I've been teaching people how to read chant notation for more than fifteen years, and while the process at its core has not changed, my bag of tricks grows with every passing year. While most of what I teach is not the sort of material that can be boiled down into the confines of a blog article like this, certain common pitfalls in sight reading rear their ugly heads frequently enough that it's high time to address them directly.
If you already know the basics for sight reading chant notation, but still find it to be a struggle, this article is for you.
This is a sequel to the ICA's first blog article, 5 Short Lessons on Reading Chant Notation. If DO and FA clefs, the four line staff, and solfege are new to you, I recommend reading it first before diving into the current article.
And now, without further ado, these are the top 5 mistakes people make when reading chant notation, and a few pro tips that I expect will help you to fix them.
1. Neglecting to map out critical intervals.
Can you tell the difference between the highlighted intervals in Examples 1 and 2? Can you sing them correctly? (Hint: all four of these start very famous Gregorian chants!)
When determining the melody of a new chant, it's important first to determine the clef and its position on the staff. Gregorian chant has two clefs: DO and FA (sometimes called the C and F clefs). The DO clef marks the DO line (a.k.a. 1st degree of the major scale), and the FA clef marks the FA line (a.k.a. 4th degree of the major scale).
In the examples below, the DO line is marked green and the FA line is marked red for added clarity. Early chant manuscripts actually do indicate these lines in color!
Pro Tip #1: Both DO and FA clefs indicate the upper pitch of a semitone/half step.
Check out the positions of the DO clef in the two chants below (these are the same chants as in Example 1 above). In Pange lingua gloriosi the clef is on the very top line. In Veni, creator Spiritus the clef shifts to the next line down, to make room for the melody, which will rise two degrees above the DO line. The different clef positions indicate different opening intervals, even though they look the same.
Next are two alleluia's, with FA clef and DO clef. The first, in Mode II, is an Eastertide standby, part of the hymn tune O FILII ET FILIAE. The second is the classic Mode VI alleluia. Both begin with an ascending whole step, but notice what happens when moving up to the next scale degree in each.
Sing them both. Do you hear the difference?
Once you have mastered the placement of semitones/half steps and whole tones/whole steps and you can sing them with ease, you can shift your focus to thirds. Gregorian chant tends to build in thirds: major thirds and minor thirds. Map them out. What do they sound like? What does a major third (two whole tones/whole steps) sound like? What does a minor third (one whole tone + one semitone/half step) sound like?
These are the chants found in Example 2 up at the beginning of this section. (I'll bet you didn't recognize them just from that example, though....or maybe you did?)
Pro tip #2: Gregorian chant tends to build in thirds. Once you've mastered semitones/half steps and whole tones/whole steps, focus on thirds. Distinguish major and minor thirds, and learn what they sound like.
2. Thinking of lines and spaces as fixed (letter) pitches.
Gregorian chant is built on the movable DO system. Now, contrary to what this might seem, movable DO does not mean that the clef can move from one line to another. Rather, it means that you can assign any pitch you wish to DO.
This is a hard concept for instrumentalists to grasp. As an instrumentalist, when you push a key or button, it produces a very specific sound frequency. To transpose a musical selection (make the whole piece sound higher or lower), you need new sheet music, and probably will have to learn a different fingering too.
The process is different for singers, who play their musical instrument with their mind rather than their fingers and hands. Unless they are cursed with perfect pitch (yes, I say cursed, because perfect pitch really is more a hindrance than a help whenever a singer is asked to sing something in a transposed key), it is easy to make a mental adjustment and continue to sing from the same sheet music.
Pro Tip #3: Practice thinking/singing in movable DO solfege, or with scale degree numbers, rather than note letter names.
Pro Tip #4: When practicing your sight singing on the four line staff, challenge yourself by assigning a different pitch to DO each practice session.
3. Ready. Fire. Aim.
Pssssssssssst! Do you know one of the very worst singer's habits? It's singing before you've set up your instrument. I used to sing in a professional early music ensemble, and sometimes a singer would sloppily come in at a prominent entrance on the wrong pitch, and then correct it just a split second later. The singer didn't think much of it, but the result was enough to ruin an entire recording. Firing before Aiming is a great way to ensure you'll never hit the target.
Michael Rocchio, Director of Vocal Arts for the International Chant Academy, always says that "singing is a thinking person's endeavor". It takes vigorous mental training to recognize the internal sensations of singing, to learn how to apply those experiences in setting up your instrument, and to hear pitches, sounds and phrases in your mind before producing them with your voice.
To become an excellent sight reader, it is absolutely critical to develop confidence in your mind's ability to perceive accurately what is on the page, and to trust that you can reproduce with your instrument what you hear in your mind's ear. This confidence comes from building a track record of success. Not from a track record of guessing.
Pro Tip #5 : Slow down. When sight reading chant, train yourself to rely on your internal ear rather than your physical outer ear. Once you learn to trust what your brain is telling you to sing, you can do anything!
4. Singing disparate notes instead of fluid motions.
Have you ever hard chant sung badly, like a bunch of pitches strung randomly together, but not really doing anything or going anywhere? I know I have. To tell you the truth, I didn't care for Gregorian chant at all for many years, because that's the only kind of sung chant I had ever heard, and I did not find it to be beautiful at all.
Thank heavens I was invited to join a small ladies' schola under a gifted director who was dedicated to singing motions instead of notes. I was mesmerized; I never knew that chant could be so beautiful! If it wasn't for Dr. Deborah Friauff, I doubt I would be here today, teaching Gregorian chant with the International Chant Academy.
"It's about the journey, and not the little stops along the way...Part of the reason for conserving the old neumes, surely, is that the neumatic notation provides a gestural sense of the music, a series of motions that can rapidly disappear when the music is thought of as a series of specific notes. Guido's new system is the moment of a very deep shift in how music was conceived. In order for it to be specific, everything must be specific, and everything must be a note. The shift is from an understanding of melody as composed of gestures and motions (as represented in neumatic notation) to one of melody as composed of discrete notes." [emphasis added] - Capturing Music by Thomas Forrest Kelly, published by W.W. Norton & Company
When Dr. Kelly refers to neumatic notation above, he is actually referring to the lines and squiggles that predate the four line staff. They are the notation you see represented at the top of the image below. Now, square notation (the middle example) can also be called neumatic because it is also composed of neumes, or melodic gestures. These square note neumes additionally notate specific pitches, however, and so we see that even here is a latent temptation to sing note for note.
Now, compare the square notation with the modern notation at the bottom, and you will immediately see how the connective motion among certain pitches becomes even harder to convey on the five line staff.
Pro Tip #6: Challenge yourself to think in terms of organic movement rather than isolated pitches. Patterns and phrases should be treated as single motions, like a writer's signature, rather than collections of individual sounds.
5. Disregard for the role of the final.
Strictly speaking, the final is the very last pitch of a chant. The last pitch of a melody is the most important. It's where the melody comes to a completion, to a place of rest.
Without getting into too many details (it's a huge subject, and I have an entire online course devoted to the Gregorian modes and their finals), let me say simply that the modern ear has a hard time embracing certain finals in Gregorian chant. As a result, even experienced singers of chant might not notice that the chant they are struggling to make sense of is, in fact, built upon a solid foundation.
“The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock." -Matthew 7:25
The MI (3rd scale degree) is the weakest of all the finals, and feels the least settled. Try emphasizing the other MI pitches as you work through the chant, making sure that you are singing the exact same MI pitch every single time. MI will become a reference point for the whole chant, giving it a sense of grounding and purpose.
SOL (the 5th scale degree) does not exert a gravitational pull on the pitches above or below it, so it too can be harder to experience as a true final.
"But wait!" you may be thinking. "What about chants that change mode, and thus have more than one pitch acting as a sort of final?"
Good question! If there's one thing we know about the eight church modes, it's that they are an invented system that was foisted upon the body of Gregorian chant after most of it had already been composed. They are a medieval attempt to explain and understand the character of Gregorian chant, but often end up leaving more questions unanswered than solved. The answer to your question will depend heavily upon the particular chant you have in mind, but I hope what follows will outline some general principles.
Panis angelicus is classified in Mode IV (what I like to call a "MI mode", because its final/resting pitch is the 3rd degree of the major scale), but when singing it you will likely find yourself gravitating towards RE, the 2nd degree, and a much more stable scale degree than MI.
In truth, this chant gravitates towards both. Let's treat each incise separately.
Panis angelicus fit panis hominum ends on MI (3rd degree).
Dat panis caelicus figuris terminum ends on RE (2nd degree).
O res mirabilis! Manducat Dominum ends on LA (if you know much about the modes, you might find it interesting to note that LA is the shared dominant of both Mode I, a RE mode, and of Mode IV)
Pauper, servus, et humilis. ends on MI (3rd degree).
Pro Tip #7: When a chant changes its mode/final, lean into the final for that section. If the very end of the chant sounds unexpected, find places where that last pitch occurs earlier in the chant, and bring those moments out as much as you can. In doing so, you will help the listener to make the connection of the ending of the piece with the rest of the chant.
What did you find to be most helpful from this article? Any "aha!" moments? You can keep the discussion going in the comments section.
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