Gregorian Chant Psaltic : a new concept ?

Dear Gregorian Chant and Medieval Music Fans,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRWZE0BDLao

You will find here my last thoughts about performing cantus according both older neumatic manuscripts and oral traditions in Christian liturgies. That small podcast develops reflexion about presenting Gregorian Chant not as a unique and single traesury, but the result of multiple exchanges with other latin families, preexisting (Gallican, Hispanic, Ambrosian, Romanesco), contemporaneous or even later developments (what Nardini called "neo-gregorian"). We are no more at the romantic times when Jean-François Champollion met the miraculous Rosetta stone : after more then 150 years of restoration, we are sure that no manuscript, even with the best neumatic notation system, will inform us how precisely we could perform a corpus whose uniqueless was always a combination of writing and orality. That double nature of the "cantilena romana" (roman meaning from christians kingdoms, many different cultural centers of course and not only the pontifical curia) changes all methods for studying and performing music. As an hommage to predecessors as famous as Huglo, Hiley, Baroffio, Rankin, Colette, Jeffery, Robertson, Saulnier, and also musicians and singers as Vellard, Pérès, Poisblaud, Bestion, Lesne, Keyrouz and Angelopoulos, let me present you my overview on that "European Treasury" as wrote Olivier Messiaen

I also invite you to visit my Homepage goudesenne.fr Jean-François Goudesenne – Notae nondum Musica

Truly yours, all the best !

Dear Jean-François

Thank you for the photo which reminds of a great time we could spend together at the Abbey Ganagobie at the Eastern periphery of the Lubéron massive. The abbey itself is probably one of the very rare French examples of the Apulian Romanesque architecture of France, because the church has mosaics in the Norman style.

I do not really understand what is "new" about the concept of chant transmission, but definitely the fixation on Western plainchant as Gregorian chant (let us say the step from Hiley's first to his second handbook) does not help at all. The real profound question is, how gets a philological approach fixed on chant sources trapped by our own habits of today. The problem is less the philological approach as a fixation on texts than the musical background of musicologists which means their preference for sources with musical notation. As an ethnomusicologist I can tell you, that written transmission has a high impact on oral tradition, but it is less concerned about the melodic memory (since only few people really know and understand profoundly musical notation, and its form does not matter here), but the memory of the texts!

If musicologists would be more aware of the fact, that the memory of the many texts have priority than of the many notes, I think we could make a great step forward. You might be suprised, but even rural people who were never taught notation, can have a very precise memory for even very sophisticated melodies, they would not loose once a certain ornament. This alone proves that the capacity of reading and writing notation is not essential for passing on a tradition. But if that is true, it also means our focus must embrace all the many liturgical manuscripts which have few or no musical notation at all. And you will see, especially concerning Greek and even more Slavic sources (which have very rarely notation!), that most liturgical manuscripts until the 12th century did not really look like we would like to imagine them. I think that Christian Troelsgård did once a short, but important essay about this:

Christian Troelsgård, 'Byzantine Chant Notation – Written Documents in an Aural Tradition,' in Aural architecture in Byzantium : music, acoustics, and ritual, ed. by Bissera V. Pentcheva (London, New York: Routledge, 2018).

But there is nothing new! The question is still the same like in the time of Notker the Stammerer or John of Montecassino: what is actually the problem with Gregorian or Carolingian chant, why did the cantors of this empire not properly understand the Roman cantors?

And the answer is very simple, there are other systems of the melodic memory which did not depend on musical notation as a sort of written transmission. Both Romes (Constantinople and Rome) depended neither on manuscripts nor on tonaries, they used the same titles for the singers (since Latin was the universal language of law) and cheironomia.

And the bitter pill for musicologists who think of Western neume notation, whenever they hear the term «cheironomia», is that it did not have the deictic quality as they imagine... Because if I just raise my arm, how could a cantor know, whether they have to go up one voice (vox) or three voices (voces) which meant in Latin one step like ut—re or three steps like ut—fa? It simply could and did work like this! A hand sign meant a melodic phrase which needed many neumes to translate it, you can see it in the earlier Slavic as well as in the later Greek manuscripts with gestic notation. There is no other way, that it worked in a very similar way for the Roman cantors, when they conducted the schola. When I went to Thessaloniki in 2023, the real expert Evangelia Spyrakou was mainly concerned with rhythm and tempo, and you might be disappointed, because you all know it so well from a conductor in the concert hall or an opera house keeping even the many musicians of a 19th-century orchestra together by just one simple sign: the cross sign! The other hand did the melodic gestures.

Thus, the problem of Gregorian chant is the evolution of neumes itself which in its earlier stages depended on the book or libellum tonary, and the tonary (as short as it often was) caused a media revolution by itself, because it transformed the melodic memory. Many illuminations of Gregory the Great with the dove surrounded by scribes writing neumes are taken from manuscripts with tonaries consisting of long lists of chant incipits. And let us not forget Hiley chose a page of a tonary taken from Ms. Harley 4951, the Gradual of the cathedral Saint Étienne of Toulouse. The tonaries written by Aquitanian cantors were master pieces and due to its illustrations («imagines» for the eight tones) very beautiful, not less astonishing than their contribution to Latin and Occitan poetry

I tried to say this during the online presentation for your book series at Brepols, but it was rather during the exchange with the other presenters, but a structuralist table with an overview of all possible neume notations according to the way they work, would be very enlightening for us, even as incompetent readers. Unfortunately, it was not acknowledged by the responsible editors.

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Oliver Gerlach November 22, 2024 10:44

I must correct myself:

Because if I just raise my arm, how could a cantor know, whether they have to go up one voice (vox) or three voices (voces) which meant in Latin one step like ut—re or three steps like ut—fa? It simply could and did work like this!

Going up one step means two voices («ii voces») like from «ut» to «re», and three steps makes four voices («iiii / iv voces») like from «ut» to «fa». And the last phrase meant the opposite: "It simply could and did NOT work like this!"
Oliver Gerlach November 22, 2024 1:03

PS.

By the way "chant psaltic" is doubled, either the art of chanting or psaltic art (ἠ ψαλτική τέχνῃ)
Oliver Gerlach November 22, 2024 1:00

Dear Jean-François

Thank you for the photo which reminds of a great time we could spend together at the Abbey Ganagobie at the Eastern periphery of the Lubéron massive. The abbey itself is probably one of the very rare French examples of the Apulian Romanesque architecture of France, because the church has mosaics in the Norman style.

I do not really understand what is "new" about the concept of chant transmission, but definitely the fixation on Western plainchant as Gregorian chant (let us say the step from Hiley's first to his second handbook) does not help at all. The real profound question is, how gets a philological approach fixed on chant sources trapped by our own habits of today. The problem is less the philological approach as a fixation on texts than the musical background of musicologists which means their preference for sources with musical notation. As an ethnomusicologist I can tell you, that written transmission has a high impact on oral tradition, but it is less concerned about the melodic memory (since only few people really know and understand profoundly musical notation, and its form does not matter here), but the memory of the texts!

If musicologists would be more aware of the fact, that the memory of the many texts have priority than of the many notes, I think we could make a great step forward. You might be suprised, but even rural people who were never taught notation, can have a very precise memory for even very sophisticated melodies, they would not loose once a certain ornament. This alone proves that the capacity of reading and writing notation is not essential for passing on a tradition. But if that is true, it also means our focus must embrace all the many liturgical manuscripts which have few or no musical notation at all. And you will see, especially concerning Greek and even more Slavic sources (which have very rarely notation!), that most liturgical manuscripts until the 12th century did not really look like we would like to imagine them. I think that Christian Troelsgård did once a short, but important essay about this:

Christian Troelsgård, 'Byzantine Chant Notation – Written Documents in an Aural Tradition,' in Aural architecture in Byzantium : music, acoustics, and ritual, ed. by Bissera V. Pentcheva (London, New York: Routledge, 2018).

But there is nothing new! The question is still the same like in the time of Notker the Stammerer or John of Montecassino: what is actually the problem with Gregorian or Carolingian chant, why did the cantors of this empire not properly understand the Roman cantors?

And the answer is very simple, there are other systems of the melodic memory which did not depend on musical notation as a sort of written transmission. Both Romes (Constantinople and Rome) depended neither on manuscripts nor on tonaries, they used the same titles for the singers (since Latin was the universal language of law) and cheironomia.

And the bitter pill for musicologists who think of Western neume notation, whenever they hear the term «cheironomia», is that it did not have the deictic quality as they imagine... Because if I just raise my arm, how could a cantor know, whether they have to go up one voice (vox) or three voices (voces) which meant in Latin one step like ut—re or three steps like ut—fa? It simply could and did work like this! A hand sign meant a melodic phrase which needed many neumes to translate it, you can see it in the earlier Slavic as well as in the later Greek manuscripts with gestic notation. There is no other way, that it worked in a very similar way for the Roman cantors, when they conducted the schola. When I went to Thessaloniki in 2023, the real expert Evangelia Spyrakou was mainly concerned with rhythm and tempo, and you might be disappointed, because you all know it so well from a conductor in the concert hall or an opera house keeping even the many musicians of a 19th-century orchestra together by just one simple sign: the cross sign! The other hand did the melodic gestures.

Thus, the problem of Gregorian chant is the evolution of neumes itself which in its earlier stages depended on the book or libellum tonary, and the tonary (as short as it often was) caused a media revolution by itself, because it transformed the melodic memory. Many illuminations of Gregory the Great with the dove surrounded by scribes writing neumes are taken from manuscripts with tonaries consisting of long lists of chant incipits. And let us not forget Hiley chose a page of a tonary taken from Ms. Harley 4951, the Gradual of the cathedral Saint Étienne of Toulouse. The tonaries written by Aquitanian cantors were master pieces and due to its illustrations («imagines» for the eight tones) very beautiful, not less astonishing than their contribution to Latin and Occitan poetry

I tried to say this during the online presentation for your book series at Brepols, but it was rather during the exchange with the other presenters, but a structuralist table with an overview of all possible neume notations according to the way they work, would be very enlightening for us, even as incompetent readers. Unfortunately, it was not acknowledged by the responsible editors.

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Gregorian Chant Psaltic : a new concept ?

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