Post intelligent and civil comments. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the NLM
Unless you can prove continuous occupation and survival, I'd not be overwhelmingly confident in the continuity. What happened in the mid-1340s, for instance? How many older monks survived to teach the younger ones? The Venerable Bede, for instance, was one of only two who survived a plague at his monastery in the 8th century when he was a boy. How do we know that the older monk who survived was any GOOD at chant? And there have been any number of reasons to evacuate a monastery close to Vienna for military reasons.
I don't want to rain on your parade, but finding continuities in the Middle Ages is my specialty - and it's sometimes more difficult than I like!
I like your reasoning for monastic chant-momentum, though.
Oh it really isn't a parade. I'm just wondering. Real musicologists think about these questions their whole lives, and yet here we have a living example right in front of us on the bestseller list. It is so difficult to know these things and yet I wonder to what extent this recording might provide a strong clue. I'm not talking about the ictus and the episema but rather the bigger picture of music that has all the features of music, most especially a tempo that you can really feel and (yes) count. Maybe this isn't proof, but I wonder if it is a strong clue.
Out of curiosity, if this were the case, then why did Gueranger work so hard to restore Chant at Solesmes? Had it been interrupted there by the revolution? If not, what were they studying that made them think that the style had changed?
Solesmes was, in effect, new monastery. It had to be completely re-founded. That's essential to understanding the history.
Yes - and the monks at Stift Heiligenkreuz only dodged the Josephite suppressions (which I had wondered about) by taking on 17 parishes (see website, #14 and 15 under "Heiligenkreuz is the mystical heart of the Vienna Woods"). They don't say anything about the Plague, the Wars of Religion, or the Turk on their otherwise very informative site.
I do think that, perhaps, Jeffrey's intuition can be reconciled with the difficulties of historical fact. The obvious and best answer would be for someone to do the research and see how long the monks have been continuously occupying the monastery. But I think another consideration is significant:
Michael asked the question "How do we know that the older monk who survived was any GOOD at chant?" This, I think, is interesting because part of me wonders whether or not this kind of question is, on some level, irrelevant with regards to the issue of finding out what medieval chant actually sounded like. Certainly virtuosity and beauty are (and ought to be) the concerns of specialists in music and musicology, but there is certainly no reason to think that all medieval chanting was "good" in that sense.
The point here is that even if the elder monk was "bad" at chant from a technical standpoint, there is little reason to think that he would deviate aggregiously from the general form and manner of chant that he learned. With this in mind, it also raises the point that when we compare monks and musicologists (with no offense meant to the venerable work of the latter :P) it is a fairly safe bet that the former will be more likely to hold fast, not simply to tradition, but to the particular tradition of their local monastery.
And so we get to the point: even with the possibility of historical "breaks" or bumps along the way in the chanting-life of a monastery, and acknowledging that perhaps nowhere will we find a place that has perfectly preserved the medieval practice, is there really good reason to think that the world outside the monastery walls has preserved medieval chant BETTER?
Mr. Tinkler and Stan,
I don't think the example of the Plague or Bede is in point here. The Cistercians where and are a religious order with, since the 1100s, a standardized chant tradition, just like my own Dominican Order since 1256. There were always at least a 1000 medieval Cistercians around in Europe to maintain the chant and they had regular visitations to make sure the books and execution were correct--just as in my order. All this up to Vat2.
The reason the Benedictines had to "revive" their chant (while we and the Cistercians did not) was that their individual autonomous houses all dropped their medieval books and started using the Roman ones in the 1500s--this meant the use of the Medicaean Gradual with its rewritten chant. That music had been reworked on modern music principles by "experts" including Palestrina. So there was a break in continuity for Benedictine music between 1400 and 1600.
The resemblance between Mocquereau's "great rhythm" and the traditional Cistercian and Dominican chant is no surprise. That is why the old Solesmes method and OP music correctly sung "feels" very similar. I have commented on this before writing at Dominican Liturgy on the French OP CD of chant. The great rhythm basically follows the sense order of the phrases--which is exactly what is prescribed in the SOCist and OP books. What is missing (the "expressive neumes" for example) in SOCist and OP music is also missing from 13th century MSS of all uses. They are a 19th century conjecture based on an attempt to combine information from old staffless MSS with that from square note MSS.
I might add that Prof. Bill Mahrt of Stanford and the CMAA, whose speciality is medieval chant, agreed in conversation with me that the SOCist and OP executions have a better chance of resembling the 1200s usage than any Solesmes method. BUT that does not mean they resemble the 10th Century practice which the Solesmes revival has been trying to reconstuct.
But one should also remember that a living tradition is also "living" and so subject to influences from the general culture. For example, I note a good number of places where the Dominican music in the 1867 Antiphonal does not match the normative medieval MSS tradition of Humber--something that got corrected in 1933 by the way. I haven't followed this out, but I suspect these changes involve assimilation to Roman uses.
Adveniat Regnum Tuum!
Jeffrey,
Very interesting post. I look forward to obtaining the recording, regardless of what the answer to your question is.
I would think it wouldn't be too hard for someone to contact the community at Heilegenkreuz and find out what influence, if any, the Solesmes revival of the 19th-20th century had on them. It may be that they studied and incorporated the teachings of Dom Mocquereau, but if not, then I think your observations are quite telling in favor of the antiquity of the Solesmes interpretation.
I was listening to this recording today when my four year old walked into the room. "This is beautiful," he said. And he sat and listened with me.
Of course, this is the same kid who, when we drove by a modern design church about 6 months ago said, "That's a big dentist's office." When I tried to explain it was a church, he said, "Maybe it used to be a church, but now it's a dentist's office."
I can vouche for one copy sold in Albany NY at Borders a few hours ago.
Hello all I wanted to ask you isn't gregorian chant a simple form of the Old Roman and would have not gregorian sounded different today then the early middle ages thanks your Orthodox brother
Joseph, Old Roman Chant is indeed usually more ornate than Gregorian Chant. Both Gregorian and Old Roman were serving the same texts, and indeed the texts are treated in the same way, for example there is agreement as to when phrases begin and end.
Certainly Gregorian Chant would have sounded different in the early middle ages. The first attempts at notation in the last half of the 9th century(notational schools of Laon and St Gall) show great subtleties and shadings of rhythms, and even some things which we cannot even guess at, "K" in the St Gall notation for "Klangor" or a thunderous sound, for example. The quilisma itself presents problems, most musicologists thinking now it may have been a sort of ornament or trill. Whatever it was, by the 12th century, the quilisma did not appear in Chant books, not to appear again until Solesmes and their work in the late 19th and early 20th century. Any attempt to sing Chant as it was in the 9th century, is just that an attempt and an educated guess. The Chant changed and slowed down considerably with the introduction of harmony (organum) and polyphony. For a really very good "guess" at what it might well have sounded like in the 9th cent., I would suggest procuring a copy of the CD "CANTO GREGORIANO"(formerly called "Les Tons de la Musique") by Dominique Vellard and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois, again, only a guess, but one sort of feels in one's bones that he gets very close....
There was a site where some of the clips could be listened to free and downloaded. I think it belonged to the monks themselves. does anyone know of it? (It's not Amazon)
Greetings from Graz, Austria!
Just some background information:
Here near Graz, we have the Cistercian Monastery Stift Rein, which has been occupied by monks since 1129, without interruption!
http://www.stift-rein.at/content...t/view/full/
809
This is less than 200km away from Heiligenkreuz. You see even in the close neighborhood of Heiligenkreuz there is a continous network of Cisterciancian monasteries.
Best greetings from Austria,
Bernhard
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