Thursday, 13 October 2011
How should we sing Gregorian chant?
Jeffrey Tucker today posted on the NLM the above video comparing two ways of singing the same communion antiphon (Aufer a me.) One is the Solesmes method and the other is the "Rhetorical method" which I have not come across before.
When I visited Talinn a couple of years ago, I experienced chant sung by a group that was enthusiastic for ancient music and interpreted the chant in a way that seemed to have a universal quality in that it would remind anyone of Jewish, Islamic or other sacred music that probably has similar roots. Since then, I have discovered the work of Ensemble Organum and others who also try to recover ancient ways of singing the text. Here is my favourite, the Kyrie Cunctipotens:
Without in any way denigrating the work of Solesmes, I think that in these times when Gregorian chant is being revived in many places throughout the world, it is useful to discuss how it can be interpreted and executed in the sacred liturgy.
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13 comments:
AQ musician friend told me some years ago that a Jesuit wrote a treatise saying the Solemnse method was wrong. I prefer the Solemnse methos to the Rhetorical in the two extracts.
Loved the Kyrie Cunctipotens. What a wonderfully resonant sound.
Not too keen on either of the two versions of Gregorian Chant. Thankyou for the chance to hear something, to me very unfamiliar.
I really found the Solemnse method unpleasant; totally lacking in feeling for either the music or the text - like computer speak.
The Rheotorical was better, though somewhat contreversial in interpretationn.
My favourite exponents of the Chant are Anonymous 4 - which perhaps identifies my musical prejudices.
That is thought provoking. The Solesmes method example pleases my ear better and is more "meditative" and I think I like it better for prayer, but the "rhetorical method" is not entirely unlovely and makes the Latin words easier to listen to which would be helpful if I understood Latin. I have a feeling it is not going to widely replace the Solesmes interpretation.
The "Kyrie Cunctipotens" is gorgeous.
Sr Bernadette said that the Ward Method, which is perhaps more widely known now in the US than the UK, is how they sang at Solesmes fifty years ago. Justine Ward did not follow some of the scholarship being undertaken there at the time. SrB is able to listen to seemingly any recording and in addition to identifying the religious community can tell you which type of interpretation they are following.
There exists a vast and very different repertoire, written across several centuries, some of which has been sung for well over a millennia, across a wide geographic area by people ranging from professional musicians, religious in enclosed communities to lay Catholics hacking thro' Mass VIII of a Sunday. As your example from Tallin shows, we do not even have a fixed idea of how the seven pitches in a mode relate to each other - presumably in the past people did indeed sing using differing temperaments. Add in wildly different acoustics, people who speak different vernacular languages. Additionally, consider how you want to approach the idea of committing a musical tradition to paper whether on a staff or in neumes and how free you feel about the the interpretation of notation, how you behave in a group of singers, and how all this has to work in the liturgy and be Catholic and we have quite a number of variables to sift through and therefore not a unique solution to the question of how to sing chant, any more than there is a unique answer to how to play Chopin on the piano or what an orchestra should sound like. I do not believe singing chant fits into Catholicism in the way that there are absolute rules regarding attendance at Mass on Sunday, for example. You cannot apply a binary approach to singing music, which is why the choir blog has that quote from the Pope regarding listening.
The Solesmes method is what I'm used to and I love it. The Rhetorical (I'd never heard of it) is very different - to my tin ears it sounded like Eastern chant.
Dear Leutgeb - many thanks indeed for your comment which combines musical erudition with practical experience of actually singing the texts on an ordinary Sunday in an ordinary parish.
Hmmm. Not sure about the Rhetorical method. It sounds vaguely oriental - evoking images of a muezzin in a minaret! But certainly preferable to the “Gelineau Psalms” that were foisted upon us back in the 60s… I can’t remember what exactly it was about them that turned us off. Possibly to our Celtic ears and, pace Solesmes, they sounded too French….:)
The late Dr. Mary Berry taught Gregorian Chant to hundreds of lay people in her classes. Although I learned it in school as a very young child-eight years old, via the Sisters of the Holy Cross, I found Dr. Berry's interpretations clear and good. However, as I learned Solesmes so long ago, I am more comfortable with it.
There has always been much discussion among Gregorian Chant buffs on Solesmes or not Solesmes. What we do owe that great place is the revival of the chant and the keeping up of the tradition.I suggest a look at http://www.solesmes.com/GB/gregorien/forme.php?js=1 and http://www.scholagregoriana.org/
Thanks to a very talented visiting Australian we had beautiful organum at the Masses on the LMS pilgrimage from Ely to Walsingham this year. It's a common feature in the FSSP parish in Sydney. I'm no chant expert, but I really like it and I know a lot of people who say that it helps them to pray.
The quest for 'authenticity' in musical performance can produce new insights and inform performance practice but is not the be-all and end-all. We are told that large-scale performances of 'Messiah' are Victorian and inauthentic and yet the centenary of Handel's birth in 1785 was marked by a performance of that work in Westminster Abbey with massive choral and orchestral resources (this was a mere quarter-century after the composer's death - in the audience was Joseph Haydn). No-one now would approach Beethoven in the way that Otto Klemperer did, yet the latter was born only 58 years after Beethoven's death, and his 1964 recording of the Missa Solemnis is unsurpassed.
What we usually know as the Solesmes method has been overtaken by modern scholarship, not least at Solesmes itself. Groups like Organum can give us some fascinating insights but their interpretation is conjectural. We don't have first millennium voices or ears (which we believe coped with microtones) and Gregorian Chant is for all time. There is no right or wrong way of singing it, as long as we remember to give primacy to the text. I have heard good singers sing Chant with immaculate intonation and ensemble but who effectively ruin it because they don't understand the meaning of the words they are singing.
There second video, although very beautiful, has a choir with a woman. The whole idea of chant is melding of voices singing the same tones so that one hears one voice. A mixed choir where one has tenors and then altos cannot chant plainsong; this video shows a polyphonic version.
Women should not sing at Mass in the Chant Choir.
Quite a number of years ago I was part of a group which sang medieval polyphony in humble old Stoke-on-Trent. The Cunctipotens Kyrie sung in modified organum at the fourth, as in that recording, was one of our stock pieces of organum singing. Apparently (if my memory serves me right) it comes from a manuscript from Notre Dame de Paris from the 11th century. Back in the late 80s, that sort of things was not welcomed in Catholic churches, and we ended out only being asked to sing in Anglican churches. I could only dream of the day when our anti-cultural, anti-intellectual English Catholic Church would accept its own treasures in the context of the liturgy for which it was created. I hope that day is now dawning.
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