# Style in Gregorian Chant



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

I know this is a bit off the wall for this forum, but you never know who’s passing through a place like this. 

I have listened to quite a bit of Gregorian chant of liturgy over the years on recordings. I am quite at a loss to understand style. How do I know what makes a chant “ performance” a good one? What are the elements of interpretative discretion to look out for? They clearly make decisions about how explosive and large to make the consonants and attacks, and how to colour the sounds, but is there anything else? Do chanters use any kind of rubato, for example? (Is there a pulse?) Or dynamic contrasts? How do they decide about tempo changes or indeed “basic” tempo? Do they make their own decisions about articulation? Phrasing? When they sing together do they use microtones to create interesting harmonies? Or do they decide for themselves how seamlessly to blend? 

And when they chant, what are their musical objectives? 

Anyway, any guidance about these things would be much appreciated, even if it’s just a pointer to a book or article (provided it’s obtainable!)


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## Kjetil Heggelund (Jan 4, 2016)

http://www.unamsanctamcatholicam.com/liturgy/78-liturgy/258-four-traits-of-gregorian-chant.html
Your questions made me wonder so I found this little article. Maybe it answers a part of what you asked for. I only seldom listen to Gregorian chant myself. I would, if I could, rate a performance like I do the renaissance music I listen to. That is keeping it nice and calm with angels singing


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

When I hear chant I listen for the genuine spiritual serenity of the performers. It has to be real and more than just a performance with only musical considerations.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

I just want to say I love these Chants!


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

We do not know much about the particular vocal stylings or performance practices used for Gregorian chant in the Middle Ages. Because of the ambiguity of medieval notation, rhythm in Gregorian chant is contested among scholars. Common modern practice favors performing Gregorian chant with a free flowing pulse, with no beat or regular metric accent, largely for aesthetic reasons. The text determines the accent while the melodic contour determines the phrasing.

Rubato, in the sense of taking time from one note and giving it to another, thus anticipating or delaying beyond the beat or prolonging a stressed note at the expense of a following one, is seen in the letters denoting rhythmic nuances sometimes found in early Gregorian chant manuscripts. Speaking in general terms, an ascending melody tends toward a dynamic crescendo and a descending one, toward a dlminuendo. These are tendencies, not laws.

As for musical objectives when singing the chant, I quote the words of Dom Desrocquettes from the introduction of his book: "In singing the melody or the words, everything must be at the same time prayerful and artistic, flexible, natural and true. Even technical points become interesting when we understand how they serve the spiritual side, translating for us and infusing into us the truth and feeling expressed or suggested by the words."

Mandryka, I think you'll find these online texts useful. I have.

https://media.musicasacra.com/books/gregorianmusicalvalues_desrocquettes.pdf

https://media.musicasacra.com/pdf/ward5.pdf


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

I thought that the term "Gregorian Chant" referred to a body of music that was reviewed, curated and then distributed/considered to be the group and form of chants approved by the Catholic Church in Rome sometime after the age of Pope Gregory. Then, there was a diverse group of other types and collections of chants that did not conform to the CCinRome--these were unique collections in the Catholic Church in numerous and diverse locations in Europe. These types of chant practices were grouped under the umbrella term "plein" chant. 

First. Is this true.

Second. If it is true are there "official"/musicological names for all these other traditions?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

RICK RIEKERT said:


> We do not know much about the particular vocal stylings or performance practices used for Gregorian chant in the Middle Ages. Because of the ambiguity of medieval notation, rhythm in Gregorian chant is contested among scholars. Common modern practice favors performing Gregorian chant with a free flowing pulse, with no beat or regular metric accent, largely for aesthetic reasons. The text determines the accent while the melodic contour determines the phrasing.
> 
> Rubato, in the sense of taking time from one note and giving it to another, thus anticipating or delaying beyond the beat or prolonging a stressed note at the expense of a following one, is seen in the letters denoting rhythmic nuances sometimes found in early Gregorian chant manuscripts. Speaking in general terms, an ascending melody tends toward a dynamic crescendo and a descending one, toward a dlminuendo. These are tendencies, not laws.
> 
> ...


Thank you, Rick, that looks very interesting. You're a brick!

I've started to get very interested in chant because I've been inspired by Marcel Pérès's book Les Voix de Plain-Chant, if you can read French I recommend it enthusiastically. He is very anti-Solesmes, which he argues is a 19th century aberration founded on inappropriate philological principles.

Mary Berry makes some comments on chant style in her book _Plainchant for everyone _



> *Alternatim*
> 
> Another whole area of adventurous chanting is the field of alternatim - the reconstruction of polyphonic or organ music involving the alternation of sections of chant with sections of measured music. If your choir is used to singing Renaissance music, search out some of the hymn settings by composers such as Tallis or Palestrina, and sing the alternate verses using the chant of the period. For you must remember that the style of chant performance in the sixteenth century was entirely different from the way in which the chant is usually sung today. By and large, singers today are all attempting to reproduce what they think the chant would have sounded like when notation first appeared: roughly, in what they consider to have been the style of the tenth century. The evidence seems to show that in the tenth century, when the chant was still a living oral tradition, it was sung quite fast, with lightness and delicacy and rhythmic variety. Over the centuries, however, the tempo had become progressively slower, so that if you want to give a really authentic performance of a Palestrina or Tallis hymn-setting, the chant sections will have to be sung in slow, equal notes, very firmly and deliberately. The result, far from being boring, is astonishingly splendid and very moving. It is a marvellous experience to sing it in this way, and it is not difficult to involve the whole congregation in the singing of these sections.
> 
> The same principle of authenticity applies if your choir is called upon to sing the chant sections in a performance of a seventeenth century organ mass, such as Couperin's `Messe pour les paroisses'. It would be a complete anachronism to sing the chant sections in these performances as if your choir was Solesmes under Dom Gajard. Each note of the chant should really be sung about as slowly as one bar of the music, and there would be a semi-metrical interpretation of certain words, particularly the dactyls. Incredible! Yes, but extremely effective and moving in performance. That sort of reconstruction requires a great deal of homework, but the standards of authenticity in performance are now such that we cannot get away with howling anachronisms in liturgical music. Ideally, too, these works should be performed in their liturgical context.


 But unfortunately she does not spell out her reasons for saying that 10th century chant was light, fast and rhythmically varied; or that 16th century singing was slow and deliberate. I can't even begin to imagine where she gets this sort of idea from in fact. Maybe someone else here knows.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

You might also look at Rev. P. Suitbertus Birkle, O.S.B _Method of the Solesmes Plain Chant_ for a discussion of how and why to sing chant. This is direct from Solesmes.

If you look at the Liber Usualis compiled in the late 19th century by the monks at Solesmes you'll see an enormous variety of chant adapted to the different seasons of the year. There are references to two versions of The Liber Usualis. The earlier version has a discussion of the music in the decent obscurity of the Latin and presents the tunes in modern notation. The later version is a Solesmes version in English with old style music.

I think Edward Bast summed it up beautifully in an earlier thread:



EdwardBast said:


> Trying to hear modal music on its own terms is no more tradition for tradition's sake than is taking the historical usage of English words into account when reading Chaucer or Shakespeare. People who want to hear chant as modal music want to get at the aesthetic essence of this music as it was created and understood on the supposition that it has irreplaceable aesthetic value in these terms. This is modal hearing. On the other hand, if you hear a cadence on the note E in a third-mode chant as arriving on the third degree of a major scale, then you are hearing the music anachronistically - and misapprehending the character of the mode. This kind of hearing is effectively illiterate in the same way that reading Shakespeare as if the words he used had the same meanings and connotations as in modern English would be. The difference, I suppose, is that our hypothetical reader of Shakespeare might be less likely to view her way of reading as "obvious literary truth."


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

One thing I'd like to know more about is the Solesmes methodology. The musicological and philological principles which resulted in their editions. 

They are authentic performance people I think, they thought they were ridding chant of incrustations, returning it to its pure ur-state. That's a strong claim to make in early music.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

See http://www.ccwatershed.org/Gregorian/ for comparisons between standard and Solesmes chant.

Some of the You Tube videos have died. Lesson 7 is very interesting on Mocquereau's method. Dom Gregory Murray's comments are particularly apposite.

The 1904 example with Pothier directing the Choir of the Benedictines of San Anselmo is here






and the 1904 example with Dom André Mocquereau conducting Pupils of French Seminary in Rome is here:






The Nullam Causam channel on You Tube has a range of videos linking to the ccwatershed site.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

JosefinaHW said:


> I thought that the term "Gregorian Chant" referred to a body of music that was reviewed, curated and then distributed/considered to be the group and form of chants approved by the Catholic Church in Rome sometime after the age of Pope Gregory. Then, there was a diverse group of other types and collections of chants that did not conform to the CCinRome--these were unique collections in the Catholic Church in numerous and diverse locations in Europe. These types of chant practices were grouped under the umbrella term "plein" chant.
> 
> First. Is this true.
> 
> Second. If it is true are there "official"/musicological names for all these other traditions?


This is not an area of expertise for me. I absorbed some basic information in Medieval music history courses and I sat in on a seminar devoted to plain song after completing my doctorate. But: what you've written is correct. The other types of chant include Old Roman, Mozarabic, Ambrosian and Byzantine (and there might be others I have forgotten). The Old Roman was a local tradition that predates the standardization and codification that spread over the Holy Roman Empire. If I remember correctly, its settings tended to be more florid than settings of the same texts in the Gregorian tradition. The Mozarabic was indigenous to the Iberian peninsula and exhibited Eastern influence(?) I think plain song is the preferred general term for monophonic music of the Church.

As for Mandryka's questions, I have little to contribute and it seems not all that much is known. One of the big issues addressed in the seminar I attended was the origins of chant - whether it was intentionally composed and notated or, alternatively, an oral tradition of which musical experts of the Church took a "snapshot" by transcribing improvised performances during one relatively brief period in the tradition's history. If one examines the chants for particular texts and liturgical functions, for example, antiphons in Dorian mode, they appear formulaic the way oral tradition poetry is. So if one lays out a group of Dorian antiphons one above the other and lines up the texts, one sees functional phrase types that bear a rough similarity. All or most chants of that type will have the same basic parts, like an initial ascent, a recitation on around a certain pitch, perhaps a change to another mode, and so on, but each example will be different in the details of the way it realizes those functions.

So I would guess if one wants to get back to the performance practice that produced the repertoire of chants that exists today, most likely one should learn to improvise using the basic formulas underlying particular subcategories of chant like the one I cited. In fact, in the seminar I took one composer attempted to do just that. He tried to learn how to improvise a kind of chant by memorizing and experimenting with the formulas that united all the chants of a particular type. He actually sang the results of his work for us.


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