I have recently become choir director at my parish, and have been typesetting some of our music for the use of the choir. It occurred to me that some of you may find it useful, too.

I have the first and second antiphons for Christmas Day, taken directly from the pew book, arranged for SATB:
First Antiphon
Second Antiphon
I also have a harmonized "O Godbearer Virgin", in the melody from the blue Marian hymnal.
O Godbearer Virgin

I'm no professional, but I think they may be useful for others. Enjoy!

Excellent work. The first antiphon file (CH-1.pdf) doesn't seem to open properly though.

Steve

Dear Steve,

Thanks. I fixed it, I think.

Karl

Karl,

Now the file shows, but strangely no tails on the notes!
I did a similar arrangement for the weekday antiphons for our choir the old fashioned way - by hand. What software are you using for the notation?

Steve

Dear Steve,

The no tails is a feature, not a bug. Since they are chants, the metrical stems would be inappropriate, I thought. In other words, I meant to do it.

I'm using a free program called "lilypond", which makes beautiful music, but has a bit of a steep learning curve. You work up a source file (a .ly file) and then compile it into the finished product.

It's not as hard as it sounds, but it is a little tricky. Once you learn it, it's faster than the standard graphical interfaces. If you think you want to use it, let me know, and I'll help.

Here's the website: www.lilypond.org
Here's a website with lots of public domain music typeset with Lilypond: http://mutopiaproject.org/

The neat thing about mutopia is that you can also download the .ly file and see how they did it.

About this Lilypond programme: is there any way to convert MIDI files into the .ly format and simply have Lilypond make Finale scores look nice?

I am committed to Finale but am fed up with its crappy and dull product appearance.

Dear Daniil,

Yes, there's a utility called midi2ly which will do that. I don't use it, but you could see if it works for you. I'm finding it's just simpler to type directly in lilypond code. I set three hymns in a few hours on Sunday; It's fast once you learn it.

Here's the note on midi2ly in the documentation: http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.1/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond/Invoking-midi2ly.html

Here's something else: http://www.nongnu.org/xml2ly/

If Finale can use musicxml format (Look into the documentation--I don't use it myself), this program can apparently convert it to lilypond. Note that it looks like a bit of trick to get the program to work. How are you with command line utilities?

Anyway, it might be worth the effort.