Cantor (Christianity)

'singer'), is the chief singer, and usually instructor, employed at a church, with responsibilities for the choir and the preparation of the Mass or worship service.

Generally, a cantor must be competent to choose and conduct the vocals for the choir, to start any chant on demand, and to be able to identify and correct the missteps of singers placed under them.

Before and after the Second Vatican Council, a cantor in the Roman Catholic Church was the leading singer of the choir, a bona fide clerical role.

A common custom for cantors was the bearing of the staff, which was the mark of his dignity and a visual representative of his sacred role inside the church.

Johann Sebastian Bach (Thomaskantor in Leipzig) and Georg Philipp Telemann (Hamburg) were among the famous musicians employed under this system.

[3] In cathedral churches in the Anglican Communion, the precentor or head cantor is a member of the governing chapter, second in rank to the dean.

Still during the last centuries, the usual career was to start (after serving as Protopsaltes of other cathedrals) as the "Second Domestikos of the Great Church" who assisted the first, then to proceed in the office of the teacher, and later even to the Lampadarios, who often replaced the left choir as a soloist called "monophonares" (see Kontakarion), and finally this career was sometimes continued by the promotion to the "Protopsaltes or Archon Psaltes (ἄρχοντες ψάλται) of the Great Church" of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

The Slavic tradition—which tends more commonly to use a choir rather than a cantor—assigns no specific vestment to the chanters, unless an individual has been ordained a Reader, in which case he would wear only the inner cassock (podryasnik) and put on the sticharion when he receives Holy Communion.