Chant in
the modern era:
the battle between melody and harmony
FROM the first stirrings
of man's fascination with harmony, chant lost its ascendancy. We, reared in the
age of recorded music, take harmony for granted; but in the 12th and 13th
centuries, it was literally unheard-of.
Harmony was therefore of
absorbing interest to musicians from the first moment its potential was sensed,
while pure melody slipped back in the queue for the musician's heart.
As a result, the history of
chant from the 16th until the 19th century resembles some Dickensian tale of an
abandoned child: callously stripped of her own charms by disapproving retainers
intent on making her look like the other children; and subsequently clad in a
panoply of fashionable outfits in an attempt to render her characterless
features attractive.
The first of the chant's
charms to be lost was rhythm. Between the end of the Silver Age and the Council
of Trent (1542-1563), the pace at which chant was sung seems to have slowed.
Perhaps it was because organum (a line of melody sung simultaneously at pitch
and a fifth or octave above and/or below that pitch) required a slower pace to
ensure the singers kept in time with one another.
Perhaps it was because early
polyphonic composers constructed their pieces upon a cantus firmus or tenor (a
piece of chant with the rhythm subtracted), so that in early polyphony, the
newly composed parts bubbled freely past a plodding foundation of chant.
Whatever
the cause, by the time the Council of Trent took place, Europe had come to view
chant as a measured form of music, like polyphony. The first complete chant book
published after the reforms of Trent presented chant in proportional notation:
the ordinary square note was allotted a value of one beat, diamond-shaped notes
were presented as half beats and a pause sign over a square note meant the note
had two beats. (See Example 1.) This stolid singing style rendered chant most
unattractive to listeners. Imagine humming Beethoven's 5th Symphony with one
note per beat, and you will get some idea of how tedious the chant sounded.
Next to suffer substantial
change were the melodies.
Between 1577 and 1613
various Roman polyphonic composers were asked to realign the chant melodies so
that they fitted the texts adjusted by the Council of Trent. The composers
entered zealously into the spirit of the thing (as reformers are wont to do)
and, going well beyond their brief, modified the music to make it conform to the
rules of 16th century polyphony.
Changes included cutting out
long melismas (many notes sung on a single syllable of text), adjusting the
length and number of notes per syllable to conform to short and long accents in
the Latin text, altering the cadences (or closing notes of a musical phrase) and
adding musical patterns or clichés to represent certain words. These reformed
chants were published as the Medicean edition and accepted by the Church as the
official version of post-Trent Gregorian chant.
(See Example 2.) It is
therefore not surprising that in some regions during the 17th and 18th
centuries, chant seems to have dropped out of use altogether, replaced by more
enjoyable and up-to-date works.
In Italy and France, baroque
and operatic sacred music, marked by trilling solos and instrumental
accompaniment, was popular; in Germany and Austria, during the 18th century,
many congregations were devoted to symphonic Masses, such as those composed by
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The story goes that when the Emperor Joseph II
(1741-1790) implemented liturgical reforms such as forbidding Masses to last for
more than three hours, Catholics that lived near the Austrian border travelled
on Sundays into Bavaria, where they could still enjoy the liturgical spectacles
they preferred.
At the opposite end of the
musical spectrum were the congregations fond of vernacular German songs.
Finally, there were some
regions, such as Mainz in Germany, which remained committed to chant, refusing m
o d e r n compositions.
Where the Medicean chant
continued to be used, it was decked out in frills designed to conceal its rather
drab character.
Figured chant, based either
on new melodies or Gregorian chant that had been further trimmed back, was e l a
b o r a t e l y ornamented by the s i n g e r s , accompanied by the organ or
doubled by a bass instrument, and often tossed between solo singers and a choir.
Introduced in France in
association with the 18th century neo-Gallican movement (which instituted many
changes to the liturgy as part of its rejection of the papacy), figured chant
later spread to Germany and the Netherlands. Counterpointed chant was a sort of
improvised polyphony, in which the standard chant melodies served as a stem
around which singers wove impromptu lines of counterpoint.
Accompanied chant was
supported by chords on the organ.
Chant also continued to be
used for a time by the Lutherans in 16th century Germany, although (like all the
post-Trent forms of chant) it was made metrical, like a hymn, to facilitate
congregational singing.
The Church seems to have
largely put up with the changes to liturgical music, merely laying down
principles to preclude practices that seriously impeded the liturgy; for
example, she insisted repeatedly that the orchestra should not dominate the
voices of the choir and that the music must serve the liturgy, rather than vice
versa.
The 19th century, with its
crop of liturgical movements, ushered in an entirely different attitude to music
of the past. In Germany, the Caecilian movement was formed to improve church
music in Europe and the Americas. Its primary aim was to promote the use of 16th
century polyphony and reform of the chant.
The Caecilian movement was
strongly supported by the Church, one of its chief representatives, F. X. Haberl
(1840-1910), being employed by the Church during the 1870s to edit a revised
version of the Medicean chant books, the Ratisbon edition.
In France,
post-Enlightenment anti-papal feeling declined and was followed by a period of
spiritual renewal. It was widely felt that the Church in France should adopt the
Roman liturgy once more, but the merits of the Medicean edition were subject to
considerable debate. New medieval manuscripts were discovered; scholastic
studies of the chant began to appear; and some attempts were made to produce new
chant books based on the manuscripts.
However, no consensus as to
the correct melodies and rhythm of Gregorian chant was achieved until the work
of the monks of Solesmes emerged from the shadows of their scriptorium.
…but what we have, we
give you.
The Abbey of Saint Pierre de
Solesmes was founded in 1833 in the province of Sarthe, France, on the ruins of
a former priory. The founder was a 28- year-old former diocesan priest, Dom
Prosper Gueranger (1805-1875). Like St Francis, Gueranger seems to have had a
special calling to restore ruins, for the other great work of his life was to
revive Gregorian chant. His purpose seems to have been to put together a
functional set of Roman liturgy chant books for use in his own monastery. In the
end, however, he not only instigated the retrieval of the Golden and Silver Age
chant from the sea of misuse, disuse and new uses into which it had sunk in the
preceding centuries, but, by means of his writings on the liturgy, he also gave
a vital impulse to the movement to re-adopt the Roman liturgy and Gregorian
chant in France.
Gueranger and his monks
approached the task of restoring the original melodies by photographing and
collating all the versions of each chant that could be found in medieval
manuscripts throughout Europe.
(Subsequent events proved
this to be a happy policy, for the Solesmes photographs remain the sole
testimony to the content of many manuscripts destroyed by bombs during World War
II.) The monks then compared the photographs, taking for each chant the melody
and text presented by the majority of manuscripts to be the correct version.
The early work of restoration proceeded under the direction of Dom Joseph Pothier (1835-1923) and resulted in the publication during the 1880s of a series of chant books for use by the Solesmes Congregation. Pothier also published a treatise in 1880 explaining the principles used in restoring the chant and expounding his then-radical accentualist theory: that chant should be sung non-metrically, at a moderately slow speech pace, and using accents in the Latin text to determine which notes should be
emphasised in the music.
Both these publications,
being implicit criticisms of the chant published in the Medicean and Ratisbon
editions, aroused vehement protests from the German publisher of the Ratisbon
edition, Pustet, to whom the Sacred Congregation of Rites (SCR) had in 1868
granted a 30-year publishing privilege and an official approval of the Ratisbon
edition as authentic Gregorian chant. Resistance to the Solesmes theories also
came from the Caecilian movement: notably from Haberl, who had developed a quite
different, metrical theory about the rhythm of the chant.
Following Pothier's
departure from Solesmes to serve as prior of another monastery, Dom Andre
Mocquereau (1849-1930) directed the publication of a series of facsimiles of
medieval manuscripts, the Paleographie Musicale.
Successfully designed to
prove that the Medicean/Ratisbon melodies were not authentic Gregorian chant,
the Paleographie led to widespread acceptance of the Solesmes research
from musicians, clergy and, ultimately, the Church.
Between 1905 and 1908, a new
Vatican edition of the chant books, based on the Solesmes version of the
chant, was published by the Church. Later Vatican editions included signs
developed by Mocquereau as rhythmic aids. (See Example 3.) Later still, the
ancient graphic musical notation from particular manuscripts was transcribed
above and below the chant, so choirs could follow the same written signs that
their counterparts long ago used to prompt their memories. (See Example 4.) Use
of the Vatican edition throughout the Church was made obligatory by Pius X, who
had followed the work of Solesmes with interest from its earliest days. Pius X's
affection and concern for sacred music dated back at least twenty years, to the
early years of his priesthood.
Previously, as Archbishop of
Venice, he had instituted a reform of sacred music that claimed for chant the
position of foremost music of the Church and encouraged the singing of chant,
not only by choirs but also by the congregation.
Almost immediately after
becoming pope, he introduced a similar reform for the universal Church in his
1903 document, Tra le sollecitudini.
Pius X's initiative was not
universally well received. Lovers of baroque, classical and modern sacred music
were aghast at the directive to return to a predominant or exclusive use of
chant and polyphony in the liturgy. Pius X seemed pleased with the fruits of his
reform and, in letters and other documents, remarked on the re-emergence of
chant throughout the world. Yet common liturgical practices from the first half
of the twentieth century - the continuing presence of vernacular hymns and the
prevalence of low masses -stand like question marks at the end of his reform.
The aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, above all, leads us to question how
widespread, deeply rooted or comprehended the reform was.
The Second Vatican Council
closed Pius X's effort to graft Gregorian chant onto the 20th century. Whatever
the intentions of the Council, the references to sacred music in the Council
documents effectively legitimated the replacement of chant with vernacular hymns
and folk music. A new chapter in the history of chant is perhaps now taking
shape through the thrust of the traditional rite movement and the thirst of a
secular world…but like all nows, the promise of the present remains for the
moment no more than a whisper through the darkness.
The Gospels tell us that,
after Christ's death, when Peter and John were confronted by a cripple begging
for money, Peter said to the cripple "Gold and silver we have none but what
we have, we give you", and stretching out his hand, he healed the cripple.
We, today, may still not sing the chant as it really was in the Golden and
Silver Ages, but we have the best restoration that scholarship can give us; and
although chant, like the other gifts that traditional rite Catholics have to
offer to the Church, may not be what the rather crippled Catholics of modernity
are seeking, it may turn out to be a gift that can help the Church to get on her
feet once again.
