I have seen notes from parish music leaders that they find the discussions obscure and intimidating, so I am going to offer one that is not intimidating.

If you don’t know Chant, you can still get yourself ready for the Colloquium, or just learn a pretty melody to use in Church.

All this talk about being prepared for the Colloquium took me way back, so I am going to try and be as helpful as I can be and state the obvious. No one did it for me, and I had to sort it out myself.

Which wasn’t easy. I bought every book at the local Newman Bookstore, I looked things up in Grove—I tried everything, and I just could not figure out where to start. (This may be useless because there might be something on the web, but the last time I looked, the lessons all still began in a fog.)

That’s because everyone wants to use elevated terminology and stress the importance of learning “solfege” from the get-go.

Fine and dandy, but it sure didn’t help me in the least.

Finally, one comment buried in the Liber Usualis itself held the key, and that should tell you how far along I was—and how dedicated to finding it out, as the L. Usualis is over $100. It looked beautiful to me as I held it, however.
So here it is, for all you newbies, the Grand Secret that will unlock all those strange looking notes and the four line staff.

No obscure terminology will be used.

Look at some Chant. At the very beginning, you will see a mark looking like a “C” on one line. It can be on different lines. If it has a little mark or hump on the back, choose another piece. You want the one that looks like a simple C.

1) Put your hands on the white keys of a piano. DO NOT MOVE YOUR HANDS TO THE BLACK KEYS FOR FOUR MONTHS.
2) Find a C and the next C up an octave. Two that you can sing comfortably.
3) Now look at the music and find the “C” written at the beginning of the Chant. That is…C. To figure out which notes you are supposed to sing, simply count the lines and spaces: “C,D,E,F…”going up, or “C,B,A,G…”going down.
4) The “C” can be on different lines. The space above it is always D, the space below always B.
5) If the melody seems to all go down from the “C” mark, start at your higher C. If it seems to go several lines UP from the C, start on your lower C.
6) Oh, and when you see a “flat” sign, you get to play the Bb on the black keys, BUT THAT IS IT. Keep those hands on the white keys, for FOUR MONTHS.
7) Oh, and to start, repeated notes on the same syllable in a word should be treated as a note held for that many counts. There are different ways to sing that, but fighting over that is what the Forum is for!

That’s it.

What about the C with a bump in the back? That’s F. But STAY ON THE WHITE KEYS. So you go “F,G,A…” going up, or “F,E,D…” going down. BUT STAY ON THE WHITE KEYS.

What to do after that?

Take the basic Chant Mass setting—the Missa Primitiva, whose melodies you now have some idea about from the new Mass setting—and practice those.

Take the most famous of all Mass Settings—the Missa de Angelis—and learn that. There are some wonderful instructional videos on YouTube by an Italian named Giovanni Vianini.

Learn those pieces by heart, and every day or two take a very short chant—you can pull them from the Liber Usualis edition available for download on this website—and learn it. Something just one or two lines long, and plonk on the piano. AND DON’T TOUCH THOSE BLACK KEYS.

You will not believe how much progress you will make.

And if someone says, “No, no, no. This is IMPROPER, you MUST learn solfege,” feel comfortable enough to say, “I’m getting there. Now leave me alone.”

So what IS solfege?

Start with C, and sing “Doh, re,mi…” Insteade of “C,D,E.” That’s it. It will take you months, if you have any music training so that you are used to the note names, to think of “F” as”Fah” and “A” as “La,” but you will.

So learn you melody, say “F,D,E,C,” (going down) and then sing it with the Solfege names, “Fah, Re, Mi, Doh.” If you can do it from the start, great, but I say learn the melodies first and get comfortable with that. Do, re, Mi, Fa come naturally enough, but I had trouble remembering "sol" (G) and "la" (A).

The beauty is that you can make "Doh" any note you want--say, an Eb--and then you just sing the melody in that key.

BUT FOR THE FIRST FOUR MONTHS, DO NOT TOUCH THE BLACK KEYS. Except Bb every once in a while.

Hope that helps.

Kenneth