Chant at St. Joe

Amy and I held a "recording session" with Youth Choir to make a memory CD for them. They sang Christus factus est (recording here), and I was really pleased at how well they all remembered it. They learn melismatic chant MUCH, MUCH more easily than adults. I think I'll add the recording to the Chant Index.

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Rehearsal with the adult choir went well, I thought. We rehearsed Spiritus Domini in church. We:

* touched briefly on how everyone thought Regina Caeli went last Sunday. Comments were positive.
* rehearsed the translation verse, english verses and Gloria Patri, mentioned names of neums, touched on the phrasing of the neums (stronger on the first tone, comparable to singing a two-note slurred passage in modern notation).
* (I had hoped to rehearse the three alleluias of the antiphon, but ran out of time. We have two more rehearsals.
* I sang the antiphon, asked whether they were starting to hear the music in it, starting to see what's notated.

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One choir member, Rose, had said something to me Sunday, about "We are used to having notes." Of course, I know that all of us American church musicians (and everyone in general) have let our oral/aural skills atrophy. I'm not trying to make anyone uncomfortable.

I'm convinced, though that "sacrament" has something to do with using our somatic and mimetic cognitive patterns to interact with the somatic and mimetic cultural web. So I'm sticking to an emphasis on oral transmission and imitation.

However, that doesn't mean that as we bootstrap bringing chant into parishes that we can't use all tools available. So, before rehearsal, I had put in some time making a "standard-notation"version of Spiritus Domini. I didn't give it out, though. I might. I might not. It was an interesting exercise for me, and might be conceptually useful, but NOT NOT NOT NOT as a starting point.