Out of at least fifteen years’ experience of helping parish cantors, Margaret Daly has prepared this collection of responsorial psalms for all the Sundays and solemnities of the three-year cycle. She has found that the best way to ensure confident and fluent singing of the verses of the psalm is to present them in musical ‘long-hand’, with each line of text under a line of music, a ‘cantor-friendly’ format which publishers have long resisted for reasons of economy.

Cantate has been produced as a service to parishes and communities, in the conviction that the failure to sing the psalm, and the practice of substituting another, more familiar song (while allowed by the Lectionary for pastoral reasons) is a serious impoverishment of the Liturgy of the Word.

It is hoped that it will be the experience of everyone who sings these settings that, in the words of St Ambrose, ‘a psalm is learnt without labour and remembered with delight’.