More on chant

I was very happy with my lecture yesterday. Rather than just teaching counterpoint — here are the rules –do this, don’t do that, avoid this, and don’t do this because it’s not in the style — I presented a variety of kinds of chants and analyzed how we would imitate it if we wanted to. Besides the wolf howl and the whale songs, we looked at Zen Buddhist chants, a Kol Nidre chant, a Native American chant and an Arabic chant. Then I presented a whole variety of songs/compositions where chant was used as an element in modern times. Then we did some practice first species exercises on the board. Tomorrow, Mitchell Morris will be our guest speaker and will lecture on Gregorian Chant and have the class sing from the original scores.

My commercial for the day was WEAR SUNSCREEN; PROTECT YOUR SKIN no matter what color you are, and that clothing and hats are our friends in sunny SoCal.