Every cantor is different; every parish situation is unique; and we are all learning (or should be!) throughout our lives as cantors.
What y0u help you to be a current cantor?
- What skills do you need, or need to improve?
- What would you like to understand better?
- What texts or music would you like to have, that you don’t have today?
Please post your answers below!
The ability and tools to teach parish how to sing, especially children.
I would like the propers for all of the Carmelite saints as part of the Menaion.
It would be great to have online classes in Church Slavonic.
These are what comes to mind for now.
My stepson, Fr. Michael Bezruchka, has told me I need a voice tutor; I believe him. Thanks for the leads in my last course with MCI.
Better access to a more diverse set of resources.
Start working on actually going through Irmologia, teach podoben and sidalen melodies, better overviews of liturgical services so that I can deliver things to my people (and chances are my pastor as well) in an orderly and concise format.
Less focus on paralitirgical hymns (they’re paraliturgical and we should be focused on learning liturgy before we go there) and more on how to sing Vespers/Matins so that at least my lack of knowledge or ability cannot be the impediment to doing those services more regularly.
Let’s learn the hard stuff.
Teach me the Slavonic/Greek so that I understand the theology of what I’m singing and not just how one translator has decided to interpret it.
Teach me at least square notation so that if I believe my people want something I have the training/ability to do the work myself.