Men’s choir was an enchanting experience

I have often publicly stated that I cannot read music. I don’t know a C from a B or an E from an F. I don’t know a sharp from a bass clef. The terminology is lost on me, sort of like a foreign language that I can’t read or translate.

Having said that, I have also stated many times that I like to sing — as long as I’m not asked to do a solo. I like the anonymity of being a chorus member so that if a mistake is made, I can always pretend that someone else did it.

That explains why about 20 years ago I allowed myself to get talked into singing in a new men’s choir at our church. Our liturgist at the time, Ellie Costello, started a group she called the Men’s Chant Schola.

There were about 10 guys, and I suppose we really should have been called a “schola cantorum” (a school for chant) because a lot of our rehearsal is spent being taught the chants we are to sing. We sang in the choir loft high above the main floor so that our music filled the church without any amplification.

One of the reasons I decided to participate in the group was that I had some very clear memories of having learned some Gregorian chant music when I was a kid at St. Anthony School in Oconto Falls, back in the days when we still used Latin in the Mass. We had a nun, Sister Aidan, who was our principal and taught seventh and eighth grades, and she used to drill us on the notation of Gregorian chant.

I’m not sure why, and I’m pretty sure we never actually sang it, but we learned about it. Music class at St. Anthony in those days consisted mostly of singing songs from the Golden Song Book on Friday afternoons. (Maybe it was called the “Golden Book of Favorite Songs”?)

Gregorian chant is very closely tied to the image of Catholic liturgy.

If you watch any documentary that mentions the church or the pope, what music do you hear playing in the background? If it isn’t Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” then it’s probably chant. In most of our parishes today, there are at least two generations who have grown up never having heard or sung any Latin chant.

There are many kinds of chant in the Catholic liturgy. Gregorian is the most common, and it’s from the pure Roman tradition. Its origins are obscure, but we know that during the time of Pope St. Gregory in the late sixth century, it was collected, codified, and refined and it continued to be written for many centuries.

Don’t worry. I’m not about to display my vast knowledge of Gregorian chant; I’d just like to have you think in a little different dimension for a few minutes.

My memory of the chant music we learned back in grades seven and eight is pretty sketchy; my memories are more about the process and the memorization we had to do. I can’t remember much about the actual singing, just the chant notation itself.

In the Gregorian system of notation, the staff had four lines instead of five as in modern music. The notes, for the most part square in shape, are placed on the lines or in the spaces between the lines as in today’s music, but the notes had funny names.

I can’t remember them all, but there was a “punctum,” a square note, which was the most common. There was a “rhombus,” which was a diamond- or lozenge-shaped note (it was shaped like a rhombus). There was a “quilisma,” which was a squiggly note. There was another note that had a tail, but I can’t remember what it was called.

It’s funny how things stay with us, isn’t it? Stuff I learned more than half a century ago is still floating around up there in the gray matter, but I sometimes forget why I went to the kitchen.

Still, the memories from those days of grade school come back to me each time I went to Men’s Schola practice. I like that. Unfortunately, the men’s schola group was sort of short-lived.

Contact Roger VanHaren at rjmavh@gmail.com.