The Birth of the Staff

It's 7:09 PM on Wednesday evening as I begin to write. I've been thinking about how to proceed through this next step of my Christian musical formation for about an hour. Back on 21 July 2025, I believed I would be complementing Psalter and Psalmody with a study of world and electronic music under a project titled "Thoughts on Music." Now it seems the Holy Spirit may be calling me to focus first on Gregorian chant. I am particularly interested in learning to chant some introductory versions of the Our Father and the Hail Mary.

Paul Rose has set the stage for my aspirations with Sung English Rosary FAST, Simple Gregorian Chant Melodies (Sing the Hours). Clearly, I need to learn how to read the four-line staff, which was invented by an 11th century Benedictine monk. This four-line staff is the basis of the modern five-line staff. 

Here is the Our Father that Paul Rose chants in the above video, on a four-line staff: 

This seems like an excellent starting point. In order to help me better understand what I am looking at, I have dipped into three references:

• A simple guide to singing Gregorian chant
• A Beginner's Guide to Reading Gregorian Chant Notation (PDF)
• Basic Gregorian Chant and Sight Reading (PDF)

It looks like my next step is to learn how to warm up my voice and identify my vocal range. Then I will need to get to work on my Tone C monastic reciting tone. Google Gemini AI provides the following information:

In the context of monastic chant, specifically Gregorian chant, a reciting tone is a repeated musical pitch on which the majority of the text in a psalm or liturgical reading is sung.

The note "C" was often used as a reciting pitch in traditional monastic settings, particularly by the monks of Solesmes Abbey. 

I have to admit that I am a little nervous about this focus on Gregorian chant. I was planning to spend Sunday, Wednesday and Friday evenings making electronic and world music.