Haha, right, I was hoping for something a little more user-friendly, but thanks.

pretty easy to grok

what does this mean?

Thanks, Richard!

You can read about fauxbourdon on Wikipedia. I could make a customized edition with the rest of the verses and written out middle, but I usually get paid a little for such work.

usable editions mean, to me: 1) page numbers 2) accents on words of more than two syllables (excepting Hebrew ones where the modern books omit them: Israel, Abraham…) 3) chant between the verses and not making me flip pages back to the beginning) 4) fauxbourdon and falsobordone underlay always provided 5) readable, mostly regular notation (none of Renato Calcaterra’s nonsense; I’d be banned if I said what I actually thought, but his editions are beyond useless).

I agree with pretty much all of this (except accents of course ;)). While I personally find Mensurstriche (or even totally barline-free scores) to be both ugly and probably impractical for most choirs, I think the idea of presenting the music in a way that's a little closer to what a Medieval or Renaissance singer would've sang from is a noble goal, and there are some practical benefits that it has over more standard music notation. I'm mainly thinking of repeating accidentals across barlines, having to cancel previous accidentals within a measure, and especially the dreaded situation of having an odd number of semibreves, forcing you to either have a x1.5-length measure somewhere or accept an awkward-looking final bar or two.

That said, I think the practicality and beauty of standard-looking scores with original note values definitely outweighs any benefits of Mensurstriche.

while folks should learn how to make their own editions, at the same time, making half of an edition and not the rest leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Perhaps there should be a comprehensive guide somewhere for this kind of thing. While all the necessary information is out there, it's not necessarily centralized or easy to find, especially for typesetting Early Music.

Joe, occasionally I have three semibreves without changing to triple meter in falsobordone. It’s that or a single beat in a measure.

I agree that there is value in trying to replicate early editions, but regularity is better. We sight-read well enough a few weeks ago with notes crossing over bar lines, but actual liturgical singing was going to suffer. Te Deum from KC, Missouri gave me the idea to explicitly repeat accidentals if the context suggests repetition or to cancel them accordingly (I use brackets for these. You might have F sharp, E, F in a part book, so the second accidental is in brackets.

The accents are unfortunately necessary imho. The musical and textual accent doesn’t always perfectly align, but when it does, and in falsobordone that is pretty much syllabic between the parts, hearing something like adiúva instead of ádiuva is more of a given than a 50-50.

Correct. I make use of Willi Appel’s book, Wikipedia, and Duffin’s guide; but I need to do way more study before attempting anything from the Trent Codices for example.

I don't see how an editor can envision every possible use of an an edition, and accept that Renato Calcaterra’s are 'useful' for his own purposes

It’s not even clear what his own purposes are since the notes are nonexistent besides “Original values, no bar lines” on CPDL. I know that I sound mean, but when yours are the only editions, and if they’re not clearly meant for singing what are we doing?!

Well later Latin does not have vowel distinctions of long and short. This is known. (The different between
/ɪ/ and /i/ is not length per se: hit and hid have different vowel lengths). I also don’t recommend to anyone that a vowel-consonant syllable use /e/, and sometimes I recommend not doing that for (consonant) vowel: Re: as /re/ in Requiem would be atrocious and tends to turn into [re:] or even [reɪ], like Ray.

If we were doing French baroque etc., in concert at least, I’d spring for that pronunciation. It would not go over well in the liturgy. It’s also very well documented.

Also, I do promise I’m not a grump. Thank you for the kind remarks and I appreciate not only your editions, even if for various reasons I make my own, and your work keeping CPDL organized and maintained. Now if only I could get my editions up the first time; replacing a careless error that slipped in and through “proofreading” is a bit of a chore as the PDF doesn’t update (even in a new browser on a new device: the current one shows as the old one, and I’ve told Claude this in the most exasperated way).

I'm not even the only one on this forum who has not-nice words for these editions; I'm surprised that people actually find these usable, which would be whatever, except that this is definitely one of those where "oh, yeah, I can see why other directors and singers might hate these" is obvious. No bar lines, no middle voice text underlay (I just randomly pulled up another one of the editions from the Trent Codices where you either have to write in the underlay or look at another voice which defeats the point of a score)…it's just disorienting to look at. Fine, part books are harder, but no one's suggesting doing that, not for regular liturgical use (and if you are…well good for you, but that's not gonna work for most of us, and it doesn't work for all music: I think much of Palestrina's office repertoire is in fact from copies written by hand of music that Haberl accessed, but I/we can't without going in person).

For these editions in particular: there's no .mxl so that's a complete nonstarter for 99% of us (since most of us don't use Lilypond, though a disproportionate number of CPDL users do). Like, I have to transcribe something anyway: if I were better with earlier polyphony, I'd do my own transcription. But that's why, although I have my preferences, I generally upload the .mxl and .mscz files: if someone wants to transpose, for example, then making a trivial change should be just that.

And since I'm not good yet at reading earlier mensural notation…we just don't do anything earlier than Josquin's main works unless someone's put in bar lines and I can say "good enough".