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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 10 2014, 10:19 PM (2,012 Views) | |
| Emma Hornby | Dec 10 2014, 10:19 PM Post #1 |
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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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| Lindsay | Jan 8 2015, 08:05 PM Post #16 |
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I'm glad my musings were useful. Thank you for the link to the Colombian church, I will have to spend some time on Google translate! |
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| Raquel Rojo Carrillo | Jan 9 2015, 01:41 PM Post #17 |
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You're welcome! If you have questions about any technical terms in Spanish just let us know (we have native Spanish-speakers in our team). |
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| Lindsay | Jan 10 2015, 06:43 PM Post #18 |
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Dear Raquel I have had a look at the Colombian article and was wondering if the text that was used is a new one especially written or whether it draws directly from the original Hispanic texts and if so whether you might be able tell where from? Regards LIndsay |
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| Raquel Rojo Carrillo | Jan 10 2015, 09:03 PM Post #19 |
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Hi Lindsay, Thanks for your question. It looks like the texts used at the Colombian church do not come directly from the Old Hispanic chant medieval sources. They must come from either: 1) the 16th century Missal and Breviary that resulted from the Cisnerian reform, or, 2) from those that were published thanks to a later attempt to restore the Hispanic rite. This later attempt took place at the end of the 18th century and was impulsed by the cardinal of Toledo don Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana, resulting in the edition of a new 'Mozarabic' Breviary (1775) and Missal (1804), both of which were based on the Cisnerian books. I need a bit of time to confirm which of these sources this text comes from (and also to know whether the Colombian church might have added anything else, but this is very unlikely!). In any case, although the text does not come directly from the Old Hispanic Medieval sources, it is related to them because the Cisnerian books do use many of the original OH texts, and the Lorenzana books are based on the Cisnerian ones. If you're interested in having a look at the original OHC texts, here's a transcription of the Antiphonary of León's text which I shared somewhere else in this forum (so apologies if you already had it!): http://bibliotecadigital.jcyl.es/i18n/consulta/registro.cmd?id=4930 Best wishes, Raquel |
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| Lindsay | Jan 10 2015, 10:23 PM Post #20 |
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Hi Raquel Thank you for your reply, I was wondering if they might help give a foothold to the whole tradition. Lindsay |
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| rwilliams | Jan 10 2015, 11:07 PM Post #21 |
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Hi I am wondering what information might exist about where the chants were used, that is which particular building(s),and if so, is it possible to glean any clues as to the possible intervals used from any acoustic qualities. Also what instruments might have been used in the same liturgical context, if any, and what were their tuning systems? Are there any religious orders still in existence using liturgies derived from the Old Hispanic, and if so, could the present day chants contain historic memories? There must have been shared musical experience that we can only guess at, however the repetition of certain snatches of 'melody' hints at a set of instructions to the singers to introduce known musical patterns. Ruth |
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| Emma Hornby | Jan 11 2015, 04:38 PM Post #22 |
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Hi Ruth! welcome to the discussion ![]()
Well, we know that they were used in monasteries, cathedrals and parish churches across the Christian parts of Iberia, and in some places in the Muslim south. One problem is that many of the pre-1080 buildings have been replaced. So, for example, the current Leon cathedral dates from the 13th-16th century; the monastery+cathedral of Santa María la Real of Nájera was founded in the 11th century, but the surviving buildings are mostly 14th-15th century; Silos monastery was in the process of having the famous buildings constructed when the shift to the Roman liturgy happened; the current Toledo cathedral was begun in the 13th century etc etc etc. There are some Visigothic churches still around, but they tend to be sufficiently modest that no-one ever thought to invest in rebuilding them, so they may not give a very clear impression of the sizes of cathedrals, or of the richer monasteries. I think Kati had some links a while ago, so I'll get her to reply as well.
I don't think there is any evidence of instrument use within the Old Hispanic liturgy. I certainly have never come across any rubrics suggesting that instruments were used at any point. Isidore of Seville talks about the division of sounded music into music made by the voice, music made by blowing (including pipe organs), and music made by banging and plucking (Strings and percussion). It's here on pages 96-98. There is nothing in any of that suggesting that any of those instruments are used in a church context (but in a pagan religious context, yes, sure). There is a really interesting and approachable book by Calvin Stapert called A New Song for an Old World (which you can preview on Google books. It lays out some of the theology behind the pretty much universal rejection of instrumental music within worship in late antique and early medieval christianity (as a way of differentiating themselves from pagans, as much as anything) The tuning will have been Pythagorean. Michel Huglo has written about the diagrams used in various 8th century manuscripts of Isidore's etymologies, and he's shown convincingly that they show an understanding of a diatonic scale built up of tetrachords. A tetrachord is a series of 4 notes next to each other, with the intervals Tone, Semitone, Tone between them. So DEFG is a tetrachord and then abcd is the next one. That's all that is explicitly signalled in the diagram, so we don't know how the tetrachords were extended outside that range of notes (byzantine chant just has octave displacement of the same intervals, so it goes ABC DEFG abcd efgaa; the early Carolingian music theory (= "Musica enchiriadis") instead extends those tetrachords literally, so their theoretical scale was ABflatC DEFG abcd ef#gaa. Pretty much only the Mozarabic chapel in Toledo which, as we've said, has a very mixed relationship with the medieval Old Hispanic melodies. In a way, though, this gives us the most splendid freedom - we don't have to try to recreate something medieval that's gone - instead, we can create music for our own time and our own cultural contexts, which draws in some way or another on the fragments of information we have about the liturgy. Yes, absolutely. And to some degree, I think those known musical patterns are interchangeable. I don't know how you might recreate such an understanding within contemporary art or church music - could singers or performers be given a repertoire of snatches of melody from which they are invited to draw at will at certain points in the piece? I don't know whether that would have anything like the same impact as these medieval patterns had, though, since these medieval patterns go across a repertoire that is sung all year round. They would have been instantly recognisable. Melodic patterns specific to a three-minute piece won't have the same impact (although I could see potential in using familiar hymn melodies in a fragmentary way like this, where both singers and listeners would be able to use them as aural hooks?). The most obvious example that comes to mind of little melodic hooks, more or less hidden, and crafted into 3-minute pieces of music in our culture would be hip hop, but I don't think the cathedral choirs will quite be expecting to be invited to do that!!!
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| Lindsay | Jan 11 2015, 11:07 PM Post #23 |
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Just out of interest, when you say that the repertoire was sung all year round what sort of differences if any would there have in the type of music or how it was sung from season to season? |
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| Kati Ihnat | Jan 12 2015, 12:08 PM Post #24 |
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Note: In response to Ruth's question about buildings, I've started a new thread on this topic! |
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| Emma Hornby | Jan 13 2015, 05:28 PM Post #25 |
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I've asked Raquel to come along and answer that question. She studies the genre of vespertini, and there are vespertini for all seasons of the year, so they make a really nice case study for answering this question. |
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| Raquel Rojo Carrillo | Jan 13 2015, 10:57 PM Post #26 |
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Hi Lindsay, thanks for your question! Many OHC genres change their features according to the liturgical context in which they appear. With liturgical context I mean their season (Advent, Christmastide, Lent, Eastertide, Ordinary time), type of office (saints' offices which have a fixed date, e.g. the Assumption of the Virgin; temporale or moveable offices, which change their date of celebration every year, e.g. Easter or Pentecost; votive offices, held to make special requests, e.g. the office for the sick, the office asking for rain; and other offices for special occasions, e.g. the wedding office, the office for the birth of a King), character of the office (solemn, celebratory, commemorative, or rogation), type of day (Sunday or weekday), and type of service (vespers, matins, mass, and little hours). The vespertinus, chant that was sung to open the OH vespers service, presents great examples of the variety of forms that an OHC genre can adopt in these contexts. The majority of vespertinus consist of a main section (a verse called ‘VPR’) and one or more additional verses. After each verse there normally is a repetition cue indicating a responsorial performance, i.e., after the complete chanting of the VPR and the verse, the last part of the VPR is chanted again (this last part is called repetendum because of this repetition), after which the next verse—if any—is chanted followed, again, by the repetendum, and so on. Thus, the performance would be: VPR-verse-repetendum(-verse II-repetendum-verse III-repetendum, etc.). I call this type of chant ‘vespertinus+’. Another important group of vespertinus has just the main section or VPR, with no additional verses, chanted straight through without repeats. Normally: vespertinus+ appear on first vespers, the service that opened most OH liturgical days, while vespertinus- are typical of second vespers, the last service of several OH liturgical days; vespertinus+ are Sunday chants and vespertinus- are assigned to weekdays without feasts or celebratory character; vespertinus+ appear in celebratory offices, while vespertinus- are used in mournful offices that are not solemnities. Additionally, the more solemn the feast, the more additional verses has its vespertinus (and when more than two additional verses, the use of a same melody for all verses is frequent), for example: patron saint feasts can have a vespertinus listing up to nine verses; the most important feast of the temporale, Easter, can have up to five additional verses; offices devoted to celebrate important moments of Christ’s life (such as Christmas and Epiphany) present three additional verses; offices celebrating special occasions (e.g. the restauration of a church), can reach up to three verses; of all the mournful offices, only that for a dead bishop has two additional verses, while the rest normally have one or none additional verses; Sundays of Advent and Lent, and most Sundays of the Ordinary time, have vespertinus with only one verse; litanies offices (rogation offices) and weekdays of Lent have vespertini-. Finally, I would like to note that not all genres vary in the same way; instead, each genre has its own specific ways of adapting to the different liturgical contexts. For example, the OH psalmus, a responsorial genre chanted in the OH mass (not the vespers), normally has one verse following its main section, but from the second Sunday of Lent to the end of Holy week its number of verses gradually increases reaching up to 15 verses (this fact about the psalmi has been noted by Don M. Randel in several of his works devoted to OHC, for example, his 1969 article entitled ‘Responsorial Psalmody in the Mozarabic Rite’). I hope this helps! |
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| Emma Hornby | Jan 16 2015, 05:49 PM Post #27 |
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There are other ways that chants can vary according to the day. In the Lenten mass psalmi (these are chants sung between the readings of the Mass), as Raquel said, there are more verses in the chants on Sundays and fewer verses in the chants for weekdays, and EVEN MORE verses in Holy Week. But also, the Sunday psalmi have more notes per syllable, both when there aren't many notes on a syllable (1-6 notes per syllable) and when there are lots (up to 100 or so). By contrast, the weekday psalmi have more like 1-3 notes per syllable when there aren't many notes on a syllable, and up to about 20 notes as the most on a syllable. So those Sunday chants would take much longer to perform, and the text would go past much more slowly. |
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| Arthur | Jan 21 2015, 04:19 PM Post #28 |
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Duly noted that there is a separate thread talking about original performance space (which I look forward to contributing to) but as a 'complete basics' question... do we know what kind of performance space the selected works will be performed in next year? Trying to establish some given circumstances before getting a little deeper than this! |
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| Emma Hornby | Jan 24 2015, 05:00 PM Post #29 |
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I've answered that in its very own discussion thread, so it doesn't get lost in the general discussion in this one
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| Lindsay | Mar 19 2015, 04:05 PM Post #30 |
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I'm not sure if this is the correct thread. Because of another of my interests I have been studying South American/Spanish fretted instruments and came across the Laud which is an adaptation of the lute or more correctly its Arabic ancestor the Oud which is still being used today. I was struck by the fact that the Laud as used in a South America uses a tuning that is closer to Middle Eastern forms of the lute rather than the modern guitar or even the renaissance lute and I wondered if it might offer any insights into the type of musical language that would be relevant to the Old Hispanic Chant? |
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8:26 PM Jul 11