ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Grègue

Grègue, also known as Gregorian chant, is a very old and special way of singing that people used to do a really long time ago. It is named after a really smart man named Pope Gregory, who helped make it popular.

So, imagine you are in a big, beautiful church with lots of people. Instead of singing in a normal way, like the songs you might know from school or TV, everyone sings together in a very special way called grègue.

First, you need to know that there are different notes in music, like how when you touch different strings on a guitar, they make different sounds. In grègue, this is called a scale. There are seven different notes in the scale, and they are named after the first seven letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

When people sing grègue, they start on a special note called a tonic, which is like their home base. From there, they go up and down the scale, but they always come back to the tonic. It's like when you are playing a game and you run around for a while, but eventually, you go back to your starting point.

The singers in grègue use their voices to create beautiful melodies. They use something called "neumes" to help them remember what sounds to make. These neumes are small symbols that show the shape of the melody. It's like when you have a puzzle with pictures and you try to match the shapes together to solve it.

But grègue is not just about the melody. It's also about how the words are sung. The singers stretch out the sounds of the words and make them sound really pretty. It's like when you are reading a story and you pause at some words to make them sound more exciting or give them more feeling.

Grègue was very important in the old times because people used it to sing prayers and religious texts in the church. It made the words sound even more special and helped people feel closer to God. That's why it's usually sung in Latin, an old language that was used in religion a long time ago.

Today, grègue is not as popular as it used to be, but some people still sing it in churches or special occasions. It's a way to keep the tradition alive and remember how people used to sing a very long time ago.