Allison Mondel held a three-hour workshop on singing the chant of Hildegard von Bingen in DC this past Saturday, as part of the DC Early Music Festival. I attended and it was awesome.
The focus of the workshop was on reading and performing from Hildegard's original notation. While she did use a four-bar staff with C clefs, she did not use the square neumes that I usually associate with chant. Everything was much more... cursive. Happily for me, it looks rather like what little I've seen of the Winchester Troper's notation, although I don't think the Troper has bar lines at all.
There are times when I'm glad I'm not a "paper trained" musician. This was one of them. People who are used to being able to sing by sight-reading seemed a lot more uncomfortable.
Allison lives in Baltimore but will be moving to Silver Spring. I am very much considering signing up for some vocal coaching. I expect to be somewhat torn - I really love exuberant chest-voice singing, while the "official early music sound" is more in the head and mouth and a lot more pure-toned. But I think I would like to learn the technique, even if I set it aside occasionally, and I would really like to learn how to "tune" properly (Pythagorean-ally?).
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