next page is just.. the next page.  It's a different experience.

    When I welcomed feedback, I thought maybe there would be some suggestions for small adjustments here and there, and I really hoped there would be at least a handful of people who were enthusiastic or excited about it as-is (not re-invented.)  But that's life.

    If there's one thing I've learned from many failed projects over the years, I am sure whatever I learned in this process will be useful somehow in the future.  But as for this specific project, I can't justify the time and energy lost any longer.  I appreciate everyone's feedback and thank you for being honest!
  • Elmar
    Posts: 525
    I made these for the people who stay. [...] All this opens the door to more possibilities than the old missals alone. But the people who stay in the parish don't care to use them, so those doors stay closed. The people at the parish, the choir etc. the people who could get the most use out of them, usually do not even try them out.
    Of course you are the best person who can judge whether a change in the content (as suggested by others above, or otherwise) would probably make a difference or not.
    When I welcomed feedback, I thought maybe there would be some suggestions for small adjustments here and there, and I really hoped there would be at least a handful of people who were enthusiastic or excited about it as-is (not re-invented.)
    In this case you still have the suggetions about type-setting improvements, like using slashed V + slashed R for celebrant vs. people and (maybe) normal black vs. enhanced, like boldface, for the difference between silent and audible voice instead of red for instructions/explanaions ('rubrics'). Those are certainly low-hanging fruits.
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 3,647
    All I can say is that I do booklets for my parish and have reinvented them a couple of times each and that’s just the nature of the beast.
  • Palestrina
    Posts: 595
    To be honest, this is one of those projects that would benefit from a bit of crowd funding and/or wiki-style resourcing.

    It’s really the next major step after the PDF scan of the Liber which, 20 years ago, was game-changing.

    The Liber made the music available; the next step is to make everything available in easily customisable formats, different paper dimensions, font sizes, with different translations (now there’s a lightning rod for anyone brave enough to wield it) and the ability to quickly insert variant material without having to start from scratch. We’re close now… a campaign along the lines of the one that gave us the Nova Organi Harmonia and we’d be there. Speaking of which, maybe the next project after that will be setting the NOH in code and adding Solesmes rhythmic signs and the ability to transpose!
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