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Monday, August 23, 2010

How Plainsong was Midwife to Europe

This is revised from pages 245-247 of Beethoven’s Anvil, Basic Books, 2001.
Medieval Europe was inhabited by a collection of tribes and states, shot through with tendrils of Christianity following the remains of the Roman Empire and with the Islamic world pushing up in Spain. European culture, considered as a specific constellation of ideas, modes of expression, and forms of organization, hardly existed, nor did any of those people think of themselves are European. Europe, as such, originated in Christendom, and the core institution of Christendom, the Christian Church, was held together, not only by religious doctrine, but by religious ritual and practice.

Plainsong was at the center of that ritual, and much religious practice as well. During the medieval period most plainsong was used within religious communities as a daily aspect of their religious life, rather than being performed with a congregation on Sundays. While this body of music has its roots in pre-Christian music of the Jewish service, it is generally known as Gregorian chant, after Pope Gregory I, who played a major role in organizing and codifying the chants late in the 6th Century CE. These chants are generally regarded as the fountainhead of Western classical music, all of whose forms have some link to this Gregorian lineage, though many other musics will eventually be put to classical use. For this reason we can think of the classical music as developing under a Gregorian Contract.

Plainsong is pure melody, sung in unison, utterly without pulse and meter. It is, in effect, spirit without body. That is the core conception that over the course of centuries becomes stretched and modified, both by extending its own devices (e.g. the development of parallel vocal lines and then polyphony) and by assimilating other types of music, including various dance styles, whether the courtly minuet of the Baroque and Classical periods or the mazurkas beloved by Chopin.

Plainsong is also the source of Western musical notation. The earliest notation appears in manuscripts from the ninth century and makes no use of the staff that became typical of later notation. The symbols representing the notes are called neumes and appear to be derived from hand gestures used to indicate the direction of melodic flow. Neumes indicate only relative pitch, rather than the absolute pitch of contemporary notation, and note durations are not clearly represented. We must regard this notation as a mnemonic aid, signs to help one remember melodies one has heard and sung. Without that prior experience, the neumes are deeply ambiguous. It would take several centuries for neumes to evolve into modern notation.

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The various tribes, cities, and states of Medieval Europe were all, in some measure, under the sway of the Roman Catholic church, and thus of its plainsong-based ritual. Europe was dotted with communities of chanting religious, and congregations would hear chanting at church services. Plainsong thus has geopolitical implications. While Europe’s various cultures each had their own local musics, they all had plainsong as a common musical practice.

European tribes first began to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world as Christians. As such they deemed themselves superior to all infidels—such as the Arabs, who showed their inferiority by studying mathematics and drinking coffee rather than alcohol. It wasn’t until the 17th century, after the Western Church had been split by the Reformation, that the secular concept of Europe replaced the sacred concept of Christendom as a touchstone of identity.

Just as humankind originated through music-making somewhere in Africa, so Europe begins to unify through the sacred music-making of the chanting religious. As that body of music begins to differentiate and develop, it moves into secular contexts and mingles with vernacular musics. From this process, over a course of centuries, emerges the high art known as classical music—at least within the Western nations. Some of that music was written to sacred ends—for instance, the cantatas and masses of Johann Sebastian Bach. Some was written for the opera in its various forms. And some was written for aristocratic patrons, a state of affairs that continued well into the 19th century.


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Without plainsong, no church. Without the church, no Europe. Without Europe, no Western culture. Without Western culture . . . What?

Could all of those tribes have been unified under a different musical regime, one based, for example, on the musics of West Africa? In a way, of course, that’s what’s been happening since the early 20th century, when jazz and blues migrated out of America and make its way to the rest of the world, to be followed by rock and hip-hop. But that’s now, more or less. What about back then? Would it have been possible then? Or were the states of mind, the modes, engendered by plainsong necessary to the intellectual work that was central to the European enterprises of trade, commerce, technology, and science?

9 comments:

  1. Rather interesting. Been some work done on the relationship between the blues and Gaelic psalm singing and chanting.

    It seemed to focus for the most part at looking at Galic slave-owners in America and Gaelic speaking-slaves (many slaves spoke Gaelic rather than English). Examining the way Gaelic culture influenced African- American traditions.

    Youre suggestion is rather more exciting.

    Not untypical for a tradition to take separate paths for centuries and then meet up again in the age of commerce.

    Its also rather interesting in relation to the spoken word and the elizabethan stage.

    The declamitory style, traditionaly used in the theatre for speaking verse, is very similar to the vocal techniques used by some preaching traditions in the U.K. and appears very similar to African- American preaching traditions, which appear to stem from African tradition.

    Can't trace the declamitory style from a historical perspective much further back than David Garrick (18th cen. Actor/manager).

    Looks like some comparative research on this subject, may bare fruit with regard to the elizabethan stage and spoken verse.

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  2. Hello again, William:

    It sounds as though you'd be interested in Christopher Page, The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years -- I've been hearing very good things about it.

    Around 1960, while I was still a schoolboy, the abbey of Solesmes was just about my favorite place in the world, and I had the good fortune to be instructed (briefly) in chant by the then choirmaster, Dom Gajard. It's my recollection that he taught that the chant rose and fell like a bird in flight, alighting for a moment on a branch, then taking wing again -- with the momentary alighting being known as the "ictus", a term I came to appreciate even more after reading in St Augustine that "pervenit ad id quod est in ictu trepidantis aspectus" -- roughly he came upon that which is in the flash of a trembling glance.

    There's quite a chant renaissance going on at the moment within the Roman church as part of Benedict XVI's "hermeneutic of continuity", which reads the documents of Vatican II in light of tradition, rather than as an abrupt break from it.

    Jeffrey Tucker's The Chant Cafe blog is keeping tabs...

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  3. sbej -- Though I don't have a citation at hand, there is an argument that melisma made its way to North America from the Middle East through two routes, one through West Africa and the other through Ireland.

    Charles -- Years ago my friend Jon Barlow told me that when his South Indian friends first heard plainsong they said it sounded to them like old old Indian music, the kind that might have existed before the oldest currently existing song.

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  4. Wm:

    Chant Cafe just posted an excerpt with link to your post above -- you might want to drop by and leave them a comment.

    All for multiple cross-blog conversations, me.

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  5. "It's my recollection that he taught that the chant rose and fell like a bird in flight, alighting for a moment on a branch, then taking wing again -- with the momentary alighting being known as the "ictus","

    I had to learn a lot of medieval songs many years ago, it is somewhat birdlike in the way it moves. You have to spend a lot of time like a baby bird falling off the branch as well before you take flight, it takes a lot of practice.

    Ictus works rather as the momentary alighting is over in the blink of an eye (ictus oculi) but is like a pause out of time.

    Line from St Agustine reminds me of a line from one of the songs I had to learn.

    The Angel Gabriel from heaven came/ his wings of drifted snow his eyes aflame.

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  6. I went to a Catholic bookstore while back looking for a Solesmes psalter and they had nothing of that kind. I'm not a theological conservative but phasing out plainsong was a big mistake. Between 1968 and 2004 my hometown Lutheran church did the same.

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  7. .
    John:

    The title you want to look for is probably the Liber Usualis -- there are various hard copies currently on offer from Biblio.

    The whole thing is also now available online as a .pdf, freely downloadable. There's even a site where you can download the same .pdf for $10 minus small change .

    There's quite an explosion of online Gregorian chant literature, in fact -- including the scholarly basis for the Solesmes method, ie the Paleographie Musicale with its facsimiles of the early manuscripts.

    The abbey of Solesmes also has a website.

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  8. I can understand why there'd be a revival of interest in chant within the Catholic Church, Charles. But the impression I have from Chant Cafe is that the interest is much wider than that. Any idea why, apart from the general attractiveness of the music? What THAT music at THIS time?

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  9. I'd say it's at the confluence of three rivers, William.

    There's a widespread contemplative trend under way, it seems to me, that gives us everything from therapy and relaxation techniques to chanting to yoga to meditation to zen – and Gregorian chant is a suitably calming and relaxing music, notably not tied to the metronome, the bar-line, the pounding (and often testosteronic) rhythm of the drum. In these times when many dogmas seem unappealing and parochial but the spiritual quest calls to us as strongly as ever, music hath charms -- and chant, not being time-bound and hence time-binding, can bring us closer to eternity.

    Then there's also a Catholic liturgical revival, strongly encouraged by the (gifted musician and) current Pope, Benedict XVI. I'd like to note here that the Chant Cafe blog is basically a break-out of the musical aspects of the ongoing New Liturgical Movement blog -- as is only fitting, when you consider that Dom Prosper Guéranger was both the founder of the liturgical movement of the nineteenth century and the founder of modern Gregorian scholarship, as well as the first abbot of the revived Abbey of Solesmes...

    And lastly, there's the "performance on historical instruments" movement, bringing both musicology and performance practice closer and closer to musical origins – with Monteverdi's "Vespero Della Beata Virgine" leading very naturally back via Byrd and Tallis and Taverner (you see my British roots here) to Perotinus and Leoninus -- and behind them all, the chant: Gregorian, Gallican, Ambrosian. Mozarabic, Judaic...

    But the Chant Cafe blog itself – I'd say that's mainly focused on chant as a part of the restoration of a sacred and dignified liturgy within Catholicism.

    *

    I'm biased, of course -- I've loved the chant for fifty of my sixty-six years at least.

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