Gregorian Chant Research Articles

Aspects of Orality and Formularity in Gregorian Chant . Theodore Karp . Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians . Kenneth Levy .

Aspects of Orality and Formularity in Gregorian Chant . Theodore Karp . Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians . Kenneth Levy .

Review: Aspects of Orality and Formularity in Gregorian Chant by Theodore Karp; Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians by Kenneth Levy

Review: Aspects of Orality and Formularity in Gregorian Chant by Theodore Karp; Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians by Kenneth Levy

La estética musical en el medievo cristiano o un viaje estético a las formas musicales gregorianas

Speaking about musical aesthetics in the Christian Middle Age is speaking about the conditions of beauty in liturgical musical forms and, ultimately, about aesthetics in a kind that, with the passage of time, would be called «gregorian chant». And because the beauty of a musical work lies in its form, we will try to discover the human expressions contained in its repertoire: music is nothing more than the joyful or hurtful expression of human feeling because in it, the same as in the human soul, everything could be included.

Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes

The oldest written tradition of European music, the art we know as Gregorian chant, is seen from an entirely new perspective in Katherine Bergeron's engaging and literate study. Bergeron traces the history of the Gregorian revival from its Romantic origins in a community of French monks at Solesmes, whose founder hoped to rebuild the moral foundation of French culture on the ruins of the Benedictine order. She draws out the parallels between this longing for a lost liturgy and the post-revolutionary quest for lost monuments that fueled the French Gothic revival, a quest that produced the modern concept of 'restoration'. Bergeron follows the technological development of the Gregorian restoration over a seventy-year period as it passed from the private performances of a monastic choir into the public commodities of printed books, photographs, and Gramophone records. She discusses such issues as architectural restoration, the modern history of typography, the uncanny power of the photographic image, and the authority of recorded sound. She also shows the extent to which different media shaped the modern image of the ancient repertory, an image that gave rise to conflicting notions not only of musical performance but of the very idea of music history.

Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians

Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians

Solesmes High Mass—or Low?

Solesmes High Mass—or Low? Get access Katherine Bergeron, Decadent enchantments: the revival of Gregorian chant at Solesmes, California Studies in 19th Century Music, x (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), $35/£22.50. Peter Jeffery Peter Jeffery Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Early Music, Volume XXVII, Issue 3, August 1999, Pages 483–485, https://doi.org/10.1093/earlyj/XXVII.3.483 Published: 01 August 1999

Review: Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes by Katherine Bergeron

Review: Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes by Katherine Bergeron

Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes . Katherine Bergeron .

Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes . Katherine Bergeron .

Reviews of Books

Reviews of Books Get access Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes By Katherine BergeronBerkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. 1998. xv + 196 pp. £22.50 ISBN 0 520 21008 5. JUDITH BOWEN JUDITH BOWEN University of York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 13, Issue 2, June 1999, Pages 254–255, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/13.2.254 Published: 01 June 1999

Singing and Thinking: Gregorian Chant and Thomistic Philosophy

Singing and Thinking: Gregorian Chant and Thomistic Philosophy

Ethnomusicology and methodical solution of analogies of Lithuanian mono-singing folk and Gregorian chant

Ethnomusicology and methodical solution of analogies of Lithuanian mono-singing folk and Gregorian chant

Goths and Romans: Daniel Rock, Augustus Welby Pugin, and Nineteenth-Century English Worship

The Chant or music used by the Papal choir, and indeed in most Catholic cathedrals and abbey churches is, excepting in some instances, ancient. Gregory the Great collected it into a body and gave it the form in which it now appears, though not the author of it. The chant of the psalms is simple and affecting, composed of Lydian, Phrygian and other Greek and Roman tunes, without many notes, but with a sufficient inflection to render them soft and plaintive or bold and animating…. This ancient music which has long been known by the name of the Gregorian chant, so well adapted to the gravity of divine service, has been much disfigured in the process of time by the bad taste of the middle and the false refinements of the latter ages. The first encumbered it with an endless succession of dull unnecessary notes, dragging their slow length along, and burthening the ear with a dead weight of sound; the other infected it with the melting airs, the laboured execution, the effeminate graces of the orchestra, useless to say the least even in the theatre, but profane and almost sacrilegious in the church. Some care seems to have been taken to avoid these defects in the papal choir. The general style and spirit of the ancient and primitive music have been retained and some modern compositions of known and acknowledged merit, introduced on stated days and in certain circumstances. Of musical instruments, the organ only is additional in St Peters, or rather in the Papal chapel, and even then not always: voices only are employed in general, and as those voices are numerous, perfect in their kind, and in thorough unison with one another, and as the singers themselves are concealed from view, the effect is enchanting and brings to mind ‘the celestial voices in full harmonic number joined’ that sometimes reached the ears of our first parents in paradise, and ‘lifted their thoughts to heaven’.

Tropis semper variantibus: Compositional strategies in the offertories of Old Roman chant

In the introduction to the second volume of the series Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi, devoted in the main to a transcription of the Old Roman gradual Vat. lat. 5319, Bruno Stäblein drew up a perceptive assessment of the native Italian chant style, contrasting it with the melodic style of Gregorian chant, a repertoire considered by many scholars to be the result of a process of local ‘editing’ of the Roman chant introduced north of the Alps in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Stäblein quoted a remark about the singing of ‘alleluia’ from Cassiodorus' commentary on Psalm 104: ‘The tongues of cantors are adorned with [alleluia], and the Lord's basilica joyfully responds with it. Innovations are always being introduced to it with varying tropes’ (tropis semper variantibus innovatur).

Remembering James Joyce

Remembering James Joyce Eugene Jolas, Rainer Rumold (bio), and Andreas Kramer (bio) 1. Voyages of Discovery It is difficult today to project oneself from the tenebrous era of the univers concentrationnaire, with its accompanying esthétique of epigones, to that period of felicity and effervescence in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when writers of the Anglo-American literary colony in Paris competed with their French contemporaries in imagining new mental landscapes, in an atmosphere of complete intellectual liberty. We seem now to have been living in a golden age of the logos. Many of us had taken refuge from the bleakness of the Volstead regime in the more friendly climate of Montparnasse and Montmartre, and we were hell-bent on discovering new continents of the mind as well. Daring experimentation with words, colors and sounds was the chief preoccupation of an intercontinental avant-garde that extended across continents and did not pause until that day in 1929 when Wall Street “laid its historic egg.” Most of the British and Americans went home then, but a few die-hards remained until the Nazis’ attempt to conquer the Occident. In the late fall of 1926, I began preparations to launch the review the following spring. I needed an editorial assistant, and had the names of several newspapermen then living in Paris under consideration. Elliot Paul seemed my best choice and I decided to invite him to join me. He gave enthusiastic acquiescence to the plan, which included a small salary that permitted him to quit newspaper work entirely and devote himself exclusively to the task. He came to our apartment in the rue Valentin-Huy every day, and we began to discuss details with growing excitement. After a few weeks, having outgrown our dining-room table, Paul and I hired a room in a modest hotel on the Place des Invalides, where we hung out the transition shingle. Our “offices,” as Paul used to call our cluttered-up ex-bedroom (complete with all French plumbing-fixtures), were eventually to become the mecca of numerous manuscript-laden “exiled” writers from every state in the Union. For some months the problem of a name troubled us, and numerous suggestions were weighed and rejected. For a time “Bridge” and “Continents” seemed to be the favorites. Then Edwin Muir’s collection of essays appeared in London, and the title struck our fancy. We finally settled upon this same title, because it seemed best to symbolize the epoch. I insisted, however, that it be printed with a lower case “t.” As an old newspaperman, I knew that the critics would give it a howling reception, and anyway it was the fashion among many continental “little magazines” of the day. Sherwood Anderson came to Paris that winter, and we were happy to see him again. I met him at the Gare du Nord, and a news story I wrote about him brought many requests for interviews from the French press. But Sherwood did not really like Paris. He knew no French and felt ill at ease in consequence, for he was essentially the Middle Western type, and it irked him that he should not be able to talk to the workers [End Page 2] of Paris in their native argot. I can still see him standing at a little bar where he had invited some workers for a drink, smiling and trying with gestures to approach their minds. He was a frequent visitor in our house, and he also saw a good deal of his old friend Gertrude Stein, concerning whose peculiarities he entertained us. “Use your head, Sherwood,” she would say to him, whenever he lazily played with some Middle Western “notion” of his. One day he arranged to bring Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas to our home. At his insistence, Maria sang some of the American songs he had liked to hear in New Orleans. Miss Stein seemed pleased, although I doubt if her interest in music was more than platonic. With Virgil Thomson, who was also present, the conversation turned to the Gregorian chant, Antheil, Milhaud and Honegger. It was not a wholly successful evening. It constituted, however, an accurate review of our future relationship...

Composition and Local Planning of Liturgical Chant in the Middle Ages

Striking features of the communion series in the Mass Proper as laid out by James McKinnon indicate a high degree of liturgico-theological planning in the 7th to 8th centuries. As pointed out by McKinnon, however, the overall planning of the series of chants for the church year was never completed.' Within the next century the so-called import of the liturgy into the Carolingian kingdom took place. This process brought with it the final composition of the so-called Gregorian Mass Proper repertory as it has been handed down to us through the written transmission of the following centuries. In spite of different opinions among modern scholars as to the precise nature and process of the rise of such musical notations it seems that the outcome of these musical efforts in the major Carolingian monasteries although certain features of the oral past of the chants were preserved was a high degree of compositional control over the course of the melodies.2 Whereas Richard Crocker has described the Gregorian chant as marked by Roman rigour and severity in the assignment of texts and by the Frank-

Cluster on the Middle Ages in Contemporary Popular Culture: Introduction

The five essays here published were first given at a conference entitled The Middle Ages in Contemporary Popular Culture, conceived by Madeleine Jeay of the McMaster Working Group on the Middle Ages and Renaissance, organised by that group and held at McMaster University in the spring of 1996. The twenty-eight papers given at the conference explored various themes concerning the ways in which the middle ages are represented in contemporary popular culture. Among these were studies of the renewed interest in witchcraft and alchemy; organisations such as the Society for Creative Anachronism and feast-extravaganza Medieval Times, which engage in historical reconstruction; the popular interest in Gregorian chant and other medieval musics; and the "use" of the middle ages in contemporary film and other media. The aim was to give voice to this phenomenon in our culture in a manner that was sympathetic, not judgmental—a manner that took the appropriation of aspects of the middle ages in our popular culture seriously and that tried to theorise this appropriation in order that we can better understand it.

The Music of the Troubadours (review)

Reviews 149 stimulus, it is an outstanding addition to Malory studies. The book will serve a student audience extremely well and there are some essays that will make a real difference to the field. The editors should be heartily congratulated. It is also, fittingly, a beautifully presented printed book. Andrew Lynch Department of English University of Western Australia Aubrey, Elizabeth, The Music of the Troubadours, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1996; cloth; pp. xxi, 326; 1 map, 99 musical examples; R.R.P. US$49.95. There is relatively little that we know for certain about the music of the troubadours. What w e know covers such points as when it was a living tradition (c. 1100 - c. 1270), where it was a living tradition (the Midi, i.e. the South of France) and what it was about (usually courtly love). W e possess the text for about 2,600 poems and have a basic idea of the melodies of about one in ten of these. Other areas, however, including antecedents, rhythm, accompaniment, transmission processes and performance practice, have consistently caused a great deal of debate. Early scholars in the field sought to understand and embrace the entire range of medieval monophonic secular song by employing a relatively positivistic approach. They often approached troubadour music in the same manner, and through the same investigations, as other monophonic repertories such as trouvere song or the Cantigas de Santa Maria. While there are links between these repertories, they are different and the same tools are not necessarily applicable. The tools the early twentieth-century musicologists applied (such as the modal rhythm of the Parisian motets and the liturgical modes of Gregorian chant) are n o w generally thought inappropriate to the troubadour repertory. Disagreements have been c o m m o n and furious. There is the story famous amongst musicologists of the duel not fought between Jean Beck and Pierre Aubry over the subject of rhythm in monophony. (Aubry shot himself while practising and died.) 150 Reviews Modern scholars have, perhaps understandably, adopted a more cautious approach, in the growing understanding that in fact we know very little about the repertory. Scholars such as Hendrik Van der Werf, Christopher Page, John Stevens and, more recently, Margaret Switten and Elizabeth Aubrey have written of this music in an increasingly prudent style, yet arguments no less passionate, if less fatal, have continued to rage concerning this area of medieval music. It is with feelings of relief, then, that I welcome the publication of EUzabeth Aubrey's The Music of the Troubadours. Here is a chance to bring together recent thought in an orderly fashion and to make of i t some sense. It is a crusade that m a y easily have failed dismally. Fortunately it does not. Aubrey's book is, as anyone w h o has read her work would expect, a thoughtful, organised and, above all, coherent delineation of recent scholarly thought on troubadour music. She has, she says, three goals: to place the music of the troubadours in its historical and theoretical context; to elucidate the respective contributions of composers, singers and scribes to the music as it survives; and to propose n e w ways of analysing the extant melodies, (p. xvi) The first aim is the real strength of the book and succeeds with a completeness that I have not elsewhere found. The second, both thoughtful and thought-provoking, is a continuation of Aubrey's other research. The third is useful in identifying important but l i t t l e researched areas. In Chapter One, Aubrey places the troubadours in their historical context, giving a brief history of the Midi in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries before moving on to discuss briefly the forty-two troubadours whose works survive with music. In so doing, she draws in the vidas (the often fanciful 'lives' of the troubadours contained in m a n y chansonniers) as well as recent study into their history. Chapter T w o tackles transmission, investigating the thorny area of oral transmission and subsequent notation into the chansonniers. Aubrey has published quite extensively in the area of transmission and Reviews 151 manuscripts. Here...

Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David G. Hughes (review)

188 Reviews limits of Languedoc to include much of Europe and the 'frontier' states of Spain and England. She shows how the clergy huilt walls, invoked saints and retics, and applied sculptural messages to control the forces of disorder and to encourage peace', a task many would like to see better done today. John James Lawson's Long AUey Hartley Vale N S W 2790 Boone, Graeme M., ed., Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David G Hughes (Isham Library Papers 4), Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Department of Music, 1995; cloth; pp. 496; 21 plates; R.R.P. US$40.00. This Festschrift is the result of a conference held in October 1990 to honour the sixtieth birthday of the dedicatee, Robert G. Hughes, Fanny Peabody Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University. Hughes is an important scholar of medieval music who has been a seminal influence on a number of very prominent musicologists, as i s testified in this volume. His importance is despite the fact that the number of his own publications is relatively small. Probably the best known is An Index of Gregorian Chant jointly authored with John R. Bryden (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1969) which provides an index to the melodies and texts of chants in readily available sources and has been much used by students of chant. A recent significant article, and one which is cited regularly in the volume being reviewed here, is 'Evidence for the Traditional View of the Transmission of Gregorian Chant', Journal of the American Musicological Society XL, 3 (1987) pp. 377-404. The l i s t of contributors to this volume is impressive. Many of the articles concern chant and in fact many of the most prominent chant scholars have contributed, often dealing with issues of central concern to this field of musicological endeavour. As a result the book presents a valuable insight into the state of chant research in the early 1990s, and in particular into issues relating to transmission of chant, one of Reviews 189 Hughes' fields of interest. The articles are arranged alphabetically according to author with the result that one m a y be surprised by sudden changes of topic, such as occurs when Nino Pirrotta's article on Itatianfourteenth-centurypolyphonic manuscripts follows a long series of articles on chant. Charles M . Atkinson begins the coUection with an important discussion of the origin of music notation, in which he revises one of the standard theories of the subject. Through discussion of early grammatical treatises, he demonstrates that the commonly proposed 'accent theory' of the origin of notation is problematic and should be replaced by a more correct understanding of musical signs as having their source in the prosodic accents actuaUy described in the grammatical treatises and probably learnt as part of a Carolingian education. In the following paper, John Boe seeks the origins of Roman music notation through manuscript evidence, finding it perfected during the period 1020-70; a note added at the end refers to a later paper (but published earlier) where Boe presents new data that alter his previous conclusions. Thomas H. Connolly has been known for his work on Old R o m a n chant. From there he moved to the study of the R o m a n and patron saint of music, St. Cecilia. His fascinating work on the subject extends weU beyond the boundaries of musicology and wtil be of interest to scholars in various other disciplines including hagiography and art history. In this essay 'The Antiphon Cantantibus Organis and Dante's Organi Del Mondo', he presents some ideas also discussed in his book Mourning into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia (1995) including reflections on the use of the word 'organs' in an antiphon for St. Cectiia and in Dante's Paradiso, and finally moving to the symbolism in Raphael's L'Estasi di Santa Cecilia. Another essay of notable relevance beyond musicology is Joseph Dyer's exploration of aspects of the liturgy and music of medieval R o m e in which he sets out to show sources which need to be taken into account in future research and to stress the...

Catholic Church Music in Ireland, 1878-1903: The Cecilian Reform Movement by Kieran Anthony Daly

book reviews489 CathoUcs living in England, whether for private prayer or in assisting at Mass or Benediction." She notes that "those extra-liturgical forms which came to be practised with increasing regularity were devotions which had also been favourites in the recusant tradition" (p. 138). Heimann insists that CathoUcs in England "remained as English as the Scots remained Scottish," but adds that "in their holy aspiration to accept one another as CathoUcs first, despite class, ethnic , and political differences, they had also become more cathoUc in the other sense," and finaUy that "this CathoUc world within England was not an outpost of Rome but remained both an English and a Catholic community" (p. 173). The book is a fine one.The very complexity ofits subject matter should incite other scholars to further research and dialogue. RJ. Schiefen University ofSt. Thomas, Houston Catholic Church Music in Ireland, 1878-1903: The Cecilian Reform Movement . By Kieran Anthony Daly. (DubUn: Four Courts Press. Distributed by International Specialized Book Services, Inc., Portland, Oregon. 1995. Pp. vU, 189. $30.00.) WhUe this concise book is primarily a study of the Irish Cecilian movement over the twenty-five-year period that preceded the promulgation ofPius X's famous sacred music motuproprio of 1903, it also provides a European and a tantaUzingly briefAmerican perspective on an interesting cultural phenomenon in the history of late nineteenth-century CathoUcism. Founded on the liturgical imperative of ridding the sacred rites of a musical style which its proponents considered had enfeebled the liturgy by its incorporation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century secular elements, the CecUians vigorously sought a return to what they considered to be the ideal church music, namely, Gregorian chant, classical polyphony, and their modern Imitators. Yet contemporary compositions had to comply strictly with the modal/diatonic harmonic language requirements of CecUian ideology if they were to be accepted as kosher. NaturaUy true creative talent could not and would not submit to such curbs on artistic freedom, and so part of the tragedy of this movement is that nonentities were elevated as paragons of compositional virtue whUe real compositional giants such as Bruckner (who as a devout Catholic leant over backwards in his efforts to comply with Cecilian requirements) were treated with some disdain. Indeed, as an indication of the zeal of the Cecilian mind, Daly recounts how in 1877, the archbishop of Dublin, whUe presiding at a festive Mass in a city church, on hearing the Kyrie of Beethoven's Mass in C . . . sent up word to the choir to have the performance ofBeethoven's Mass discontinued, and some other listed work which was free from conditions and independent ofinstruments substituted. 490BOOK REVIEWS This account (as is much of the source material In this book) is taken from the Lyra Ecclesiastica, the journal of the CecUian movement Ui Ireland, which flourished for fifteen years between 1878 and 1893 This periodical published Usts of approved music called the white list (which clearly impUed the existence of a black list), and kept strong tabs on the music programs (and their manner of execution) of liturgical celebrations throughout the country. Central to Daly's work are studies of the three clerical leaders of the international movement's Irish section: the German, Heinrich Bewerunge, a priest of the Diocese ofPaderborn, who came to Ireland in 1888 as Maynooth's first professor of sacred music, a position he was to hold until his death m 1923:WUUam Walsh, the musicianly president of Maynooth who became archbishop of Dublin Ln 1885 and reigned until 1921,lending the considerable weight ofhis office to the implementation ofCeciUan ideals in the Uturgy; and then there wasWalsh's auxLUary Nicholas DonneUy cold, aloof, but imbued with a deep love and knowledge of CeciUan music which was developed and sustained through his annual visits to thefons et origo of the movement, Regensburg, and to other continental centers of CeciUan endeavor, and through his friendship and association with such CecUian stalwarts as F. X. Haberl, Franz Witt, and Michael Haller. As this was primarily a southern German movement in origin and organization , it is not surprising that the CeciUan society took root Ln the United States Ui the Midwest where...

Medieval Music on the Web: Musical Resources for the 21st Century

ABSTRACTThe revival of Gregorian chant at the end of the 19th century and the more recent production of monumental editions of other repertoires of medieval music have revealed the richness and beauty of the earliest European musical traditions. They have also stimulated a great deal of scholarship, so that we now know of the existence of even more music from the middle ages. The expense of printing new editions of this music and the loss of original notational information have both been overcome by a project at La Trobe University. Music from original manuscripts has been transcribed, employing custom-written software (SCRIBE) which has been used to produce musical scores in which the original notation is preserved along with the modern equivalent. These files are linked to extensive databases which correlate textual, musical and bibliographic information; some are linked to CD quality sound files. When these are linked to colour images of original source manuscripts the source, edition and audible music...