{"id":19662,"date":"2016-04-20T14:29:35","date_gmt":"2016-04-20T14:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wcwb.warnercwhite1.org\/?page_id=19662"},"modified":"2017-02-16T21:49:42","modified_gmt":"2017-02-16T21:49:42","slug":"easy-chanting","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wcwx.warnercwhite1.org\/?page_id=19662","title":{"rendered":"Chanting easily"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Easy chanting”? — You take one look at the lines below\u00a0and you think, “Easy?” — no way.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Beginning<\/span><\/p>\n

But take a second look.\u00a0All you have to know for reading this chant\u00a0is up<\/em> and down.<\/em> You don’t have to know quarter-notes or full-notes or half-notes, or anything like that. The rhythm is your speech rhythm, whatever feels right to you.\u00a0Up and down at your own speech rhythm.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The up and down is the one you’ve been hearing all your life. It’s the scale you learned in grade school —\u00a0Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do<\/em>. And you start on a note of your own choosing, whatever feels right to you. You chant up and down from there.<\/span><\/p>\n

That’s it. Plainsong is\u00a0much easier to read than modern notation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, every setting on this site has an audio file at the beginning for you to play and thus get the chant pattern into your head. That, along with the plainsong score\u00a0tells you what to sing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me give you an example.\u00a0Here’s how you see the first two verses of Psalm 90.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Chant<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Psalm<\/span><\/p>\n

You get the score, then the audio file (played by a bassoon), and then the psalm verses\u00a0pointed.<\/em> (I’ll explain the pointing in a moment.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Here I am chanting it —<\/span><\/p>\nhttp:\/\/wcwb.warnercwhite1.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Ps-90-2-verses.m4a<\/a><\/audio>\n

I start the first verse on a convenient note. It’s represented by the blank square. I chant on that note — it’s called the\u00a0reciting note<\/em> — until I come to a syllable\u00a0in red. Then I go down two notes for the syllable\u00a0our<\/em>, then up four notes for the syllable\u00a0re<\/em>, and then down for the final syllables of the half-verse (in this case, just the one syllable fuge<\/em>).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I begin the second half-verse on the reciting note and continue to the syllable\u00a0in red, where I follow the same procedure as before, except with some difference in the intervals — down two for\u00a0an<\/em>, up four for\u00a0o,\u00a0<\/em>then down one for the conclusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second verse goes the same except that this time the half-verses end on accented rather than unaccented syllables.<\/span><\/p>\n

There’s the flexibility. This why these chants are called\u00a0flexible chants<\/em>\u00a0(F-chants<\/em>).<\/em> They provide for ending half-verses either on accented or unaccented syllables. (More about this shortly.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Notice also that it’s one note per syllable. Monkish plainsong is much more elaborate. They chant many times a day for a lifetime; so they get bored and want more variety. But we want to keep it simple.\u00a0There are a couple of exceptions to the simplicity — the alleluia at the end of the invitatories and the ending notes of\u00a0one or two of the canticles. But these variations are easy\u00a0and intuitive. Here, for example, is the alleluia at the end of the invitatories —<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Alleluia\"<\/span><\/p>\nhttp:\/\/wcwb.warnercwhite1.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Alleluia.m4a<\/a><\/audio>\n

One other wrinkle occurs in the Song of Moses. There’s a very long half-verse. You can sing it on one note if you want, but for variety’s sake you can briefly drop down two notes and then come back up to the\u00a0reciting note. Here it is —<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Dropdown-Song<\/span><\/p>\n

You are reciting the long phrase,”who is like you, glorious in holiness, awesome in renown.” Above the syllable ho<\/em>\u00a0there’s an accent mark. It\u00a0tells you that you can drop down on the next syllable for two syllables\u00a0and then come back up. This is the only such reciting variation in these chants.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that’s it! You now know all you need to know about using\u00a0these chants. But if you want to know more, there’s a very good, simple introduction to plainsong at\u00a0http:\/\/www.ccwatershed.org\/Gregorian\/<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now what’s the scoop with F-chants?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When you listen to monks chanting the traditional plainsong settings you hear prayer. The words — even if you understand the Latin easily — have little significance. The chant is a means of meditation, for the monks as cantors, and for you as listener.<\/span><\/p>\n

That can be done in English, but not so well.\u00a0English moves from consonant to consonant and with a different accent pattern from Latin. In Latin the\u00a0half-verses almost always end on an accented syllable. The chants have been developed accordingly. But in English the half-verses frequently end on a textually unaccented syllable. The consequence is a mismatch between tone and text.<\/span><\/p>\n

Several attempts have been made over the years to alter the traditional tones in adjustment to this difference. They have involved adding a note or two, as needed, at the end of the first half-verse. By and large these attempts have succeeded — for the first halves of the verses. But the second halves\u00a0have retained the problem.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I decided to alter the ending half-verses in the same way. At first I tried to take a traditional chant and alter it as little as possible, but succeeded with only one — traditional Tonus IId-2, which I turned into Chant A. All of the other chants are original.<\/span><\/p>\n

So in these chants textual accent and musical accent match. The consequence is to bring out meaning. When your chant and your text go together in accent, meaning is emphasized.\u00a0These chants\u00a0thrust meaning upon you.<\/span><\/p>\n

I do not claim that chanting with meaning is better than chanting in prayerful meditation. But there it is. We have the choice.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Easy chanting”? — You take one look at the lines below\u00a0and you think, “Easy?” — no way. But take a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":19619,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-19662","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P7ETbH-578","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcwx.warnercwhite1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcwx.warnercwhite1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcwx.warnercwhite1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcwx.warnercwhite1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcwx.warnercwhite1.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wcwx.warnercwhite1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19882,"href":"https:\/\/wcwx.warnercwhite1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19662\/revisions\/19882"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcwx.warnercwhite1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcwx.warnercwhite1.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}