A Beginner's Guide to Reading Gregorian Chant Notation: Learning to recognize big neumes first makes reading from small missals and chant books easier in the future.

by Noel Jones

A simple and friendly guide to reading chant notation, the easiest guide in print to make it possible to sight read Gregorian Chant in a very short period of time. In Gregorian Chant notes are arranged like a train....each note or grouping has a clear purpose and when connected to its neighbors makes up a melody. This book teaches how to see them, read them and sing them. It was created for self-teaching, individual instruction, choir training or chant workshops. Chant is the basis for all modern music notation. This book shows the simple building blocks and teaches you to quickly be able to recognize and sing the basic patterns of notes that make up all chant, from the simplest ones to the melismatic Alleluias of the Roman Gradual.

Genres: Music

Kindle Edition

First published July 28, 2008

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tonight I finished reading A Beginner's Guide To Reading Gregorian Chant Notation. Gregorian chant is the foundation of the modern system of musical notation.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is clearly a use for this little book, but it's not ready for primetime. The proofing is so bad that multiple sentences on later pages are ripped off midstream at the end of a line. For such a tiny book, it's quite a bit *longer* than it needs to be since every individual concept, however boneheadedly simple, not only gets a two page spread, in the middle of the book the author does three basic ones over again. Meanwhile some of the more confusing stuff is left very underexplained (partly via aforementioned truncated sentences).

So if you actually understand neumes, go write up a little guidebook. It would be almost impossible not to improve on this one.

[Daniel Volpato]

Excellent for someone that wants to be introduced to singing gregorian chant. It lacks a suplement (online would be nice) with the audio recordings of each of the "scores" presented. This would help those without previous knowledge of music scores. Since this supplement does not exist, some notion on reading scores is recommended.

Ideal para iniciantes, como diz o título, porém, extremamente simples. Faltou um suplemento (ainda que online) com as gravações em áudio de cada uma das linhas apresentadas. Facilitaria para aqueles com nenhum contato anterior com partituras. Como este suplemento não existe, um pouco de noção de leitura de partituras é recomendada.

[Pauline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

This is a great little book. It does exactly what it promises in very clear diagrams. I now understand Gregorian notation :0)