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Gregorian Melodies Popular Chants: More Popular Chants From The Monks Of Solesmes (Latin Edition) Bo
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The changes made in the new system of chants were so significant that they have led some scholars to speculate that it was named in honor of the contemporary Pope Gregory II.[18] Nevertheless, the lore surrounding Pope Gregory I was sufficient to culminate in his portrayal as the actual author of Gregorian Chant. He was often depicted as receiving the dictation of plainchant from a dove representing the Holy Spirit, thus giving Gregorian chant the stamp of being divinely inspired.[19] Scholars agree that the melodic content of much Gregorian Chant did not exist in that form in Gregory I's day. In addition, it is known definitively that the familiar neumatic system for notating plainchant had not been established in his time.[20] Nevertheless, Gregory's authorship is popularly accepted by some as fact to this day.[21]
Gregorian chant is, as 'chant' implies, vocal music. The text, the phrases, words and eventually the syllables, can be sung in various ways. The most straightforward is recitation on the same tone, which is called "syllabic" as each syllable is sung to a single tone. Likewise, simple chants are often syllabic throughout with only a few instances where two or more notes are sung on one syllable. "Neumatic" chants are more embellished and ligatures, a connected group of notes, written as a single compound neume, abound in the text. Melismatic chants are the most ornate chants in which elaborate melodies are sung on long sustained vowels as in the Alleluia, ranging from five or six notes per syllable to over sixty in the more prolix melismata.[31]
Several features besides modality contribute to the musical idiom of Gregorian chant, giving it a distinctive musical flavor. Melodic motion is primarily stepwise. Skips of a third are common, and larger skips far more common than in other plainchant repertories such as Ambrosian chant or Beneventan chant. Gregorian melodies are more likely to traverse a seventh than a full octave, so that melodies rarely travel from D up to the D an octave higher, but often travel from D to the C a seventh higher, using such patterns as D-F-G-A-C.[45]> Gregorian melodies often explore chains of pitches, such as F-A-C, around which the other notes of the chant gravitate.[46] Within each mode, certain incipits and cadences are preferred, which the modal theory alone does not explain. Chants often display complex internal structures that combine and repeat musical subphrases. This occurs notably in the Offertories; in chants with shorter, repeating texts such as the Kyrie and Agnus Dei; and in longer chants with clear textual divisions such as the Great Responsories, the Gloria, and the Credo.[47]
Gregorian melodies provided musical material and served as models for tropes and liturgical dramas. Vernacular hymns such as "Christ ist erstanden" and "Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist" adapted original Gregorian melodies to translated texts. Secular tunes such as the popular Renaissance "In Nomine" were based on Gregorian melodies. Beginning with the improvised harmonizations of Gregorian chant known as organum, Gregorian chants became a driving force in medieval and Renaissance polyphony. Often, a Gregorian chant (sometimes in modified form) would be used as a cantus firmus, so that the consecutive notes of the chant determined the harmonic progression. The Marian antiphons, especially Alma Redemptoris Mater, were frequently arranged by Renaissance composers. The use of chant as a cantus firmus was the predominant practice until the Baroque period, when the stronger harmonic progressions made possible by an independent bass line became standard.
As scholars of Medieval music and Gregorian Chant know, the primary driving force behind the chant reforms of the Monks of Solesmes in the later nineteenth century was to restore the chant melodies to their "proper," Medieval state and to rid them of later accumulations and distortions. (It is always surprising in this context, given his importance for Latin church music in general, that Palestrina appears as the principal villain in this story, and that his edition of chant was seen by the Solesmes monks as the worst such edition ever devised.) All chant books produced since the Solesmes reforms, most notably the well-known Liber Usualis (a compilation of most of the most important chants for the most important feasts), have been motivated, then, by an attempt to collate the earliest and most important Medieval chant manuscripts and determine some sort of "definitive" or "original" version of any given chant. More recent work, on the other hand, has taught us to recognize that even during the Middle Ages, long before Palestrina and the Council of Trent, there was a great deal of regional practice and one encountered many variants, large and small, as one traveled around Western Christendom. Writing in the thirteenth century, William Durandus of Mende could also have been speaking of chant when, in the introduction to his Rationale for the Divine Office, he had this to say about the standard Latin liturgy that was his book's subject:
Whether or not, then, Dante himself had particular "versions" of certain chants in mind or thought of them as his favorites and was surprised not to find them elsewhere, the characters in his poem are more often than not singing as part of a group, and these groups do not seem to represent ethnicities or gatherings of countrymen. It seems most sensible, therefore, to approach the task of identifying chant melodies as one of searching out the most common and widely accepted ones, just those, in other words, that the Solesmes monks have tried over the years to favor.
The more common use for an antiphon is as a "response" to a standard liturgical text, most often a Psalm or the Magnificat, which serves to relate that liturgical text to the particular feast being celebrated. To do this, the antiphon is sung both before and at the conclusion of the long liturgical text and is itself brief. In the Liber Usualis the Ave Maria is applied in just this way to Psalm 121, Laetatus sum, for the much later Feast of the Rosary on October 7 (LU, 1679). Dante, on the other hand, describes the singing of Ave Maria without connection to any other text, and it was undoubtedly frequently sung in this way. These three Marian chants were among the most familiar and widely known melodies in the entire Gregorian repertory; later composers set them hundreds of time in their polyphony, and all Christians would have known them. For us today, of course, Schubert's setting has, alas, all but eliminated the simple and beautiful Gregorian Ave Maria from public consciousness.
Perhaps the most common available edition of the sung office in English is the Mundelein Psalter. This text, a joint venture of the University of Saint Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, IL, and Benedictine Father Samuel Weber, provides simple psalm tones for use in the psalter which can be applied both to psalm texts and antiphons alike, along with simplified hymn melodies. It is a popular edition among seminaries and religious houses, but while it provides a simple approach to the sung office in English, the Psalter cannot be said to be an English rendering of the true chanted office, as it treats the antiphons as simple addendums to the psalm texts, having them sung in the same manner according to a psalm tone. However, like in the Mass, the antiphons are properly liturgical moments in themselves. They are meant to provide a sort of meditative preface and conclusion to the psalm text, and therefore require the singer to linger over them with a through-composed melody.
Since the texts of most of the Proper chants of the Mass are derived from the Psalter, a book of the Hebrew Scriptures consisting of 150 poetic texts known as "psalms," it will be valuable to understand something about the singing of psalms in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Three principal musical forms were used. The simplest of these is known as direct psalmody, in which the text of the entire psalm is sung, most likely to a repeated formula (simple or elaborate), from beginning to end without interruption. Most often performed by a soloist, a verse-by-verse choral rendition amounted to the same thing. Responsorial psalmody took a form that was undoubtedly very common in the ancient world, and not only among the Jews. A soloist (cantor) sang successive verses of a psalm, also to a repeated formula, which he might have varied with impromptu embellishment. The chanting of the psalm verses was interrupted every verse (or group of verses) by a choral refrain drawn from one of the psalm verses. By the end of the fourth century this manner of singing the psalms had achieved great popularity in the West, having been introduced from the Near East.
The most convenient book with music for the Mass is the Liber Usualis, published in many editions by the monks of Solesmes from 1896 up until the years preceding the Second Vatican Council. It duplicates no medieval book but provides music for all Sundays and principal feasts of the year. The weekdays of Lent, all of which have special Masses, are not included. For these one must have recourse to the Graduale Romanum. The square notation on four staff lines in these books is based on notation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (The vertical and horizontal strokes are modern additions designed to facilitate a style of performance known as the "Solesmes method." Although unhistorical, this method produced many beautiful and evocative recordings.) Dealers in second-hand theological books will be able to supply Latin- English missals printed before 1960. These contain all of the prayers and readings, as well as the texts of the chants necessary for the celebration of the Mass throughout the year.
The revival of monasticism in the 19th century by Dom P. gueranger of solesmes abbey and the concomitant revival in liturgical studies brought about a renewed interest in the history of Gregorian chant. This chant was seen as belonging to the golden age of the formation of Roman liturgy and thus as holding priority of place in the history of sacred music. Although terms such as plainsong or plainchant (cantus planus, unmeasured chant, in contradistinction to cantus mensuratus or rhythmically organized song) also are used, Gergorian chant has become the most popular term because it can be easily differentiated from ambrosian, mozarabic, gallican, and byzantine chant. Gregorian chant was first written down in the 9th century and has continued in unbroken use in the Roman rite to the present day. In each period of music history it has been influenced by the contemporary musical idiom, and constant attempts to find out what its original character was like have bee made during the centuries. Present scholarship has unearthed many problems that remain unsolved. More important historical perspectives have been opened up by: M. Huglo, H. Hucke, J. Handschin, B. Stäblein, D. Levy, D. Hughes and J. McKinnon. Valuable contributions have been made by E. Wellesz, Dom L. Brou, and O. Strunk on the relationship between Gregorian chant and other 2b1af7f3a8