This is just slightly off topic, but there's a battle going on about Chant. I would love comments from those in the know.
This article Sacred Music, Sacred Time by David P. Goldman sparked this:
Gregorian Chant: General: First Things: chant was the "invention" of Solesmes, and other odd claims on MusicaSacra forum.
15 years ago
Uh well....to say that the Solesme 'invented' their restored chant, in passing in an article like that is very irresponsible. He also never clearly explains what he means by that. In the forum he seems to say that their was no existent tradition to resurrect and no original chant to restore (because it was so diverse). that's not quite accurate let me try to explain......
ReplyDeleteduring the high middle ages polyphony developed from and then overtook chant as the common liturgical music. then during the Renaissance chants were "reformed" in the spirit of the Renaissance, without getting into details the melody's were corrupted. Solesmes abbey (in the 19thcentury)collected chant manuscripts and restored the melody's so our chant books today do contain authentic medieval chant (we have the manuscripts they exist I can sing from them in fact) .....of course we don't know exactly how they were sung in the middle ages short of finding a medieval tape recorder.
If he means that Solesmes invented a way to sing chant hes sort of right one of the monks invented a systematic way of singing the chant useful since it has no regularly recurring (metric) beat.
Also the chant tradition was never completely extinct. The Cartusians and Cictercians have maintained their own chant traditions right up until today.
The Solesmes version of the communion chant can be found here
http://www.christusrex.org/www2/cantgreg/partituras/co_qui_manducat.gif
a 12century manuscript with the same chant can be seen here
http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/bcj/0018/103/medium
just look they are virtually identical.