To those who are struggling with Chant, I say, don’t give up.

A personal story I just thought I'd share.

Twenty years ago I bought a box set (remember those?) called “Eternal Chant.” I was really only taken with one of the three CDs, because the recording quality was so bad on the others, but I played that CD every night. While I like all kinds of music—I was then still regularly going to the old 9:30 Club in DC—Chant became a regular fixture of my life.

I was then an Evangelical.

I loved it so much, I told a friend that I wanted to learn how to sing it, and she laughed at me, as if it were some unattainable goal. I didn’t make much progress formally. I bought a Gregorian Hymnal, but it gathered dust.

But I kept listening. I came home one night and some housemates started up a Chant tape (remember those?) that someone had just been given, deliberately to see how I would react. One of them told me they heard me singing it all the time.

I had not at that point studied a single square note.

I’ll spare you the details, but it can be done.

After converting, I took a break from “praise band,” because church-i-ness had driven me both nuts and to Rome. Plus, the Archdiocese of Washington is rather too well supplied with good music, and places for amateurs are difficult to find. That, and about half the year I work nights at my second job.

But I studied.

The tools were just not there. I could not find an easy explanation of the four line staff until I crept through the introduction to the Liber Usualis, 50 pages or so of closely printed text. Somewhere in there it says something like “think of Doh as C and count the lines.” Other supposedly less technical books had left me scratching my head, even though I of course understood the idea of solfege. Once I learned that, spent a lot of time counting lines, but I learned.

For newbies, stick with C. Lots of books and articles use “do” and “c” interchangeably, and you really only need to move up and down if you are directing a choir with a tight range. For most melodies, just choose your upper or lower C and you should be able to reach everything. For practicing my upper range, I moved “do” to Bb and then worked back up to C.

And there are other things to do: pick a complicated melody (not necessarily long) for each clef and memorize it, using note names as well as the words. Pick a melody that lies between Fah and Doh but uses Ti (B), and not Te (Bb), so you brain doesn’t switch from the C major scale to the F major scale. As Te (Bb) is possible and not uncommon, see if you can find a melody that has both Ti and Te for an extra workout.

Stuff like that. Try to keep up just reading, but pick one or two chants and learn them thoroughly, then pick one or two more--some balance between fluency and detailed accuracy.

A great voice teacher helps, but they don’t need to know Chant. Mine didn’t know Chant per se, just how it sounded. I would tell her “this means that,” and she would say, “Then that should sound like this.” She calls it “the waving handkerchief,” the kind of legato you should strive for. I just heard that a notoriously headstrong choral director has been teaching priests…using Italian art song. Ok, you see, Gregory the Great was Roman, but Pagliacci is just NOT the ideal…

By the time I went to the Colloquium, I could fit easily in the Advanced class. A few sessions with Scott Turkington were invaluable, especially as regards rhythm. But I had made it quite far on my own, and so can you.

I have been studying harder, and this last Pentecost I decided that it simply had to all get put together in my head. I am hoping to move, and I have checked: there is room in the new diocese for an amateur schola. In addition to learning each Mass for the week in a general way, I spent the summer learning the propers for Pentecost. I figured, why not stick with the day I started? Also, if I just went back to Advent, I’d probably get depressed---back to square one and all that.

Towards the end of the summer, I found I was sight reading complicated chants with considerable accuracy. Not necessarily well, but accurately.

So it is September, and I set my sights on Advent. And the same thing happened: I looked at the first chants, and got them right.

Then we got to Ad Te Levavi, the Introit. It has some tricks, and I didn’t feel like slogging ahead. I am working on some Schubert as well, and I thought, let’s wait.

But I decided to update my Advent playlist on Napster, the now-legal online service where the owners of the rights to largely unnoticed records earn $10 in a good year.

Here is the great difference. In my L. Usualis, there are my pencil scratches from perhaps three or four years ago, where I marked which Advent Chants were available on Napster. Not that many.

I just spent the afternoon comparing recordings for nearly every single proper for Advent 1. Add to that the websites Jeffrey Tucker likes to mention, and some wonderful videos and recordings by Giovanni Vianini in Milan. (Some? Maestro Vianini has produced a huge reference collection of melodies, recorded by a schola that performs once a month at the Basilica of San Marco in Milan. 750 videos on his YouTube channel and several CDs. His tutorial on the Missa de Angelis is the Gold Standard.)

A little bookmarking, and you have yourself a school of Chant that was unimaginable 5 years ago.

Jeff is right. The explosion in resources makes the difference.

In the article from CNS that was posted in the forum, an official of the USCCB made the comment that if it weren’t for the blogs, “we’d just be quietly doing our job,” or something to that effect. As I pointed out in the forum, that man technically has no job, as the USCCB staff has NO CANONIC STATUS WHATSOEVER.

Just the Bishops, and they have said Chant. This guy didn’t like it, but that is what they said.

And now a person who wishes to think “with the Church” about Divine Worship is free to do so, without meddling interlopers who claim authority for themselves because they work in an office with a name like “Divine Worship.”

Dear Fr. Neuhaus had some fun with a famously disobedient priest, who extolled the virtues of the layman as against the Magisterial teachings of the Church.

Until JPII put the Catechism in the hands of the lay people.

Then the priest was left stammering that laypeople really shouldn’t be getting too many uppity ideas; you know, priests are supposed to interpret Church teaching.

That’s the way it is with people who have been messing around with the Liturgy for 40 years. They said their music was “for the people,” but they never listened to “the people,” whoever that is.

If you want to mess with their heads, keep studying Chant. I can tell you that you will ultimately get where you want to go. Now, with lots of help. Hats off to everyone who has made that possible.

A note on using Napster: Certain texts have several settings, so be sure you are adding the right one to your playlist. And some recordings of monks, particularly the old ones, use slightly different melodies. I suppose they are working from books older than the Liber Usualis, a modern creation.