ficult, she said, because it's harder to find and read the notes.
Seminarian Thomas Matya also helped at the camp. He taught the history of Gregorian chant, its importance in the Church, and Latin pronunciation.
Matya, who will study this fall at the Pontifical North American Col lege in Rome, said the goals for the camp were modest, mostly to make Gregorian chant better known and better sung.
The camp offered a basic introduction to chant, Matya said, “especially for those who may have heard of it, or have sung some of the simple chants at Mass,” and are “trying to progress one or two steps further.”
“The idea was to make it pretty simple,” he said, “but also to have a little bit of fun in doing it.”
During the 10 a.m.-to-3 p.m. hours of the camp, 20 minutes of a lesson were followed by a 20-minute game or activity.
Participants – which included parishioners from St. Mary, St. Ludger in Creighton, St. Michael in Coleridge and Holy Trinity in Hartington – brought sack lunches from home, while adult volunteers provided morning and afternoon snacks.
Parishioner-led Event The camp, led by lay people from area parishes, was successful, Matya said, and helped build campers’ confidence.
“The goal wasn’t to have 40 or 50 people,” he said. “We thought, let’s have a small camp that’s actually successful. Then if people seem to like it and it works well, we can make some tweaks and maybe next summer we can run it again and expand a little more.”
Several priests stopped by during the camp’s two days, including Fathers Kevin Vogel, Will Targy and Marcus Knecht. Another seminarian, Ethan Menning, also helped.
Melissa Lind, an organist at St. Mary of the Seven Dolors who leads several youths in a choir, was instrumental in creating the Chant Camp.
She first saw a Chant Camp at a Kansas City, MO, parish and wanted to do something similar back home.
She talked with Andrew Meluch, who was enthusiastic about the idea.
Lind, who doesn’t fancy herself as a singer, said that learning chant “was a challenge mentally and vocally.”
“We’re so used to using instruments like piano and organ,” she said, plus there’s the added challenge of singing in Latin.
‘Especially Sacred’ Chant is a unique form of worship, unlike any other form of music sung in church, Andrew Meluch said.
Vatican II documents emphasized the importance of Gregorian chant in liturgy. “It’s this sort of universal music of the Church,” Meluch said. “It extends throughout all of the Western Church, at least. And it isn’t bound to any particular folk tradition or doesn’t sound like it’s from some specific country."
“It’s not even Western music as we know it now because the rhythm that it uses is totally different. And for that reason, it’s also especially sacred music. It doesn’t sound like any music that we use for any other purpose.”
Gregorian chant can be sung at Mass, as part of the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours and even as a part of personal prayer, such as the rosary.
“It really is a beautiful and enjoyable art form,” Meluch said. “It takes work to learn to sing it, but when you sing it well, people are attracted to it.”
Anna Meluch said her husband learned Gregorian chant at his high school in Cleveland. He continued learning and singing more of it while a student at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA.
“It was cool to see him be able to pass that ability to some of these kids in our area,” she said, “and to see them pick it up really quickly and be really quite enthusiastic about it.”
The couple, who sing in a choir at Holy Trinity, emphasize that they support other forms of music sung at Mass. “We sing it, too,” Anna said.
Gregorian chant is a form of worship that they’ve grown to love and enjoy sharing.
If other parishes are interested in organizing a Chant Camp, the couple would be available for support and ideas.
“We just think that this is a beautiful thing that the Church has given us that people forgot about,” Anna Meluch said. “So we want to share this beautiful thing and promote it, because the Church loves it, and we love it, too.”
Klaire said one of her favorite parts about the camp was when everyone learned a chant and went into the church to sing it. “The church was empty, and it echoed, and it was really cool.”
Gregorian chant, the eighth-grader learned, is unlike any other liturgical music.
"It's definitely different from what people usually sing,” she said. “It doesn’t sound the same, but once you learn it, you learn to love it.”
