Gregory Camp, 22, came to GW thinking he was going to study cultural diplomacy, but then music just started taking over.

“Music is more active and it’s not boring,” Camp said. “You can study and perform it at the same time and it requires working with a team.”

But the type of music Camp is interested in is not what you would expect. For his senior honors thesis he studied Gregorian chant of the ninth century from its first manuscripts. He put together a group of nine GW students and taught them how to read and perform the neumes, an early form of musical notations made of dots and dashes. Performing the chants with the manuscripts as a guide made it a deeper, more reflective performance, he said.

Gregorian chanting sounds like dynamic meditation music with a twist of ornamentation, Camp said. He encouraged his choir to improvise and contribute personal renderings to the music. Originally, he wanted to update the neumes and get something brand-new but he ended up settling for a creative final product with a different sound.

His interest in Gregorian chanting was sparked when he spent a semester abroad studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. His class on musical paleography, the study of old manuscripts, introduced him to Gregorian chanting and he was intrigued by the ancient texts. While he was in Paris he attended three concerts a week, totaling 35 concerts by the end of his stay. He also studied abroad in Rome.

Other than French and Italian, Camp speaks a little Croatian and Slovenian. The GW Singers, a choir group for which Camp is secretary and publicist, will be touring Croatia, Slovenia and Venice this summer. Camp will not sing a piece if he does not understand the lyrics.

“If I started singing a lot of Russian music, well, then I’d have to learn Russian,” Camp said.

After a summer at home in Denver, Camp is off to Oxford with a full ride to get a master’s in musicology. His ultimate goal is a Ph. D in musicology and to teach in a university or work in arts administration.

When describing musicology, Camp quoted Dmitri Shostakovich, a Russian composer: “Our cook prepared the scrambled eggs for us and we are eating them. Now imagine a person who did not cook the eggs and does not eat them, but talks about them – that is a musicologist.”

But even though Camp, a baritone, enjoys the side to music that is neither performing nor composing, he said he plans to continue singing.

“It’s important not just to study music, but to perform it,” he said. “Take Mozart for example. The opera only matters if someone performs it.”