This is a recording of Gregorian Chant from a monastery in Europe, France I believe, recorded in 1903!!! So it has to be beautiful, no? Well, no! Maybe this contributed to the dramatic decline in French Catholicism? Give me "Day by Day" any day over this!
15 comments:
They would have had to sing into an acoustic horn (this is 20 years before electric recording!) which would have been incapable of capturing any ambient resonance. They would have been told to articulate the notes in a way which would suit the medium. This is a wonderful chant written by an anonymous composer over 1200 years ago who in a later age would have been a Mozart or a Schubert. It requires no little skill to sing well. However, the Kyrie from Mass IX is equally great music, easy to learn, and why anyone would want to sing Marty Haugen in preference to it is completely and utterly beyond my comprehension.
Hadn’t by 1903 Gregorian Chant fallen to the way-side with the Church (especially in Europe)?
That was one of the reforms of St. Pius X – essentially kicking Verdi (and other popular composers) out and replacing them with Gregorian Chant.
What truly “creeps-me-out” musically are the recordings of Alessandro Moreschi (a Soprano castrato).
ANY congregation should be able to master this little ditty in, well, about 27 years with 2 hours of practices per week. Whoa.
Even before reading John Nolan’s comment, and allowing for the quality of the recording, this did not seem so bad to me. In fact, just listening to it once began to calm down my mind and make me feel more peaceful, which is of course one of the wonderful blessings brought by Gregorian chant.
If anyone wants to hear live Gregorian chant done well locally by a monastic community today, I recommend attending the Liturgy of the Hours in the church of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia (It is several years since my last visit but I assume they are still doing it and it is still open to the public).
@Billerica
It's not intended for the congregation but for the schola, and the verse, where the melody soars above the staff, would be sung by the cantors. The Mass Ordinary for the season,in this case Mass I (Lux et origo), can be sung by the Congregation (usually alternating with the schola) as of course can the Sequence and Credo.
The simplest chants in the Mass are those for the celebrant, deacon and subdeacon, since they have a lot of other things to do. The Ordinary chants from the Kyriale are more elaborate, but not beyond the capabilities of the congregation, who will use them several weeks running. The Proper Chants are more elaborate still, often with long melismas. They are the preserve of the schola, and Graduals and Alleluias have 'virtuoso' sections for the cantors.
A Mass sung entirely in Chant therefore contains much variety. Last year I attended a Solemn EF Mass in which not just the Ordinary, but all the Propers were sung in 16th century polyphony, presumably because the otherwise capable choir were not trained in chant! I have to admit it became wearisome after a while. Vatican II was quite right in demanding first place for Gregorian Chant as being uniquely suited to the Roman Rite.
Oh please...
What John said in his first comment about recording technology is germaine. But.....
Do you want to compare the generous portrayal of both dash and long distance runners in "Chariots of Fire" with the quantum leaps in athletic sciences in the following century? I remember as a young kid reading about the inconqerable four minute mile, Everest and such. Well, tell Bannister, Hillary and all who conspire to push the human experience closer to perfection.
If you spend any time in a university music recording library you will hear many more "oddities" than this and the last castrati. In fact, the collected recordings of aboriginal singing in the Delta White South, Black South, Africa, Asia, American plains, etc. actually lend credence to both John's explanation and mine. Knowledge and applied physics are gamechangers. It's a fool's errand to wonder if Capella Sixtina under Palestrina was ideal or "better" than Palestrina under Peter Phillips/Tallis Scholars. But I'd bet on the latter.
So forget about whether the ladder will stand on the lower rung of Dom Moc's recording. It will, and will continue to take us higher.
Geez, our perspective can be so short-sighted and uninformed, it's irritating.
We are creatures. We are creatures in our time, also possessed of faculties which enable us to project portions of our human destiny and, by occasion and maybe providence, actually achieve them.
Just because Rudee Vallee was "it" in the thirties didn't make much of a career for Tiny Tim in the seventies.
If one approaches Mass with an ear tilted towards "perfomance practice" of its ritual music, s/he is missing the most important image in the picture.
Thus endeth the rant.
Charles, so you like "Day by Day?"
There may be other factors in play, not only the recording horn, which could be 20 feet or longer, but what 'standard' tuning they were pitched to. The slurring may be the technique for moving from note to note versus a 'stopped' movement. I would differ from Charles in the comparison of the runners or mountain climbers, though. That assumes that one is objectively superior to another. I think the vocalists could have sung it in a style our modern ears would know, but they were taught differently for some reason. Perhaps it was an affectation for the French seminarians to pronounce Latin, training them away from their severely glottal natural tongue.
"If one approaches Mass with an ear tilted towards "perfomance practice" of its ritual music, s/he is missing the most important image in the picture."
The criticisms of this recording sound like just plain, old fashioned snobbery to me.
FRAJM- not Schwartz's best song.
RCG-I think we're on the same page. It is about era, conditioning, affectations, expectations, etc. I did not mean to infer that Hussein Bolt is objectively superior to Jesse Owens or Billy Hayes as 100 metre racers; we all stand on the shoulders of our forebears.
Fr.S- so, you're sort of agreeing with me? (Without agreeing that FRAJM practices snobbery.)
Now there is Gregorian Chant that I love and then there is some that seems to go on for much too long such for each syllable as in this ancient recording and quite frankly it gives me physical symptoms like a stomach ache. I don't think this would be appreciated in a typical parish Mass, but I could be wrong.
Inflection and pronunciation can be introduce 'performance' as much as a pop score from Marty Haugen. In opera the pronunciation is often vital to tying the music to the story: does the singer sing with the proper accent as much as he sings the proper pronunciation. Consider when people are warbling a hymn and pronounce 'the' as 'thuh'. The enunciation can convey the meaning of the not just the individual words very effectively but the entire sentence. I play music that is often played in a manner specifically to sound 'old fashioned'. It can inform a study of music roots that can reach forward to what we now think of as another genre. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.
Here is Gregorian Chant in an entirely different metre:
Ubi Caritas. As much as I like this, I also think it would be inappropriate for Mass because it would tend to distract the congregation from the prayer. Rather, the clipped eighths of a chant with a solid understanding of the use of assonance and prosody. It lifts the mind so the spirit can reach a little higher.
Father, the long melismas (many notes on one syllable) are the essence of Gegorian melody. Nick Gale has interestingly compared them to the vocal techniques used by jazz or 'scat' singers. When sung badly, in a leaden mechanical way, they can put people off chant. When sung well they lift the soul. They enable both singers and listeners to meditate on the text.
A typical parish is unlikely to have a schola which can deliver the GR Propers but if it does, then it should sing them wherever possible, ad maiorem Dei gloriam. If people don't appreciate it they can always slink out, having due care lest their knuckles drag along the ground as they go.
John, your remark about melismas made me scuff my knuckles and reminded me of something that sent me to look again at the notation in the video. The shape of the notes indicate they may be influenced by 'shape notation' or shape note singing that was used in the 19th century. It was a way making the note shape on the music sheet to aid in singing the note. The notation on the video remind me more of notation used for fiddle, er, violin, and instead of bowing may be instructing the singer on breathing. Maybe Charles can figure it out.
@rcg
The square notation on the four-line staff, thus indicating pitch, was of course only invented some centuries after this chant was written. The 1903 edition includes dots to indicate lengthenings, and later Solesmes editions added episemas and a liquescent on the third syllable of the Alleluia.
However, manuscript sources from the ninth and tenth centuries have, over the written text, a 'code' of signs and letters (known as semiology) indicating in often quite meticulous detail the rhythm of the chant (the melodies would have been learned by heart, and it took years to do so). The Graduale Triplex gives two sets of signs or 'neums', one from Laon and another, using a different method, from St-Gall.
The recovery of Gregorian Chant in the 19th century was based on the interpretation of these neums and their application to performance practice, and the work is ongoing. However, it must always be borne in mind that we can never know exactly how chant sounded in the ninth century, nor is there an 'ideal' or 'correct way of singing chant.
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