The Recovering Choir Director

What if there was a tool that would allow a chant director, academic scholar, or anyone interested in Gregorian chant to search the entire repertoire, by punching in a three- to eight-note melody, and find common melodic incipits in different chants, ordered by melody, text, or liturgical function…in seconds?

That tool now exists.

Global Chant Database was developed by Jan Koláček — PhD student of the Institute of Musicology at the Charles University in Prague. The database is intended as an easy tool for scholars and students to search and identify plainchant melodies. The primary stage of the project includes the data from the thematic catalog An Index of Gregorian chant, compiled by John R. Bryden and David G. Hughes, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1969.  The purpose of the database is to comprise the chant incipits of all important editions of plainchant and an adequate number of significant medieval manuscripts.  The melody encoding scheme is compatible with the font ‘Volpiano’ and other melody codes — this enables to make links with other chant databases.

Among other things, this tool allows people to see for themselves commonalities in the different chants of the Church.  To see these commonalities is to understand that the deeper one gets into the chant repertoire, the easier it becomes to acquire new chants.  The website itself is thorough, fast-loading, and user-friendly — definitely worthy of bookmarking.

Try it out for yourself.

(H/T: ChantBlog)