As previously mentioned, I've sketched out a couple of possible options for singing, in English, a version of the traditional Introit for the First Sunday in Advent. Now that I see my own efforts on paper, and now that I have had a chance to compare them with the wealth of material that is now - or soon will be - available for this purpose, I am not sure that it is really worth my while to scan my poor attempts and upload them. If you're really interested I can send you a pdf. But what I have in mind is something that no one else appears to have tried, so let me at least describe my 'method'.
For the text of the antiphon, I used the Processional which has been produced by the Society of St Gregory and endorsed by the Bishops' Conferences of England & Wales, and Scotland. For the Psalm verses, I used the Grail Psalter. The opening English phrase was set, very closely, to the opening musical phrase of the Gregorian Introit. This is the USP of this method. Using current resources, one must either sing the full, traditional plainsong melody (from the Graduale Romanum or Triplex or Novum, or the American Gradual, or the Plainchant Gradual), OR wave bye-bye to the musical incipit, and this is the gap I would like to see filled. These striking, beautiful and ancient incipits, especially as they are found in the Introits of key Sundays and high days, illuminate and articulate the liturgical year like so many painted miniatures in a Book of Hours. Can we, somehow, hang on to these treasures? I think especially of Ad te levavi, Puer natus est, Nos autem gloriari, Resurrexi, Viri Galilaei, Gaudeamus, and Requiem aeternam. Hence my desire to replicate the opening melodic phrase as closely as possible. After that, I simplified the chant, making it more or less syllabic, but following the basic outline of the traditional tone. Someone with a strong grasp of Gregorian semiology and some basic skill as a composer (I have neither) could do this much more effectively. This simplified antiphon would be well within the reach of even a quite modest schola. The Psalm verses could be sung by a cantor, using the traditional Introit Psalm tone adapted for the rhythms of English.
Now, it may be the case that you have no schola at a given Mass, but just a cantor. So I made a second version in which the antiphon text was truncated to 'To you I lift up my soul, O my God', set to a correspondingly simple melody, but preserving the ancient melodic incipit. This would be simple enough for the congregation to learn by ear within a few repetitions, like the refrain of a Responsorial Psalm, so it would be possible for people to join in even without having the music in front of them. The verses of text that were lopped off the antiphon could be sung as the first two verses of the Psalm, which for illustrative purposes I set to the Psalm tone VIII G (again suitably adapted for English rather than Latin stress patterns).
It takes nearly as long to describe this process as to do it; I spent about an hour, total, creating these two versions of the Introit, so it would be quite feasible to produce similar introits week by week. My invitation, then, to music directors and composers more talented than I, is: Go thou and do likewise. I would hope I am not the only person who would be glad to see (or hear) a set of simplified Introits for the liturgical year which preserved those talismanic incipit melodies.
[Update: the title of this blog post has been changed in obedience to a legitimate exercise of authority on the part of Hilary Jane Margaret White. We hear, and we obey.]
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