George Theodoridis has a voice and ethos that appeal to me. He’s lead chanter at the cathedral in D. C. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTHn0YuwDOM is nice because it’s one of the few recordings of his that I’ve heard which is from a real service.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tbqRP_VWVc&t=16s is a training example from him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1_CGJ7d9hc is the complete Canon of Matins for Christmas, taken at a pretty good clip – not sure which choir it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vBg9nS9m_8 is, I think, from the Boston Byzantine Choir in English.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRajIGA154I&list=PLXo1mxnBNAEndTJyziQrD5NLxxQxmIyPy is another one in English that we will hear regularly in a couple of months.

Apparently it’s not so easy to find good recordings of some of my favorite hymns.

Byzantine chant is monophonic and text-focused, so much of the spirit of each hymn is established by the scale used and the foundational note.

I’ve watched a lot of Beato’s videos. I think he’s especially good on what drives modern pop music, and why it sounds so monotonous. However, he focuses on a lot of musicians I don’t care much about and ignores many of the ones I do. I’m more inclined to listen to and enjoy the guy who calls himself the Professor of Rock.

Eye-opening and so obviously true. Every time you hear a current “hit” you’ll be asking “where’s the melody?”

I try to keep an open mind myself, though like others I’m finding I’m spending more time expanding my knowledge of older music/performers rather than listening to the rather flat-sounding modern stuff. The jazz section of my CD collection has been growing the most recently…I’m somewhere around 600 CDs and I have a long way to go.

Do you have any links to Byzantine chant or liturgical music?

Not aware of ever having heard it, or even knowing it was something significantly different in essentials from, say, Gregorian chant. ( In all honesty all that sing-song stuff sounds much the same to me … Some pleasant, mostly boring )

I do recall looking up Ambrosian Rite chant on YouTube and not really getting what was so distinct about it.

I don’t think I would know what to look for in Byzantine… So maybe you can point.

And too, expand if you like, on equal temperament. I keep thinking ” well tempered “, and I only barely grasp that in a practical sense.

As far as the RCs go; after having never darkend the door of a church in 30 plus years, I took my declining mother to Mass a couple of times in order to give my Protestant father a rest.

The wimpy, modernist, eagles soar, peace and justice sxxt they were spewing made me nearly walk out. But I could not very well leave an elderly woman I cherished sitting alone in a pew as I went off to stand and fume in a vestibule, just because of my disgusted pique at wimp.music warbled by a bunch of gay males and butch chicks.

But as for Holy Holy Holy, Faith of our Fathers, and Sanctissima … They are standard fare no more, apparently.

Even some of the music in my parish choir’s music collection makes me think “eww, really?!” when I pull it out and review it. That reaction is sometimes induced by a melodic sequence or cadence that just doesn’t seem to belong in the context, such as when the arranger sees a need to force certain traditional melodies into a four-part SATB context – one can easily end up with a soprano or alto passage that really doesn’t fit the ethos.

As often, it can be caused by the arranger’s attempt to cram the square peg of Byzantine chant (microtonal, modal) into the round hole of Western music (equal temperament and so on), which can and often does result in a certain amount of melodic awkwardness or just plain inaccuracy. (In particular, attempting to transcribe hymns originally in Byzantine mode 4 into Western notation runs a high risk of yielding particularly ugly results.)

As I occasionally try to explain to my choir, except for the straight-up enharmonic modes, it seems to me that every other transcription of Byzantine chant into Western music is inevitably an approximation at best. Some of the approximations happen to work relatively well, to be sure, but others are rather ‘lossy’, especially in the diatonic and soft-chromatic spaces.

The whole subject of liturgical text translations, which is closely tied to the music aspect, is also something on which I regularly spend my snob-vibes.

So that’s my snobby side on display.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzd8utz2tts