| For Byzantine chant, I strongly recommend immersing yourself in the music by listening to it as much as possible. Try to focus on music in your native language--if it's English, then there are more and more recordings coming out. Become familiar with the scales that are used and learn what tone each song is going with. Memorize and sing back the simpler melodies that you can manage, such as the troparia commonly sung every week. If your parish does chant, express your interest to the lead chanter and see what they have to say about learning. While we of course want everyone to be able to participate, if somebody is really off (especially with ison, which are the held "bass notes"), it can confuse people and cause a lot of chaos in the middle of a service. :) If your parish doesn't chant (meaning they only sing perhaps Russian-style four-part harmony), then you have a more difficult road ahead. It's hard to develop this skill without a mentor and without often practicing it in the real life context of the services. And it's of course nice when you don't have to lead a service while also being a beginner! I encourage you to check out https://www.byzantinebeginnings.com/ It's a unique teaching method for chant using games and exercises, rather than just reading sheet music. Although I had chanted for many years, after I took the first course I really improved a lot. A good friend of mine is involved in creating it and has used her professional teaching experience to shape its pedagogy, although it's still being refined between sessions. Finally, I strongly recommend learning Byzantine notation over using western notation, even if you are familiar with the latter. Byzantine notation is a DSL optimized for conveying the subtle rhythm and ornamentation that is often lost in translations to the western staff. The loss of this can make renditions sound stale and lifeless. As you can see in my original comment, fully translating such nuances results in way too much boilerplate! An experienced chanter can read a series of neumes like words in a sentence and know all of the musical richness to impart to it. May you have a blessed start to your Lenten journey. |