‘Singing Gregorian’

Gregorian chant is the oldest music in the Western musical tradition. Derived from the chants of antiquity, Gregorian chant conquered the whole of Western Europe over 1,000 years ago. From the Renaissance onwards a lot of the original finesse of this early practice was lost. We will travel back in time to the early Middle Ages, with a few simple Gregorian melodies as our guide. There was no real musical notation with staffs at the time, but the friars and priests learnt the right pitch for singing in church and used to scribble ‘neumes’ above the words as prompts.