In preparation for attending the Colloquium last year, I studied to prepare myself here at home, not sure what I needed to know and also not sure how much I knew. But, what to take with me? I eventually decided that Gregorian Chant by Mr. Apel would have to stay home (too heavy) and that Chant Made Simple by Robert M. Fowells might be useful. So it, along with some paperbacks to read during spare time, ended up in my bag.
The paperbacks took up space and were unopened as each night I was too tired to read and as far as spare time...non-existent!
The Fowells did help, but in retrospect, I would have been much better off to have Dr. Susan Treacy's book from Cantica Nova - A Plain and Easy Introduction to Gregorian Chant.


A Plain and Easy Introduction to Gregorian Chant

I did arrive home understanding things better, and decided to create a coloring book about chant for people that like to take time and do things that really lock in what they are learning - if you highlight what you read, you might find the student book useful. But then I decided to go further, creating a book that builds upon the way that scribes used to write chant with red for the FA line and green for the DO line...in this book, done in color, we disable the thinking that comes with modern music that ties us to treble and bass clefs for singing and using color, makes singing using the DO and FA clef simple, easy and memorable. Since this explanation might scare off beginners, for whom this book is written, the decision was made to base this all on the first phrase of JOY TO THE WORLD. To access a free download of the book and our other books including the Choirbook Series, send an email to download@thecatholicchoirbook.com with DOWNLOAD as the subject.

The chants in the book are in English.

Free printable, shareable downloads for all our books are available on the page.

The major things that I learned that I wish I had known when I got there are covered in:

"If You Can Sing JOY TO THE WORLD You Can Learn To Read And Sing Gregorian Chant."

It's based upon the fact that chant was at times notated using a red line for FA and green for DO and that learning the descending notes of JTTW makes it possible for average people to sing 7 of the 8 notes of chant....and the audio samples included on our website teach the 8th one.

Audio samples are mostly piano at this time, but we are improving them as we go along.

Free printable, shareable downloads for all our books are available at be download@thecatholicchoirbook.com as listed above.

If you are teaching a Chant Class and after seeing this book as a PDF (and the others on our download site) and decide to use our book for your class we will assist you in supplying discounted printed books to your students and provide a Desk Copy for you to teach from at no charge as long as we might use the name of the place you are teaching on our site. The University of Illinois, Urbana, uses our simple beginner's guide book for a class that they offer...have gotten some nice emails from the students! Coincidentally, my wife's parents both graduated from there in engineering and, of course, music.