All of my serious musical experience being in Gregorian chant has led to me being decent at sight-reading intervals, but having NO ear for what pitch is which. This can be awkward when people assume I know Normal Music Things, instead of having put every one of my skill points into being a chant schola member.
#i would like to know what this is about!!!!! #Will you elaborate for me! #infodump maybe! #or ignore the stranger on the internet that is okay too! 👌
Hi! I will quite likely begin at the wrong point somewhere in this elaboration, but I am happy to give it a go!
So Gregorian chant is the traditional music of the Roman Catholic Church. It dates back to the 9th and 10th centuries, and that's just when it was developed out of some of the Church's older, closely related musical traditions. It is "plainchant," which means it is music traditionally sung in one melody (no harmonies) and without instrumental accompaniment.
Because it is so old, it has its own system of musical notation that predates our normal modern systems. It looks like this:
Because it's so centered around the human voice (it can be accompanied, but that's not what it's designed for! it's designed for the people of the Catholic Church, monks and nuns and priests and ordinary people, to sing daily in their own communities), it is not concerned with what note it starts on. There's nothing on this music that marks where C is, or what key it's in - no absolute pitches for anything.
The little funny shape attached to the top line, at the start of the music, tells you where do is, instead. (The do-re-mi syllables actually originate from a Gregorian chant hymn!) Once you know where do is supposed to be, you just measure up and down by half-steps or whole steps to reach the other notes. And that means you can start on absolutely any note, to fit the range of your choir's voices, without worrying about adjusting anything else.
But my point is, I have a sort of sense by long practice of what the distances between different points on the above sheet music sound like. My ear has been trained to at least somewhat tie specific sounds to specific intervals between notes. (The rest is practice and memorization, like anything else. :P)
My ear has NOT been trained to tell a C from a B or a G, in isolation. I don't need to know that! I just need my choir director to provide the note we're starting at, and then I know the shape of the music from there!
But this gets embarrassing when people who Know Music beyond this very specific context assume that, because I can sing and learn music, I can identify the actual pitches of notes instead of operating on vibes and practice at all times.
#this sounds super cool actually this is way better than googling#i think i got maybe 15%#the gist#but now I’m INTERESTED#are there any examples of people singing this that i can hear today?
There are so many!!!
It is not sung in every Catholic church every week, because we do use both modern compositions and older-but-fancier-music in Masses as well as Gregorian chant. BUT it is still sung at every level of the Church and in all parts of the world! Parishes use it at Mass and in other services, monks and nuns are chanting it every day - I am myself going to sing a whole bunch of it tomorrow morning with five other people, at our Sunday Mass.
...I have put a bunch of videos under the cut, which you may peruse or not at your leisure. :P
To toss in some additional trivia:
The pace of plainchant is distinctly non-metric. Instead of having a time signature, an ideal basis for how fast to sing everything is to use the same speed you'd use for reading aloud while addressing an assembly. Some prepositions and articles will get a shorter duration, some emphasized syllables will get multiple notes (melisma).
More on Modes below the cut:
MODES! Thank you!
After over a decade in chant I am still torn between feeling I don't understand modes and being convinced they're Not Actually That Complicated. I think possibly both are a little true. xP Delightful to hear someone else explaining them!
And also YES the non-metrical nature of chant, my beloved. It's SO centered on the words and the voice - the melody serves the text! Much more true in the chants that are directly reciting Scripture than in the hymns, of course, but even rhymed and metrical hymns aren't strictly timed in the way that something with a time signature would be.
