Considerations on the Experience of Learning and Performing Plainchant Among Non-Professional Choral Singers in a Contemporary Irish Context

Plainchant has formed a core sacred vocal repertory for Western Christianity for over a millennium, and following a surge of interest in chant as an early music repertory over the twentieth century and beyond, it has accrued particular significance for amateur choral singers involved in church music. This paper is based upon an exploratory qualitative study carried out in 2024, which examined attitudes to learning and performing chant among Irish community and church choirs, and sought to establish levels of interest in performing chant, awareness of resource availability, and perceived barriers to learning. Methods used for the study include an online questionnaire for choral practitioners, with an option for participation in focus group discussions to explore themes raised in questionnaire responses. Thematic analysis was used to explore opinions and experiences of participants as offered in open-ended questionnaire responses and focus group discussions, triangulated by quantitative data provided by closed-ended questionnaire responses. One of the major challenges iterated by choral practitioners in our study was the issue with reading square notation, a version of French thirteenth-century notation developed by the monks of Solesmes Abbey and standardised as liturgical chant notation by the beginning of the twentieth century. This issue is explored in detail in the present paper.