Apparently, the men’s schola at the 17th International Gregorian Chant Seminar in Italy are as confused about chant as I am! Because, without even consulting me or reading about my crazy mensuralist theories, they seem to have come up with an interpretation of the offertory chant Laudate Dominum that is remarkably similar to my own.
Here is my single-take home recording, after about five minutes of study:
For comparison, here is the Seminar choir after working with one of the founding members of the International Society for the Study of Gregorian Chant (AISCGre, the group that edited and produced the Graduale Novum). As you listen, you may wish to look at the notation in the Laon manuscript (p. 74, beginning on the bottom left hand side) or else risk a case of motion sickness from the, shall we say, less than ideal camerawork in this video:
This is perhaps the most important post to date here on Euouae dot com, because if you believe that these two renditions are similar, that is evidence that my forthcoming chant method is in fact a practical way to sing chants from the Graduale Novum the way the editors of that volume intend for it to be used.
I considered calling this post “Chironomic Neumes of the Adiastematic Manuscripts from Metz and Einsiedeln” just to make me look smart. But I have come to realize that some of the unnecessarily complicated jargon associated with Gregorian chant can be a stumbling block for those who want to learn to read the comparatively user-friedly manuscript notation.
Eric Estrada
Everything starts out simple enough, with a single dot called a punctum. Even the names of two-note groups are easy to master: in a pes the second note is higher; in a clivis, the second one is lower. When we have three-note groups, however, there are more melodic possibilities: low-high-low (torculus), high-low-high (porrectus), low-high-high (scandicus), and high-low-low (climacus). By the time we get to four-note shapes, it starts getting ridiculous, with compound names such as pes sub-bipunctis, porrectus-flexus, and torculus-resupinus. Then, after going through all of that, the Solesmes method tells us — wait for it — that all of these groups are performed exactly the same way!
For those who find the nomenclature as unsatisfactory as the method, I have produced a little chart containing the fundamental note shapes from the Laon and St. Gall manuscripts along with their English names.
Here we have two recordings of today’s Communion chant, Laetabimur. The first, from St. Benedict’s in Sao Paolo, Brazil uses the organ to provide a harmonic accompaniment:
When we performed this chant today at the French National Church in San Francisco, I decided to use an organ drone:
Neither of these practices is justified by the notation itself, so I cannot make an argument for or against their “historical authenticity” based on manuscript evidence. But I will ask, does the addition of the organ help to bring rhythmic vitality to the chant, or does it stifle the suppleness of the Gregorian composition?
For those interested in chant accompaniment, there’s no better online resource than the Leland Library of Rare Books, which also hosts a number of treatises on the subject. If nothing else, these collections provide valuable insight into various rhythmic theories that have been in practice in the previous two centuries.
Adam Bartlett (English chant pioneer, disciple of Columba Kelly, and otherwise stand-up guy) has publicly accused me of espousing Mensuralism (the belief that music, including Gregorian chant, has any sort of discernible rhythm), which he states was “one of Cardine’s greatest fears.” Cardine! Who wrote THE BOOK on Gregorian Semiology. What was it called again? Oh yeah: Gregorian Semiology.
Apparently, Cardine and Kelly, both of whom devoted their lives to studying the notation of medieval manuscripts, have come to the conclusion that the length of the notes in Gregorian chant “cannot be measured.” Now, I remember when Robert Shaw once told us in a rehearsal that “music is based on the belief that time can be measured, and that anyone who has ever held someone’s hand while they were dying or being born knows that it cannot.” It was touching, really. But then he went on to lead a hundred and fifty people in count-singing every single subject and counter subject in the contrapuntal sections of the Brahms Requiem. Why? Because Robert Shaw was a mensuralist.
The idea that Gregorian chant could have been passed on through oral tradition for centuries before it was written down without any sort of “measurable” duration of notes is far-fetched enough. But when you examine a number of independently produced manuscripts that in all but a few cases agree with one another about which notes are long and which are short, it’s hard to believe there wasn’t some sort of regularity to them, some way to measure the lengths of notes.
But who knows? Maybe I’m wrong. So before I put any more time into developing a practical method for normal people who are not medieval scholars to actually sing this stuff, I guess I should try to find out if I’m just totally bonkers.
Here is a recording of me singing the Introit Rorate caeli as it appears on p. 15 of the Graduale Novum. Again, as in my previous few recordings, I did not spend hours studying this chant. I just looked at the limited information about pitch and rhythm found in the Graduale Novum and sang what it appears to say. Then, for comparison, I have superimposed Columba Kelly’s rhetorical analysis (which IS the result of many hours of study, in addition to textual and modal analyses), where he uses small, medium, and large notes to indicate normal, augmented, and diminished syllabic value. [Note: he uses a different source for the actual pitches, so we're primarily concerned with the rhythm].
With one exception (the first syllable of “super,” which anyway I think I hold a little bit too long), these do not appear to me to be in wild disagreement. But maybe that’s because my judgement has been clouded by mensuralist brainwashing. What do you think?
When what we now call Gregorian chant was first written down around the 10th century, scribes used symbols called neumes to notate the ornate melodies. The earliest manuscripts do not give precise indications of pitch, since the notation served only as a memory aid for notes that were already committed to memory. The great variety of symbols must therefore represent a diversity of rhythm. This is the foundation of the field of study known as Gregorian Semiology.
We come to our conclusions about the rhythm of 10th century chant not by mere speculation (as skeptics of the most recent research would have you believe), but by comparing numerous manuscripts and methodically decoding the meaning of the various neumes. In some cases, however, a particular chant might only appear in only one manuscript. How, then, are we to be certain of its interpretation? Take a look at this excerpt from the mode VII gradual Audi filia sung by members of Euouae according to the notation found in the Cantatorium of St. Gall:
Since this chant does not appear in the Laon manuscript, you might think it was impossible to confirm our rhythmic reading. However, substantial portions of this melody also appear in another mode VII gradual: Salvum fac populum tuum, sung here by our friends in Lisbon, Portugal according to the three-line notation in the Graduale Novum.
Here’s another phrase that is common to both chants:
While the stylistic interpretations of the two ensembles are quite different, the rhythmic readings are actually remarkably similar. (And I think if you asked either director, we’d probably admit that these single-take live recordings do not necessarily reflect our absolute ideal performances). The fact that we independently arrived at near identical readings (in terms of rhythm) leads me to believe that a practical method for performing chant according to the 10th century practice can be taught with as much consistency as the wide-spread Solesmes method. It is not, after all, rocket science:
Or that’s what some of the folks over at the New Liturgical Movement would have you think. The responses to a repost of my side-by-side comparison of the Solesmes method v. the Rhetorical approach range from the politely skeptical (“I doubt whether the second recording is fully representative for the semiological method”) to the vitriolic (a now-deleted comment that said something to the effect of “if this is what chant sounded like in the Medieval period, no one would want to restore it now”).
In response to one reader who commented that I was “clearly not interpreting the St. Gall semiology [sic]” (I think they mean “paleography”), I decided to challenge myself:
1) find a chant in the Graduale Novum that contains only St. Gall neumes, and not Laon notation.
2) record Solesmes and rhetorical versions of that chant
3) compare the result to pre-existing recordings in the Solesmes and semiologically-informed methods.
Well, the perfect chant presented itself — Dicit Dominus: Implete, from the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time. I can hardly call this a “rhetorical” performance in that I didn’t spend a long time practicing or trying to really get the feeling for “how it goes.” I am simply giving an honest reading, pretty much at sight, of the rhythm of the St. Gall notation using the pitches from the Graduale Novum. Again, for comparison, I have included the version from the Solesmes edition.
As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. Is my reading, as one reader commented on my previous post, “just an idosyncratic interpretation, and not one that actually renders neumes consistently”? Let’s see how it compares to Turco’s reading of the same chant:
Now, let’s hope that Turco’s group spent more than two minutes studying this chant before they decided to record it for a commercial release. And let’s lay aside the fact that it is given a nuanced performance, with an ensemble (not a solo voice), and in a lovely acoustic. Also, it’s clear that Turco is working with a different source for the pitches than the Graduale Novum version. Looking only at the rhythms, i.e. the long and short notes, you will find that they are largely in the same place as in my reading. The fact that the two of us came to such similar readings independently of one another leads me to think that my performance is not capricious.
The ways in which they disagree are the last note of the cursive torculus (which I treat as a long before a new syllable, by convention) and the first note of what I had instinctively guessed might be a torculus initio debilis (which is difficult to confirm without the more explicit Laon notation to compare). I admit I might not be reading these two in the same way they were performed in the 10th century, but I am an confident that in the absence of another manuscript with which to compare, this is at the very least a plausible interpretation.
Oh, and if you want to double check my Solesmes method singing, you can compare it to the version at jogueschant.org.
This past Sunday’s communion chant Aufer a me provides an excellent example of the difference between the versions in the 1908 Vatican Edition and the 2011 Graduale Novum. [N.B. - The version from gregor-und-taube.de pictured in the video is identical to the melodic reading found in the GN].
Rather than writing a lengthy article for this week’s post, I will let the music speak for itself:
During a choral rehearsal my freshman year in music school, the conductor informed us that auditions would be held later that week for solos in Faure’s Requiem. A young baritone announced, “Well, I guess I had better brush up on my French!” only to discover that the piece was actually composed in Latin. The next semester when auditions were being held for the Brahms Requiem, the same baritone (thinking he had learned from his previous mistake) proudly exclaimed, “Well, I guess I had better brush up on my…. Latin!“
What does this have to do with the debate over the reconstructed regional variations in the pronunciation of Latin that seems to be de rigeur among today’s performers of so-called early music? Probably nothing, except that it is about as silly. And that maybe sometimes we try too hard to get things “right.”
I don’t dispute the idea that Latin pronunciation was likely as varied in medieval France, Germany, and Italy as English in Sydney, Boston, and Tuscaloosa is today. The difference is that today we have an international standard for the performance ecclesiastical Latin. For me to ask my ensembles, made of up of native and non-native speakers of English, to imitate when performing Lassus the way a native German speaker might mispronounce ecclesiastical Latin has always seemed to me to be completely absurd.
Besides, in addition to directing the professional Medieval ensemble Euouae, I am also employed by the Church and hope to bring the treasury of chant and polyphony that for decades has been all but banished to the concert hall back into the liturgical context for which it was intended. That is true authenticity! So as unfashionable as it may be among the early music crowd, I use modern church Latin for my performances of sacred music, regardless of whether it is 10th or 15th century, or if it was penned by a English composer of German descent who was employed in an Italian church with a choir full of French singers.
I came to this decision when I was attending a concert of early polyphony performed by the Gregorian Ensemble at Notre Dame while I was in Paris with the Choirs of San Francisco’s Notre Dame des Victoires a few years back. I noticed that the group sometimes used French vowels on words like “Sanctus” (as in the French “salut”) and even nasals on words that ended in -em or -um.
After the concert, the organist from La Sainte Trinite (where we had performed earlier in our trip) offered to introduce me to the conductor. Here was my chance to ask the chant director at Notre Dame in Paris about period pronunciation of Latin! Perhaps I would finally put to rest what at the time had been a heated debate with one of my colleagues. So I went up to the maestro, told him how much I had enjoyed the performance, and asked (in my best French) why it was that some words were pronounced as if they were French. Was it for historical authenticity? issues of vocal technique? acoustical considerations? He smiled and said (in English), “Why? It is because my singers do not listen to me.”
