First Meeting

Our parish bulletin read:
"LEARN GREGORIAN CHANT
We are starting a male-voice choir to sing Gregorian chant, the traditional music of the Catholic Church.
There will be a taster session in St Margarets on Thursday November 15th at 7.30pm.
Chant expert, Alan Henderson, has offered to come to Stirling to give lessons free-of-charge."

Nine men came to the meeting in the church hall. Some could read music. I couldn't so I'm going to include my first impressions.

Alan began with a recording of Julie Andrews singing Do-Re-Mi from the Sound of Music,
'Doh a deer, a female deer...'
We learned that the 'doh, ray, me' scale is at the root of chant.

He gave us a copy of The Gregorian Chant Highway Code (copyright The Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge).

Click photo to enlarge

The Doh clef shows where the scale starts, the square dots show the note to be sung, building up or down from the Doh clef. The Fah clef works the same way, but starting with Fah. How hard can that be?

 Alan had made a handout with three quizzes for us. It featured familiar tunes written in chant notation:

 Answers at the bottom

We learned that the names of the notes in the scale arose from an 8th century hymn from first vespers of St John the Baptist on June 24th, Ut queant laxis. In this hymn, the first syllable of each word falls on the correct note in the scale, so the notes were given the names of that syllable (ut, re, mi, fa, so, la).

Ut queant laxis

resonāre fibris

Mira gestorum

famuli tuorum,

Solve polluti

labii reatum,

Sancte Iohannes

Wikipedia translates this as: So that these your servants can, with all their voice, sing your wonderful feats, clean the blemish of our spotted lips, O Saint John

Click for full screen to see the notes highlighted

Malky tells us that Ut is still used in some languages for Doh.

At the end of the session we sang Salve Regina together.


Answers to quiz:
1. Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy'
2. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
3. NZ National Anthem: God Defend New Zealand