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| Can the Old Hispanic melodies be reconstructed? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 1 2014, 07:08 PM (786 Views) | |
| Emma Hornby | Dec 1 2014, 07:08 PM Post #1 |
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I received this question via email last week:
First, a quick explanation of the neumes. At the link here you can see the pages of an Old Hispanic chant manuscript, which has been kept in the cathedral of Leon since the middle ages The music notation is above the lines of text. The notation shows the direction of the melody (a line going upwards on the page like this: / indicates a high or higher note; a sign like this \ is a low or lower note; a sign like this . is just a single note. These basic shapes can be joined together into groups, so that ^ would be a note followed by a lower note. The notation doesn't show intervallic content, and it does not show pitch. So: can we work backwards from modern notation in order to reconstruct the melodies transmitted in these neume notations? Unfortunately, only about 20 of the Old Hispanic chants have survived in notation with intervallic content. One problem is that there just isn't enough melodic information in those 20 chants for us to extrapolate outwards and reconstruct all of the other thousands of chants in the repertoire. The second problem is that exactly the same notational sign can be used at any of the pitches and, as far as we can tell, with any intervallic content. Even if the intervallic content seems to be constrained within a particular notational sign, it is only constrained on the level of "small interval here" or "large interval here" rather than specifying the interval or meaning the same interval every time. |
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| Lindsay | Dec 5 2014, 08:54 PM Post #2 |
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I have been thinking about the problem of reconstructing the melodies that would have been used for the Old Hispanic chants or at least composing melodies that would be a response to them and had a few thoughts. As a layman I am aware that I am in all probability asking questions that have already been posed before so I my apologies. Firstly I was wondering if there might be any parallels with neumes that are used for reciting either the Torah or the Koran? Secondly if, as seems likely, it is impossible to reconstruct any of the melodies from neumes, would it be possible to establish a framework or set of rules that composers could work within that would at least be plausible by using things like the most likely modes from that era or typical pitch ranges from other chants? |
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| RAbbott | Dec 6 2014, 02:02 AM Post #3 |
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"the problem of reconstructing the melodies that would have been used for the Old Hispanic chants" "parallels with neumes that are used for reciting either the Torah or the Koran?" "a framework or set of rules that composers could work within" Lindsay, loving your thinking, I'm considering very similar starting points. On another thread I have a timeline that might be useful. Further to that can I ask Emma if melody is set/the key focus in Old Hispanic Liturgy? In classical music the obsesion seams to be with harmony and often historically left room for improvisation with melody as with Jazz, Irish folk however, leaves melody set and concrete but improvisation is focused on ornamentation and these flourishes are where virtuosos express their skill. In west Africa the importance is on rhythm and melody is a dressing to that. Do we know the related importance within Old Hispanic Liturgy as attributed to key components such as rhythm, harmony, melody, ornamentation, improvisation and dynamic? Perhaps melody just wasn't as important to them as another feature. Or perhaps certain intervals were assumed. Many thanks Edited by RAbbott, Dec 6 2014, 03:51 AM.
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| RAbbott | Dec 6 2014, 03:47 AM Post #4 |
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Sorry, another addition to that last point. There's a very basic and over simplified association of harmony progression in classical as being associated in with fifths, whereas Jazz tends to move in fourths. Irish and Jewish folk tend to move diatonically through their respect keys with occasional dramatic jumps. Within these forms because a tendency is implied it would be easier to extrapolate a melody. Are there any common cultural tendencies towards interval that might be assumed within the O.H.L. that might fill in the gaps for us. We only have a snippet of material to draw on from the day, but if the music surrounding it often moved in thirds, for example, that might be a good guess. Would they have used pythagorean tonality? |
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| Lindsay | Dec 7 2014, 11:53 AM Post #5 |
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From the reading I have been doing my understanding is that modern notation is a combination of at least two different approaches. Staff notation allows notes to be plotted out which ultimately enabled composers to work out increasingly sophisticated harmony whereas we still have ornaments such as turns or trills which indicate particular melodic formulae which seem to me to be closer to the idea of neumes. Considering the problem of neumes occurring at different pitches it did occur to me that if certain signs represented a specific melodic formula then one might be able get an idea of where in a mode they could occur. So for example if one took a neume that looked like a tick with the tail to the right it could represent a fall of a second followed by a rise of a third. Just considering the major scale or Ionian mode it occurred to me that it could occur only in two positions c b d and f e g. This may have been already researched of course. |
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| Emma Hornby | Dec 8 2014, 04:55 PM Post #6 |
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We are going to need to answer these one at a time!! ![]() QUESTION 1
QUESTION 2
QUESTION 3
QUESTION 4
QUESTION 5
QUESTION 6
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| Elsa De Luca | Dec 9 2014, 04:51 PM Post #7 |
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Hi, I'll try to answer your questions:
Thank you for trying to wide our geographical limits! As far as I know, the closest parallel notationally are with other Western chant notations from the 9th-10th centuries. If you are OK with reading Spanish, I would point you to an article by Herminio Gonzalez-Barrionuevo (‘Relación entre la notación “mozárabe” de tipo vertical y otras escrituras neumáticas’, Studi Gregoriani 11 (1995), pp. 5-112). The scholar investigated the relationship between Eastern notation (byzantine) and the Old Hispanic one. He explained that the Old Hispanic notation belongs to the group of Latin Western neumatic notations; these are dialects of an original common notational language established in Western Europe but which then developed independently in different directions. Hope this helps!
I am afraid that neither modes nor pitch ranges can be provided for the Old Hispanic melodies! Anyway, don’t worry because we are not expecting composers like you to literally try to reconstruct the melodies. You also do not need to follow the neume contours as found in the Old Hispanic manuscripts, unless you want to give yourself that constraint. As you probably know, notation was an aid for memory and singers had to already know the melody by heart in order to read the notation correctly. The Old Hispanic neumes could bear only partial information about the music to be performed. I would encourage you to use that ‘missing information’ in the notation of the Old Hispanic chants as a starting point for your musical creativity!
Thank you for this thoughtful question! Let me untangle the many things you asked. First of all: improvisation. If something is improvised is then ‘free’ and, for being extemporary, it lives in the moment. For this intrinsic factor, improvised music is generally not written down. Written things become, to a certain extent, ‘established’. In other words, we don’t have many traces of ‘improvised’ Old Hispanic melodies. Unfortunately, we cannot say which the musical principles of the Old Hispanic improvisation were. Having said that, I will try to tell you something that we can infer from the observation of the Old Hispanic manuscripts. In spite of not giving exact pitch information, this notation (especially that found in the oldest manuscripts) is extremely rich in other details. This strongly suggests that the Old Hispanic music was rich in musical nuances. These musical nuances almost certainly involved different aspects of ornamentation, rhythm, dynamic and so on. I hope to have answered at least partially your question!
Certainly, we know from Isidore’s writings that the Old Hispanic chant was a diatonic system. Regarding this, you may find interesting to read Michel Huglo, ‘The Musica Isidori Tradition in the Iberian Peninsula’, in Hispania Vetus, ed. S. Zapke, Bilbao, 2007, pp. 61-92. Google Books
The interpretation you suggest could be possible. However, it is one of the million hypothesis that can be formulated on the exact meaning of the Old Hispanic neumes. If you look at the Old Hispanic manuscripts you will see that there are many graphical ways to give a two-note downward melodic movement. So, what’s the exact interval? God knows. We know that some palaeographical features of this notation (connection between notes, inclination of the pen-stroke etc.) had a specific musical meaning. In addition to that, the placement of the neumes over the text seems to have been used purposefully (to a certain extent). Now, you are probably thinking ‘but I still need a musical principle to start composing’. Well, I would suggest you to start playing our special ‘Old Hispanic musical game for Composers’ Ready? Here we go!These are the rules: 1) Pick up a few pages from the Old Hispanic manuscripts freely available on the internet (e.g. Leon, Archivo de la Catedral, MS 8 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS 10110) and choose a graphical feature of the neumes (e.g. curves, angles, gaps, ticks, curls…). 2) Give that feature a musical meaning: pitch, interval, portamento, dynamic, ornamentation… (Whatever you like!). 3) Start singing from the manuscript and apply consistently the musical meaning you chose to all the occurrences of the same graphical feature. This is your only restriction! All the other palaeographical features of the neumes will be… free space for your imagination! In other words you will be (re)inventing the Old Hispanic chant with your personal touch! Like it? Hope so!!! All best, Elsa PS: you don’t need to sing in Latin or Spanish
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| Lindsay | Dec 9 2014, 05:03 PM Post #8 |
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I like your game. I will have to experiment. |
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| Elsa De Luca | Dec 9 2014, 06:31 PM Post #9 |
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| Emma Hornby | Dec 9 2014, 07:41 PM Post #10 |
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We were thinking a bit more about this one. As far as we know (but we are not experts on it), in the early middle ages, arabic music did not use notation very much at all, but the notations it did use were based on letters of the arabic alphabet rather than using the kinds of neume shapes with the kinds of functions we are used to in the west. Someone will correct us if we are wrong about this, I hope. Hebrew cantillation signs are trying to show something quite different from these early neumes - they help people navigate round a very simple melody; our neumes show very complex melodies and they almost always show all the notes. Modern scholars see them as quite different things, functionally - the cantillation signs (in the west anyway) are the ancestors of punctuation marks and don't necessarily look like what they are supposed to sound like. It is a symbolic relationship. The neumes, on the other hand, DO have a direct relationship between how they look and how they sound. If you have access to jstor, this is an interesting article by Jacques Viret |
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| Emma Hornby | Dec 9 2014, 09:03 PM Post #11 |
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I wanted to have a go at answering this question too. There are places in Old Hispanic chant where there does seem to have been space for improvisation, and these are syllables which have very long melismas on them (that is, lots of notes on one syllable). Those melismas often work in segments, so a series of (say) 30 notes will be repeated, and then the next series of 30 notes will be repeated in an AA'BB'CC' structure, where the very last couple of notes is different in the second rendition each time. When one of these chants appears in multiple manuscripts, all sorts of things vary. Sometimes two manuscripts might have very similar long melismas. Sometimes they will share the AA' bit, but then go off in quite different directions from each other. Or one manuscript will have the AA' bit and then a cadence rather than more notes. Or one manuscript might just have a modest 10 notes or so on the syllable, which are totally different. So we think that these melismas were an opportunity for improvisation in some way, and some of the solutions got written down. Of course, when a chant only survives in one manuscript, we can only speculate about whether its long melismas would have varied in practice. We've got no evidence of harmony in this repertoire at all. There was plenty of improvised polyphony north of the Pyrenees, with music theory treatises telling us how to do it. But we honestly just don't know whether polyphony was part of the musical language in the Old Hispanic liturgy. There is no mention of it. I wouldn't think in terms of dynamic in these medieval chant repertoires in the way that we think of terraced dynamics and structural long-term crescendos and things. Instead, I think the notation (as Elsa said) probably shows lots of nuance, and some of that nuance might well be in intensity or volume, and other nuance in rhythm (we don't even know whether it was metrical rhythm or something more free flowing), and other nuance was ornamental. But we can't be sure at all which of the musical signs might map onto intensity, and which map onto rhythm, and which map onto ornament, and which (if any) are to do with pronunciation, like the liquescent signs used in Gregorian chant (we don't think we have any of those in the Old Hispanic notations). My personal hierarchy for this repertoire, but it's probably reflecting my own values and interests more than theirs, would be: 1) melodic language (i.e. something beyond a specific concrete instance of melody in a specific chant - a way of understanding how melodies are put together in a fitting way); 2) melodic formulas (specific little snippets of melody, some of them have particular formal contexts, like "this works at cadences" or "this is good on particular words" or "this is a good way of opening a chant") 3) particular melodies that go with particular texts in particular formal contexts (i.e. an antiphon, or a responsory, or whatever), which are subject to certain amounts of change, but would recognisably be "the same" for 400 years or so 4) and then, for me, the rhythm and ornament and vocal nuance of various kinds would drape on top of that (and the reason it is not higher up the hierarchy, for me, is that quite a lot of that falls out of use by the time of the latest manuscripts in the 13th and 14th centuries, so it can't have been SO fundamental to the practice that losing it would lose the essence of the practice). I loved this question, thank you so much for asking it. |
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| Emma Hornby | Dec 12 2014, 05:57 PM Post #12 |
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Although we cannot reconstruct the melodies that are preserved only in neumes, there are about 20 chants that have been preserved in heighted notation. They were all transcribed by Rojo and Prado (the transcriptions start at page 73). You need to be a bit careful of these transcriptions. The heighted notation tells us precisely what the interval steps are (2nd, 3rd, 4th etc) but not what kind of interval steps there are. There are no clefs. We know it is a diatonic system, using CDEFGA plus B or B flat. But there is nothing to specify what the first note of a chant is, and therefore there are various places on the scale that the chant could start, and that affects the intervals afterwards. If the first interval is a third, then it's a major third if the piece started on C, but a minor third if the piece started on D. Manuel Pedro Ferreira more recently made a transcription of four of these chants (in his Antologia de Música Em Portugal). He made a different decision about the starting note in one of them, giving it a very different sound than you find in the Rojo and Prado edition. Despite this, these chants might give you a sense of the kinds of melodies that the Old Hispanic singers were used to, and that might inspire you one way or another. I have some rough performing editions on 5-line stave of some of the chants, if anyone wants to see them (just ask, and I'll upload here). |
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8:26 PM Jul 11