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Some complete basics - where to start?
Topic Started: Dec 10 2014, 10:19 PM (2,009 Views)
Emma Hornby
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We are researching the Old Hispanic ('Mozarabic') liturgy. This is a Latin Christian liturgy that was celebrated in parts of the Iberian peninsula from Visigothic times (7th century) until the end of the 11th century. It went on being used in a handful of Toledo parish churches after that and we have manuscripts through to the 14th century from there.

The problem for us is that we cannot transcribe the notation. It does not have intervallic content and it has no pitch information. So (with about 20 exceptions of chants that have been preserved in pitched notation), we cannot sing any of this music now.

But the liturgy and its chant is really interesting to us because:

- the theology of the liturgy is distinctive, drawing on the theology of (in particular) Augustine of Hippo, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville etc. The meanings of the biblical chant texts are often made explicit in prayers that accompany the chants, and those prayers tell us what those chant texts were supposed to mean to the congregation. By looking at these chant and prayer texts, we can gain a rich sense of a particular medieval Iberian theology, which is rather different from what we are more used to nowadays.

- the melodies can contribute to the meaning. There are cadences we can identify, so we can work out how the text was punctuated musically. Some syllables have more notes than others, so we can get a sense of the pacing of text. This might give a very particular experience of that text - lingering on a particular word might help to draw out a particular theological meaning. Some syllables have 200 or more notes, and then we can think about what it means when text is entirely left behind for a while - is that an opportunity for spiritual ecstasy of some kind? Or is it a moment for purely musical display? Or something else?

- the kind of melodic language in operation here is also interesting. It sometimes feels like a cut-and-paste job, with familiar snatches of melody being combined in different ways in different chants. How might that sort of combinatory musical language impact the way that the music carries the text, or the way we respond to the music?

- groups of chants get combined within the liturgy, building cumulative meaning across a celebration. They can be related both textually and musically (or not!).

This is a small sample of some of the elements that we hope you might like to ask more about, and that might inspire you. We are not looking for you to write pretend medieval music. Instead, we hope to be able to communicate our understanding of the aesthetic/devotional/spiritual potential of this material so that you can think of ways of creating an equivalent aesthetic or spiritual or devotional impact now, either entirely freely (the instrumental competition) or within a Christian liturgical context (the choir competition).
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Emma Hornby
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This question from a different discussion thread:

Quote:
 

Are we encouraged to tackle classic topics such as the Passion?

For my own leanings I would like to choose an concept as expressed in all three of the major religions of Spain at the time.
Perhaps Abraham's potential sacrifice of Isaac as it had a global impact on the cultures of Iberia.
Would this be acceptable?



You can tackle any topic you like, as long as it links with the Old Hispanic office research one way or another.

Abraham and Isaac could be really interesting - if bits of that story are used liturgically, we might be able to hunt them down for you, so you can see what texts were juxtaposed in the Old Hispanic liturgy relating to them (and obviously, if others want to know about the texts used for other occasions or on other topics, we can do our best to track them down).

Look at Litha's introduction here. She started by thinking about Palm Sunday, but has ended up thinking in much more abstract terms about social hierarchies and initiation. The planned piece will be for concert performance rather than a liturgy.

People writing for the cathedral choirs will need to stick with Christian texts and write music that is useful for an Anglican liturgy, because that is part of the compositional brief. But people wanting to write for Kokoro can be much less directly linked to the liturgy or to Christianity at all, as long as the line of thought from our research to your compositional inspiration is clear and is clearly articulated in the commentary.
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Lindsay
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When you say that the melodies were a 'cut and paste job' with familiar snatches of melody is it likely that these would be re-used sacred melodies or well known secular tunes?
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Emma Hornby
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"The familiar snatches of melody" are things we recognise from chant to chant. I just went into the Leon antiphoner and opened a random folio, and got this lot (the images should be attached to this post; if you right click on them you can open them in new tabs):

1: chant opening. There are LOADS of chants that have this sort of opening, with the shape you can see on the right hand side of the image, very close to the beginning of the chant (with a single note on any syllable before it). I've come across this exact opening shape, in various manuscripts, over 100 times in total.

2: simple cadence

3: cadence. Really common (and reminds me every time of a Gregorian chant cadence that goes abcbc ba. I'm not claiming it's the same melody at all, but I can't help humming that melody most times I see that shape :$ )

4: this one can be found on almost every page of every manuscript, with this exact pattern of note shapes (v-shaped rising pair; angular rising pair; then a three-note shape with a fall then a rise). Sometimes it's at a cadence, sometimes it's mid phrase.

5: This quite often appears at the end of a melisma (lots of notes on a syllable), or else just on its own, but it is cadential

6: this is a cadence, often appears at the end of responsory verses



It's not even reuse of sacred melodies exactly, it is more that the melodic language of the Old Hispanic chant seems to be built up of little chunks of melody that can be used multiple times, usually in the same formal context (at cadences, or at openings, say).

I simply do not know whether this melodic language extends to secular music. The problem there is that the secular music we have from Iberia dates, as far as I know, from more than a century after these Old Hispanic chants stopped being used. Also, that secular music is very different in style - there is no equivalent there to the 200 notes on a single syllable that we get in the chants. The Cantigas de Santa Maria tend to be much more syllabic than our chants - I will ask a colleague, though, whether there are any similarities in the way that songs are made in that repertoire.



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Edited by Emma Hornby, Dec 12 2014, 08:20 PM.
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Emma Hornby
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OK, I had a conversation with my colleague Sarah Johnson, who works on the Cantigaes. I hope I don't misrepresent what she wanted to say.

In the Old Hispanic chants, as I said in the previous message, we get snippets of melody reused time after time. In the Cantigas, there are shared melodic processes from song to song, but these are more framework than 'motif'. There are basic opening and cadence patterns that occur across melodic families, but not consistently, and more because there are only so many ways of ending on F (or whatever) rather than because there are recurring cadential motifs.

So it does not look as if there is a close relationship between the ways that people make songs within the two repertoires. I'm not surprised by that, since they date from different eras.

There is one more thing I could do with pursuing here - and thank you for the nudge - and that is to look at the 20 ish pitched chants, to see whether they share the same sort of tonal framework as the cantigas. I am not expecting that they will, but it would be a useful piece of information either way, if you are hoping to capture some tonal elements of the Iberian sound world in your composition.
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Lindsay
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Just a few things, do you have a link to the pitched chants and could you suggest a good starting point with the cantigas?
As a purely personal aside it seems important that even if we have no way of knowing what would have been authentic then at least the pieces should as far as possible be created in a way that wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't known about the old Hispanic chant tradition.

Also (which may not be relevant to this particular thread) I came across 'An introduction to Gregorian plainchant and transcription into modern musical notation' by Arnold den Teuling from 2006 recently. It includes a table which compares neumes with Gregorian and modern notation and I wondered if you had seen it and if you had any thoughts about it?
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Emma Hornby
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Hi Lindsay,

There's a transcription of the pitched chants here: http://bibliotecadigital.jcyl.es/i18n/consulta/registro.cmd?id=14947

And I'll upload a few of my (informal performing) transcriptions of them onto a 5 line staff in case that's helpful - there should be some attached to this post. The Arnold den Teuling appears to be here. There are various ways of trying to transcribe medieval chant in a way that makes sense to modern readers. Of course, that's not what we are trying to do here, in this competition. it's certainly interesting, though, to explore different people's ways of trying to represent in modern notation the performance style that they associate with medieval chant. den Teuling comes up with something that - I think - modern performers would often sing very metrically, just because those notations are metrical in the music we usually sing. Eerik Joks recently did a really really interesting PhD on the modern performance styles of GRegorian chant. There is a copy here. I tend to use a 5-line staff but without stems on the notes. I use a tenuto mark to signal a longer note, and I use a slur to indicate shorter notes. I either put the shakes/ornaments above the note or I replace the notehead with an ornament entirely. And strophas (those commas in medieval notation) I either treat as a staccato with a dot over, or sometimes I replace the note head with a comma. At least I used to do that, but I'm not sure I would know how to any more. Like den Teuling, I use a diamond and open note head for a liquescence (one of the signs that tells singers to do the second vowel of a dipthong on that particular note, or to vocalise a letter on that note like "m" or "l" or "n").

It is totally possible that some of the composers might be inspired by some of the ways that music was notated in the past, and particularly on the Iberian peninsula, but the important thing will be, of course, to be communicating clearly with the modern performers who are going to try to perform whatever they come up with!


Quote:
 
As a purely personal aside it seems important that even if we have no way of knowing what would have been authentic then at least the pieces should as far as possible be created in a way that wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't known about the old Hispanic chant tradition.


I entirely agree, Lindsay, but I would add to that: I think that the way in which the pieces are created in response to the Old Hispanic tradition might vary enormously. In fact, I hope the way they are created varies enormously. Some people might be inspired by the melodic language of the Old Hispanic chants (what we know of it); some people might be inspired by the notation (either to use elements of it, or to create notations that are visually or conceptually similar); some people might be inspired by the kinds of rituals the OH chant was used in; some people might be inspired by the way that textual material interacted (chants, readings, prayers etc) within the Old Hispanic liturgy, and do something that builds on the same sort of intertextuality but perhaps from a different ideological starting point. That's just what came off the top of my head there! So yes, some people might do something that builds on what we know of this medieval soundworld, but others might do something totally totally different arising from what they learn about the Old Hispanic liturgy.

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Emma Hornby
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Here's another performing edition file - I love this chant!

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Emma Hornby
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A starting point with the cantigas is cantigasdesantamaria.com

If you explore the transcriptions, you'll see one kind that just makes the medieval notation neater (but still notation) and another that turns it into a modern 5 line staff. Is that what you meant? A starting point for getting to know Cantigas melodies? But DO bear in mind that it is really a lot like getting to know Messiaen's music as a first stage in trying to understand Georges Bizet's musical style (except that the sacred/secular divide is the other way round there, with the older one being the more secular), or actually, even, getting to know Messiaen's music as a first stage in trying to understand Rameau's musical style - that might be a better analogy in terms of the chronology.
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Lindsay
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Many thanks for this it is helpful to get a flavour of what the chants might have been like.


Sorry another aside, the comparison with the gap in time between Rameau and Messiaen is quite thought provoking although I suppose it is possible that Rameau could have at least made an attempt at some of Messiaen's scores and vice versa. (Although on the other hand I do remember coming across a quote from Messiaen some time ago to the effect that Western music had gone wrong hundreds of years ago!).

It also made me think of the whole issue of authenticity in performance as we cant even be totally sure of how music was performed when we have standard notation. I've thought for some time it would be a really interesting experiment to get performers from two different world music traditions who don't know each others music and just give them instructions written by experts on how to play some pieces and then get them to judge each others attempts. It might raise some interesting questions about the whole issue of authenticity.
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Emma Hornby
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Yes, Lindsay, I completely agree - the sound world of very familiar music recorded in the early years of recording technology has a very different aesthetic and performance practice from what we are used to with those repertoires, despite the fact that there is an unbroken performing tradition between then and now, and it's less than 150 years ago. There's some fascinating work by Daniel Leech Wilkinson in this area.

It is just one of the reasons why we decided on this project to try to find a way of recreating something of the effect of Old Hispanic chant - whether that is the spiritual effect or emotional effect or intellectual effect or aesthetic effect - without trying to recreate the sound world of that Visigothic Christian devotional culture, or even the musical idioms. If we can manage to communicate to you composers what we think this music might have done to people, and how, then you can try to create music that tries to do something (for our own time) to people that is somehow analogous. We need you to keep asking questions until you get answers that give you a kicking off point! :)
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Lindsay
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Hi Emma

I had a few questions which I hope aren't too basic. Your last post made me start thinking about what experiences today might be analogous to the type of experiences that you mention and wondered if anything is known about who the congregation would have been and what other music may have been part of their daily lives? Would the chant just be performed by specialist musicians or would all the worshippers be expected to participate in some way?

With regard to the spiritual effect I was thinking about the use of words such as 'gotten' in modern American English which have fallen out of use in England and wondered if any older forms of worship have continued in the church in South American countries which might give some ideas about the old Hispanic rites?
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Emma Hornby
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Oooh, these are great questions! I'll have a go at answering this one first:

Quote:
 
...wondered if anything is known about who the congregation would have been and what other music may have been part of their daily lives? Would the chant just be performed by specialist musicians or would all the worshippers be expected to participate in some way?


There are three quite different worshipping contexts

1. Cathedrals. These were usually staffed by clerics rather than people in monastic orders. Those clerics performed the daily liturgy, including the main Office hours (so, Vespers, the night office = 'ad matutinem', Terce, Sext, and 'None) as well as the Mass. There will have been a worshipping congregation, although there often seem to have been screens (as elsewhere in the middle ages) so that a lot of their experience will have been of somewhat muffled noises happening out of sight in the distance. There were parish churches in the cities too, and I honestly don't know who went to a parish church and who went to a cathedral in the usual run of things.

2. Monasteries. These varied enormously in size and wealth and level of activity. Their main job was to perform the liturgy and, in addition to the cathedral office, they did more Office hours (each of 12 hours was celebrated with an office, rather than the third, sixth and ninth hour as in the cathedral rite). The music for these offices will have been very simple - it's a few psalms chanted with antiphons and prayers and not a lot else (NB over simplification, but it will do for now). Presumably lay people living nearby will have treated the monastery church as their regular church for worship and, as with the cathedrals, screens and other architectural features will have been used to separate the monastics from the laity. Monastic communities were sometimes tiny - just a handful of people. The important thing was that they kept the liturgy running for the good of their souls and everyone else's souls, but the musical results may often have been more devotional than artistic :)

3. Parish churches. We know a bit about the way that these continued to have the Old Hispanic liturgy in Toledo until the 14th century, and we have a Liber Ordinum (which is a book full of special rites of various kinds) that seems to have been for the use of a parish priest rather than someone in a more elaborate institution. They seem to have done the cathedral office, if the Toledo books are anything to go by, and they at least went on copying the elaborate melodies that we know from earlier manuscripts. Presumably they kept the chant tradition going, even though the parish churches were increasingly poverty stricken once benedictine (well, Cluniac) monasticism and the Roman liturgy had become the royally-sponsored norm by the end of the 11th century. These parish churches will have been the focus for worship for smallish communities of people, but of course the laity won't have been in church every day (even though there is liturgical provision for most days), and the standard of the chanting may well not have been anything to write home about!

Quote:
 
Would the chant just be performed by specialist musicians or would all the worshippers be expected to participate in some way?


There are a few chants that absolutely everyone was expected to join in with. E.g. there's a Mass chant called a "clamores", which is part of a string of materials sung between the readings of the Mass. And at the end of the "clamores" (which is specialist singer-ish music) there is a "Deo gratias" which is often written out fully with notation. Each manuscript has just one or two melodies for this "Deo gratias", and it varies from manuscript to manuscript, and it looks as if this is the bit which everyone joined in with.

There's one of them on the top line of this image British Library Add. 11695, where the text seems to go "Deo grs", and there are just a couple of notes above the text.

There's another British Library image attached to this post, and that has CLM at the top right, telling you the clamores "Caeli enarrant gloriam" is about to start. At the end of it, very faint on the bottom line, is "do grs" (= deo gratias) with that same two-notes-at-the-same-height thing on the first syllable, and then a sign like a rounded hill, which is a note and then a lower note.

both those manuscripts were from Silos, or somewhere near Silos, so that's THEIR melody for the "Deo gratias".

And there's a Leon 8 snippet attached to this post, and that's the melody they used.

I would guess that absolutely everybody - laity and all - joined in with those acclamations.

Otherwise, almost all of the music was sung by people within the religious community. Some of the chants will have been sung by special soloists or choir members - there are plenty of those in the repertoire. And other chants will have been sung by the whole religious community, like the hymns and the psalms, which go round and round continuously in the liturgical cycle, and were sung to really simple melodies, so everyone could latch on to them. I do not think the laity joined in with either hymn or psalm singing - I would doubt that they would know the psalms by heart, or have the literacy to be able to read and join in. Of course, the readings and prayers were sung to a simple reciting tone as well (rather than spoken), and they would have been performed by whoever had that liturgical responsibility (and Isidore of Seville talks about how important that job was in making sure everyone understood the text).



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Emma Hornby
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Quote:
 
With regard to the spiritual effect I was thinking about the use of words such as 'gotten' in modern American English which have fallen out of use in England and wondered if any older forms of worship have continued in the church in South American countries which might give some ideas about the old Hispanic rites?



I don't have any idea about South America - not that I know of.

There IS a continuation of some of the Old Hispanic rites in the Mozarabic Chapel in Toledo Cathedral. Ca 1500, Cardinal Cisneros commissioned Canon Ortiz to create a new Breviary and Missal for the Old Hispanic rite. He consulted all the most knowledgeable practitioners of the ancient Old Hispanic liturgy, and put together materials, with music. The texts are really pretty close to one of the medieval branches of the Old Hispanic liturgy - close enough that Ortiz and his assistants were almost certainly looking at exactly the same manuscript that we look at to make the comparison (the 13th century manuscript in question is housed in Toledo cathedral, and may well have been in the cathedral library by the end of the 15th century). The melodies are more problematic, though, for our purposes. Some of them derive from Gregorian melodies. Some seem to be newly composed. Some of the simple ones (like the litany-type chants called "preces") do seem to be somewhat related to the medieval melodies that we know. To a first approximation, though, the melodic tradition seems to have died out between the 14th century and the end of the 15th century. This is hardly surprising, given how few people will have been carrying that tradition in the Toledo parish churches, and given the chances of those people dying from plague or something. I did some close comparisons of some of the Mass chants I was working on a few years ago and, honestly, I couldn't see a relationship between the Cisneros/Ortiz melodies and the genuine medieval ones.

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Raquel Rojo Carrillo
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Hi Lindsay! Thanks for your question! Following Emma's can add something related with the Old Hispanic genre that I am currently studying: the vespertinus, first chant that was sung every day at the Old Hispanic vespers. Comparison of the vespertinus with the genre that has its same placement and function in the Neo-Mozarabic chant (repertoire that originated from the late 15th-century Cisnerian reform), gives results that coincide with what Emma explains: many of the texts are shared by both genres, but their melodies seem to be unrelated. It is worth bearing in mind that, even after the publication of Ortiz's breviary and missal and the production of the four 'Cantorales' (manuscripts containing the music for this 'reconstruction' of the Hispanic medieval rite), this OH-inspired repertoire was marginally practised in just a few churches of Spain, among them only one chapel of the Cathedral of Toledo (the Corpus Christi chapel, where this chant is still performed today). In fact, apart from these four Toledan cantorales, no other 16th-century manuscript or print containing the music of the Neo-Mozarabic repertoire has surfaced.
So, this marginal repertoire seems not to have been introduced in South America during its conquest and evangelisation. Also, a more standardised and universally known liturgy and chant were necessary to impose an alien religion throughout a continent that was populated by peoples of completely different religious practices. Franco-Roman chant (i.e. Gregorian) was more suitable for this task and more convenient for the Spanish conquerors to gain additional support and funding from Rome. Anyway, if you would like to have a look at the Cantorales (they still are the only plainchant repertoire that was inspired by the medieval Hispanic rite) you can find some pictures of their recently published facsimile together with a couple images of late Toledan OHC sources here: http://www.omifacsimiles.com/brochures/cantmoz.html. I also wanted to add that thanks to your question I found out that a Colombian church recently decided to allow and practise the Neo-Mozarabic chant :) , see this link for more information: http://iglesiantiguaencolombia.jimdo.com/rito-hispano-mozarabe/

Edited by Raquel Rojo Carrillo, Jan 8 2015, 05:34 PM.
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