There is, as Steve notes in his blog, an other-worldly quality to chanting and the sense we have, after an hour or two in the liturgical theme-park that is the birth of polyphony, of having been in another time zone, is common to much religious music and has been a way of getting a few inches nearer to God for centuries(1).

However, it seems to me good Factory practice not only to wonder at the effects of an experiment, but to come to some rational explanation as to what elements might be at work and what the effect of their interaction might be(2). So:

• Breathing: Exhaling slowly is good for body and mind.

• Voice: Humming, which made up most the first 45 minutes of the afternoon, teaches the voice to work efficiently with limited air-fuel. A slow steady airstream causes the vocal cords to vibrate with greater intensity.

• Listening. Staying in tune requires great concentration within the group. Other noises and distractions diminish

• The mode. The notes that form a particular mode are building blocks of melody and can be used very simply, or in a highly complex way.

• Dance. This gives us a physical expression of beat and makes it easier to divide the beat into smaller units. Dancing is good anyway.

• Intoning. Intoning text pegs the words to a long note like washing on a line or pearls on a string. Since we are on one note and no longer have changes of pitch as a tool for emphasis and punching out stress is ungainly in chant, our main tool is a natural and proportionate lengthening of vowels. Since vowels carry the note, our music is richer for this lengthening

• Cadence. The text is recited on the 'dominant' and descends to the 'final' only at the end of a line. This encourages the line-endings to be a sort of resolution after the suspension of the reciting note.

• Timbre. A combination of physical relaxation, concentration, air-efficiency, exercising through a larger range than the speaking voice normally has, vowel-lengthening and sustaining of tone all give a pleasing quality to the sound. Lighter and higher, it was remarked, and with a colour that draws the ear to the sound rather than drives the sound at the listener.

A note on Modes. Though the Greeks had modes with the same names and were codified by Boethius, the 6th century theologian, the Church, or Gregorian modes come from around the 9th century. A mode is the ordering of tones and semitones to form a pattern. In this pattern is a hierarchy, in which the Final is the first, the Dominant the second, which, in a Psalm, is the reciting note on which the bulk of the text is carried. We worked mainly in the Dorian mode, which can be found on the piano by going up the white-note scale from D to D. The Dominant note in the Dorian mode is a 5th above the Final, which, if the Final is 'D', will be the A above. As is common in the Dorian mode, we flattened the 6th note of the scale, a B flat. We touched briefly on the contents of the Phrygian mode, which starts on E and goes up, again, on the white notes to the next E(3).

Singing monotonously. Of the church forms, there are two which make use of a monotone. These are psalms and prayers. As the psalm form is most adaptable to our purpose, we substituted psalm verses with iambic lines from Hamlet. We worked with a simplified version of the Dorian Psalm Tone (Tone 1) with a nice downward scale at the end. Here it is, as it appears for Psalm 110 in the Liber Usualis:

Most of the words are sung to the reciting note, on the Dominant of the mode of which there are as many as there are words to be fitted. Note that the psalm form is antithetical, with the verse being in two parts, each part separated by a colon. There is a small decoration of the reciting note before the colon, and a more elaborate cadence (in several different versions, which is why the word congregatione is repeated a few times) at the end of the verse, which, in this example, goes down a little scale to the Final, which is on the bottom line of the four-line stave.

It is important for our purposes to note that chant has no time-signature, therefore no beat, and that the syllables are not sung in a regular pulse. Like our verse in Hamlet, there are stresses on parts of words, and these, in chant, are best marked by lengthening, and not by giving them a bash. And even more than is the case with Shakespearian verse, if chant is flat-footed and stagnant, it's a real drag to hear.

It is not necessary to make this point, but to repel any doubt, I will. Hamlet, or any other Factory show(4), should never sound as if it could be wafting its way over the wall of a monastery garden. For us, it is a training tool, and part of our practice of training uphill. With that in mind, there is nothing to lose by getting good at it.










Notes:

(1) or whoever
(2) there is a lot of cash to be made running courses on chanting, with the promise of spiritual enlightement, wisdom of the ancients, healing, tuning in with nature's natural frequencies etc. But it's all quite rational and it takes neither a weekend guru to explain it nor glazed eyes and a credit card to understand it
(3) think Spanish guitar music
(4) unless things get freaky