If you can’t tell Gregorian chant from the Goo Goo Dolls, help is on the way. You can take classes. Some seminarians are doing just that in Connecticut:

On Thursday nights they gather here, in this basement classroom with whitewashed walls, a banged-up piano and a wooden crucifix perched above the chalkboard.

They are five men, four in black suit jackets and white collared shirts and one in the slate gray habit of a friar. They come from places like South Dakota, Kansas City and California. All want to be priests.

With their teacher and the rows of empty chairs as their audience, they fill their lungs with air and sing the sonorous chants that are centuries upon centuries old.

Or try to sing them. Tongues trip over lyrics crafted in a dead language. Their lungs give out under syllables meant to be held for seven, sometimes 10 seconds.

But the men, all seminarians at Holy Apostles College and Seminary, are devoted to it. This is a class in Gregorian chant, one of the world’s oldest musical traditions.

And, as any of its disciples would tell you, there’s nothing quite like it in the world.

“It’s supremely beautiful. It’s deeply spiritual,” said Scott McKee, 46, a member of the class who is from Albuquerque, N.M. “There are people who listen to chant and are not Catholic, but they feel something in it that touches them.”

Gregorian chant has been a part of the Catholic Church’s heritage for over a millennium, written in a Latin text with tones that rise and fall to a cadence formed before the ninth century. There are enclaves in Connecticut where it is still practiced regularly.

But classes in the ancient art are rare. Yale has held them and plans to again next year. Specialists traveling in the state sometimes host chant seminars.

The class at Holy Apostles is unique in that it trains future priests both how to chant and how to teach it to the laity. Students learn to conduct and compose. This year’s midterm, for instance, asked students to write their own chants.

The goal is to graduate seminarians who will safeguard and spread an age-old church tradition, one that scholars say was, until the 1980s, in serious danger of tumbling into irrelevance.

“We are the Latin rite Roman Catholic Church,” said the Very Rev. Douglas Mosey, president and rector of Holy Apostles. “We don’t want the parishes to lose their rich Latin heritage. We don’t want our language and our music to just drop out of consciousness.”

How cool is that? Check the link for more on how it’s taught, and where. And start warming up. There’s also a video demonstration.

Photo: Marguerite Mullee Duncan, music director at Holy Apostles College and Seminary, guides seminarian Scott McKee through a Gregorian chant lesson recently. By Mark Mirko, Hartford Courant