laying out plainsong chant

[Gabe Moothart]

Hello!

I am new to lilypond, and I'm trying to layout a psalm chanted in plainsong, so that the output should look something like this:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84432/psalm_example.png

So far I have this:

https://gist.github.com/gmoothart/6929479

which renders like so:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84432/ps149.pdf

Any comments/suggestions are helpful, but I think my biggest questions are:

1) How to create the "bar" in the music (I've inserted rests just to show where they go) ?

2) How to add parentheses around the "optional" notes, as in the example

3) How to add markings directly below the music (the ticks and slashes in the example)

4) how to add an "umlaut" over a letter as in the example.

Thanks in advance for any help. So far I'm very impressed with lilypond!

Gabe