Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Welcome to Old Hispanic Office. We hope you enjoy your visit.


You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. You are very welcome to read the forum, to learn about our research on the Old Hispanic office, and about the ways in which composers are developing some of our research findings into modern compositions.

We invite composers who are interested in the Composition CompetitionRe-imagining Old Hispanic musical culture to register and join in the discussion. Others with an interest in Old Hispanic chant and liturgy are equally welcome to join the conversation. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.



Join our community!


If you're already a member please log in to your account in order to post messages:

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
Performative and compositional aspects; Core issues and themes for the compositional work
Topic Started: Jan 22 2015, 12:42 AM (495 Views)
Sorjuana_re
No Avatar

I would like to discuss compositional and performative aspects of this music.

Starting with performative aspects, I think about the people who performed these chants:
There were nuns and monks separately, in their respective monasteries? Or would they perform together, for some occasions? Can the existing manuscripts be traced to a monastery and it’s male or female voices?

Did they perform daily, and how many hours a day? Mostly, I assume, they were by themselves, only occasionally there would be visitors from outside, or the people of a settlement nearby attending?

Most of them were young, probably between 17 and 35, some few older? Young people singing together?

It would seem to me that the vocal range of the chants/melodies would have been an average human vocal range. The monks and nuns of a respective monastery would perform together, some soloists, and a chorus of average voices, presumably. Especially if I consider that probably monks or nuns at that time had a lot of hard work to perform during their days, even if they were of noble birth.

The singing and praying would go on for a number of hours, as far as I know; is that true? Considering one would have been performing chants for hours: that does change the style of performing, obviously. It seems to me that one would attain a different state of mind, performing for some hours. At least, that’s my experience from doing such things at times.

Singing would play the role of a daily contemplative group practise for a community of people working/living/praying together; sharing their lives - and what they believed to be their future afterlives

Key aspects of the performance, in essence, could then be described as: breathing in unison, becoming a body in unison, building community.

Practises like that are not done much any more, except by very few communities, mostly in non-European countries, it seems.

I deliberately separate these aspects from the liturgical and theological side here, and take a purely 'professional' attitude as a contemporary composer, trying to contextualise the historic compositions.



Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Emma Hornby
Member Avatar
Administrator
Wow, what a rich post! Thank you so much. I'll try to answer the questions one at a time.

Quote:
 
here were nuns and monks separately, in their respective monasteries? Or would they perform together, for some occasions?


Sometimes monasteries were for just men, or just women, and sometimes there were double monasteries, where men and women lived separately, but side-by-side in the same institution. Kati may be able to say more about this - I'll ask her! I have an archaeologist friend I can ask about the practicalities of life in a double monastery - I'll get back to you on that!

Quote:
 
Can the existing manuscripts be traced to a monastery and it’s male or female voices?

Sometimes, but mostly not.
A handful of the manuscripts have colophons, which are little statements in the manuscript saying something like "this manuscript was made by me, Petrus, for the monastery of Sant Iago, at the behest of Abbot Iohannes of Sahagun, paid for by Lord Ferdinando, and I completed it on Ascension Day, 1015". (I made up this example). We most often get the scribe's name. The rest of the information, though, is not given in all of the manuscripts with colophons. Sometimes we have a date for the manuscript, but no clear indication of where it was made, for whom, and who paid. For many of the manuscripts, we know where they ended up by the end of the middle ages - there was a big pile of them at the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos (about half the surviving manuscripts), and some of them were written at Silos, and some were used at Silos but written elsewhere, and some seem to have been just collected at Silos after the tradition went out of use. There was another pile of manuscripts at the abbey of San Millan de la Cogolla; more of those seem to have been used (and maybe written) at that abbey than with the Silos pile. And another pile of manuscripts ended up in Toledo cathedral, and almost all of those seem to have been neither copied nor used at the cathedral - instead, they were used at the parish churches in the city of Toledo after the cathedral had switched across to the Roman liturgy (so, during the 12th-14th centuries). I can talk about this for hours, so please just ask a little supplementary question and that'll set me off again!

Oh, Silos and San Millan were both male monasteries.



Quote:
 
Did they perform daily, and how many hours a day? Mostly, I assume, they were by themselves, only occasionally there would be visitors from outside, or the people of a settlement nearby attending?


Yes every day. Many days have liturgies that are proper to those particular days (even "Friday in the third week of Lent" - they can often look like pretty nondescript occasions). Some days don't have their own special liturgy, and on those days, the monks would have performed the "ferial liturgy". This has the same basic shape as the liturgy on the more special days, but the music is very simple, and there's not exactly a choice of the psalms to sing. Instead, they seem to have worked their way around the psalter (we are working on piecing together how that worked).

As with the Roman liturgy, it would have taken more hours on Feast days, and fewer hours on other days. We worked out how long the night office for the Feast of the Virgin Mary (18 December) would have taken. This is the biggest celebration of the year in the Leon antiphoner. On a normal, boring day, there is one set of antiphon+psalm, antiphon+psalm, alleluiaticum+psalm (that's an antiphon with lots of alleluias in!), responsory+psalm. And then you move onto the rest of the service. On 18 December, there were SEVEN sets of ant.+ps., ant.+ps., all.+ps., resp.+ps.! In this 18 December Mary office, after each set of chants there was a reading from Ildefonsus of Toledo's De perpetua virginitate Mariae contra tres infideles . And it wasn't an extract - the whole thing was read, divided up into seven. So we worked it out, reading enough of the Ildefonsus to work out how long a page would take to read and multiplying up, and singing random notes at a sensible speed in order to estimate how long each chant would take, and this whole night office, we reckon, would have lasted about seven hours. After which they'd have got on with a full day of liturgical celebration for the rest of the feast! Now, this is exceptional, but they certainly were spending several hours a day on the liturgy.

We don't know all that much about the devotional practices of the laity. Those for whom the monastery church was their local church will have attended (though of course not for all the services). Have a look at the discussion thread on buildings and spaces - I think there's a little bit in there about how the space was divided up for laity and monastics.



Quote:
 
Most of them were young, probably between 17 and 35, some few older? Young people singing together?
I really don't know! I will ask Kati if we can find that out for you easily.

Quote:
 
It would seem to me that the vocal range of the chants/melodies would have been an average human vocal range. The monks and nuns of a respective monastery would perform together, some soloists, and a chorus of average voices, presumably. Especially if I consider that probably monks or nuns at that time had a lot of hard work to perform during their days, even if they were of noble birth.


The chanting of the Roman liturgy rarely goes much beyond an octave in this period (by the 12th century, we get compositions by Hildegard and others writing in that south German sequence tradition, and yes, they sometimes write the most astonishing virtuosic chants that span 2 octaves, but that's not the sound world of early medieval chant at all). Take a look at the transcriptions of the chants (there's a discussion thread with that title!) and you can get a sense of the range. It's certainly within a normal vocal range.

Remember that there's no absolute pitch - the cantor (who would start the chant) would choose a pitch that would make the whole chant sit comfortably within his/her range and the range of the others singing with him/her. In Roman chant, there is a sense of some of the modes being high pitched and others low pitched (there's a lovely clear discussion of that on page 80 of this book, which you should be able to preview on google books. It's Chris Page writing there).

There are some chants that were sung by absolutely everyone (including laity) - these were very very simple. Some chants were sung by the whole monastic community (simple antiphons and psalms etc). Some chants were in the realm of the cantors, who were the specialist singers. Some of them seem to have been solo chants; some were sung by a choir; and some were sung by a pair or trio of "soloists" (Isidore talks about that, and I can dig out the reference for you if you want it)

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Emma Hornby
Member Avatar
Administrator
Quote:
 
Singing would play the role of a daily contemplative group practise for a community of people working/living/praying together; sharing their lives - and what they believed to be their future afterlives

Key aspects of the performance, in essence, could then be described as: breathing in unison, becoming a body in unison, building community.


Yes, absolutely right. Especially in the psalm chanting. The psalms were all known off by heart (that was one of the first things a novice monk or nun would learn). They were sung to very simple melodies. Sometimes there might be as many as 30 psalm verses being sung in sequence and then, for sure, the singers would/could achieve that contemplative state. With the antiphon and the accompanying prayer signalling to the community the direction(s) in which those contemplations might go.

Quote:
 
I deliberately separate these aspects from the liturgical and theological side here, and take a purely 'professional' attitude as a contemporary composer, trying to contextualise the historic compositions.


Perfect! We'll be delighted to answer any more questions you have on these topics or others!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Raquel Rojo Carrillo
Member Avatar

Thank you very much for starting this discussion!

Very little is known about the performance of this repertoire. The manuscripts do not specify for what type of voice were the chants written. This repertoire was produced to be performed at public and private services held monasteries, nunneries, parish churches and cathedrals. Musicologists trace the possible institutions in which OHC could have been practised through the analysis of the codicological, palaeographical and liturgical features of the manuscripts, as well as looking at the counted numbers of references to this repertoire in other sources related to Medieval Iberia (e.g. the works of Isidore of Seville). For example, the presence of a Regula puellarum bound together with the texts and music for the mass and office of Saint Pelagius in the fragmentary source F-Pn n. acq. lat. 239 has led scholars, from Férotin in 1912 to Millares Carlo in 1999, to believe that this source belonged to a nunnery. Most OHC sources, however, share great part of their repertoire, even if they are related to different types of institutions; so it seems that there was a core corpus of chants that was shared in all these possible institutions. Following my previous example, the few chants that appear at the fragmentary source F-Pn n. acq. lat. 239, also are written with very similar melodies and liturgical assignments, in at least 10 other sources, some of which were related to cathedrals (e.g. the Antiphonary of León) and others that have been preserved for long in masculine monasteries (e.g. the manuscripts 3 and 6 of the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos). Thus it must have been a repertoire that was suitable for any members of these institutions. In other words, any cleric of the time might have been expected to be familiar with this repertoire.

If the sources are related to monastic institutions they tend to include more services—they would present ‘little hours’ in addition to the public services (vespers, mass, matins). Nuns and monks would be chanting throughout the day, and, yes, the style of performance changes, normally according to the genre of chant and the type of office. So, for example, a vespers could start with a responsorial vespertinus (a chant that normally has a main section and verse, that are performed one after the other, repeating the last part of the main section after the verse, with the participation of different vocal sections, probably a soloist and a choir); a melismatic and challenging sono would follow, probably involving the most skilled soloists; then a group of antiphons, less melismatic than the genres mentioned before, would follow, with a different alternation of the vocal groups; a hymn could also be included and might have allowed the participation of the congregation in its chanting, and so on… Each of these genres would vary according to the liturgical season. For example, the vespertinus chant presents more than one verse when it appears in a solemnity.

The key aspects of performance that you mention were totally possible and necessary. I would add memorising to these key aspects. Since musical writing had just started to be employed as a resource for the transmission of musical repertoires in the Middle Ages, memory had a vital role in the performance of Old Hispanic chant (and of plainchant repertoires of the time). Thus, performers became, as you wrote, a body in unison, breathing and also thinking together.

Thanks!
Edited by Raquel Rojo Carrillo, Jan 22 2015, 06:59 PM.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Kati Ihnat
No Avatar

This is great. I'm going to try and add to the discussion using the surviving monastic rules from Iberia in this period. One was written in the sixth century by Isidore of Seville, one of the most important bishops and religious figures in early medieval Iberia; two others were written in the seventh century by bishop Fructuosus of Braga. Monastic rules tend to lay out the basic guidelines for life in a monastery, including questions of admission, daily life, and the special cases: sick and old monks, guests, the role of the abbot, etc. In the rest of Europe, the primary monastic rule of influence was that of St Benedict (i.e. the Benedictine Rule), which became especially standard in the eighth and ninth-century Carolingian Empire. While the Benedictine Rule was known in Iberia, it does not seem to have been especially strictly followed on a wide scale, and there seem to have been a number of different rules and types of communities. This would mean variety in practice and make-up of communities, but I'll try and answer your questions from the evidence of the rules we've got.
Quote:
 
There were nuns and monks separately, in their respective monasteries? Or would they perform together, for some occasions? Can the existing manuscripts be traced to a monastery and it’s male or female voices?


Fructuosus' rule makes clear that there were mixed monasteries - although he strongly disapproved of them (thinking there was no way monks wouldn't get distracted...). But he also makes provisions for situations where it was simply the case that monasteries were mixed. He specifies that their lives should be as separate as possible - working in different parts of the field, eating and sleeping in different quarters. It appears he suggests also that although they share religious services, they should sit on different sides of the choir. So that could give us an insight into what the offices of these mixed monasteries might have sounded like. [Chapters 15 and 17, Fructuosus, Rule II]

Quote:
 
Did they perform daily, and how many hours a day? Mostly, I assume, they were by themselves, only occasionally there would be visitors from outside, or the people of a settlement nearby attending?

So as Raquel was saying, there are a number of 'little offices' performed in monasteries in addition to the standard Vespers, Matins, terce, sext and none we also find in cathedrals. There's quite a bit of variety in terms of what monastic houses were doing, and Isidore and Fructuosus' rules diverge on this count. The manuscripts that contain the actual contents of these hours have up to a total of twelve. The smaller hours would have involved the recitation of just three psalms and their antiphons, so would not have taken long, unlike the bigger offices of Vespers and Matins (as Emma said, these could become extremely long). In between these hours, there were other things monks were supposed to do: work outside from dawn to nine, from nine to twelve reading/studying, then rest til three, work again until vespers (around six pm). [Chap. 5, Isidore, Rule] There would indeed have frequently been guests at the monasteries (other monks, nuns, pilgrims, bishops, etc.) and these would have been expected to participate in the life of the monastery. [Chap. 17, Fructuosus, Rule II]

Quote:
 
Most of them were young, probably between 17 and 35, some few older? Young people singing together?

As for the ages of the various members of monastic communities, these ran the whole gamut. There were children under seven up to old men and women. Fructuosus tells us of monasteries that accepted entire families - parents with their children - the whole family had to place itself under the abbot's command, and the children had to be educated, boys and girls alike. [Chap. 6, Fructuosus, Rule II] There's no specification that this would have included singing, but in the cases where young children ended up in monasteries (because they were given as oblates by their parents, or in other cases, were taken away from their Jewish parents - as was stipulated in the seventh-century laws), we can assume they would have had some musical education. This to say that it is very likely that, like in regions north of the Pyrenees, children would have lent their voices to the liturgy.
Edited by Kati Ihnat, Jan 23 2015, 03:49 PM.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
ZetaBoards - Free Forum Hosting
Enjoy forums? Start your own community for free.
Learn More · Register Now
« Previous Topic · Discussion threads · Next Topic »
Add Reply