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01 January 2010

Chant Books

Download Classic Chant books as pdfs

All the basic chant books have been scanned and made available for free download by the Church Music Association of America. There are masses of things on their website: Music DownloadsLiterature for Download, and Chant books of all kinds.  They are all pdf files, many of them extremely large.

In addition to the Offertoriale edited by Ott, available as a dowloadable pdf from the CMAA and as a reprint from Amazon, there is an on-going project to put online newly edited versions of these verses on a German website, Gregor & Taube, alongside a complete Sunday Graduale for the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, edited from early manuscripts.

Also available for download is the 1974 edition of the booklet Jubilate Deo, which Pope Paul VI intended as a minimum chant repertoire for parishes. 

There are a lot of interesting historical editions of chant books which have been scanned and can be downloaded for free, provided by Corpus Christi Watershed (there is an overlap with the CMAA list above).

The Global Chant Database is 'a searchable database of plainchant melodies and texts included in medieval sources and new editions.'

For Priests

Windsor Latin Mass (from Missouri, USA) is in the process of putting up the written chants necessary for priests: Collect, Epistle, Gospel, Postcommunion, in the different versions (festal and solemn, 'antiquus' and 'ad libitum'). These are beautifully clear sheets with the entire text set to the square notes. An on-going project.

You can now buy a book of these, suitable for use in the liturgy, for all the Sundays of the year: the Canticum Clericorum Romanum. See a review here.


Buy printed Chant Books

From the  Latin Mass Society: see especially their unique resource for the Diocesan Feasts of England and Wales.

You can also buy new books in the UK from St Michael's Abbey (Farnbrough) and Cenacle Catholic Books.

St Philip's Books of Oxford often has second-hand Libers and Graduales.

The Abbey of Solesmes sells a number of their own books directly.


Create your own Chant pdfs

The GABC Transcription Tool will create pdfs of a huge number of chants, according to the melody given in the Graduale Romanum and according to whatever Psalm-tone you like. It also does the lections.

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