From a review by Willy Schuyesman for the CD "Eucharistie."
"The 20-member choir conducted by the charismatic father Gereon van Boesschoten has beautiful voices, and benefits from the fact that its members have had more than 20 years to blend in their voices into the choir sound, resulting in a nice and pleasing homogenous sound.
"And because of these substantial advantages, I find it all the more disappointing that the choir still performs Gregorian chant according to the performance rules of the beginning of the century. Beautiful as that may sound, it is still a pity that they seem not to have heard of Cardine or his capital research into the repertoire: all notes have the same length, an almost mathematical average, with no expressive extras whatsoever on important notes or words. One would have hoped that by now, most singers are aware of the rhythmic subtleties hidden in the neumes and their importance for a right interpretation of the text.
"But as we said, the feast of the Holy Sacrament was fairly recent addition, which means that many of its chants were composed at a time when the rhythmic characteristics had sunk into oblivion under polyphonic pressure. This means that in a number of cases, the choir could get away with a fairly ‘egalitarian’ musical approach. Yet the proper of Mass originated much earlier on, most of the chants featuring in manuscripts dating back to the late 900s, and therefore deserves much more rhythmical attention. In the introit Cibavit eos, for instance, there are a number of occasions (say the two last Alleluias) where we can hear the first note of the quilisma being stressed, whereas semiologists have long discovered that it is the last note of quilismas and scandici that need stressing. Or the gradual Oculi omnium, where every hint of musical build-up in Oculi is simply flattened out by making all the notes the same length. The same happens in the responsory Unus panis, where the solo part clearly demonstrates that this approach simply destroys the structure of the chant."
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So, I'm not the only person looking for more in the chant.
The track Qui manducat is available for download on the link above. It's interesting to me that some of the words are juxtaposed from what I'm accustomed. It's the first time I've run into that.
3 comments:
You are very quick to complain about "performance rules of the beginning of the century", but you are probably the only person I've come across in my past few years of chant studies who interprets and sings the neums in that manner, almost like an Irish ballad, with swooping runs, and the like, instead of the more meditative and floating "mathematical average".
Be kind to these great performers, but don't act "shocked" because people don't interpret Gregorian neums in the weird way you have learned to do so. I'd be pretty reticent about this "overwhelming scholarship" of Cardine as being definitive in any way whatsoever.
Whoops. It seems clear by the comment above that I'm not marking quotations clearly enough. The anonymous poster above thinks I wrote the text. I've added BLOCKQUOTE tags.
To Anonymous, and anyone else, please don't take my search as a criticism of the way chant is sung. It's been sung measuredly for a goodly chunk of its existence, and it is beautifully done, and loved by many. My focus right now is on the possibility of using what we know about the notation, orally-transmitted music, and cognitive abilities to unlock the chant's potential as a more direct form of communication.
Thanks for posting. Come back anytime.
I'll be following up on that perceived similiarity to Irish ballads. Gregorian chant is root repertoire for Western music as well as Western language. Since it's the oral transmission link that might be missing in our current praxis, we should be able to find artifacts of this in Western folk music.
Can anyone recommend recordings in which the folk music is similar to the style of singing you hear on this site?
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