The Interpretation of Plainchant

Author(s): Egon Wellesz

Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Oct., 1963), pp. 343-349
Published by: Oxford University Press
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THE INTERPRETATION OF PLAINCHANT

By EGON WELLESZ

In his 'Motu proprio' of 22 November I903 Pope Pius X referred

to "very recent studies" by which the ancient chant of the Roman
Church "has been restored so well to its former integrity and purity",
and ordered its widespread restitution. This refers to the work done
by the Benedictine monks of Solesmes who, since 1889, had been
publishing in the 'Paleographie Musicale' facsimiles of the oldest
and most important manuscripts, which were to serve as a basis for
an authentic edition of the corpus of Gregorian melodies. It is well
known that already at that time two opposite views existed about the
rhythmic execution of plainchant, and that a real controversy began
when the first chant books were printed with the additional signs
worked out by Dom Mocquereau.1 It is, however, only recently
that even the rhythmic interpretation of the neumes which we find
in the official 'Editio Vaticana' has been rejected. This was done by
W. A. Vollaerts, who spent 35 years examining the relevant manu-
scripts and the writings of the theorists. His book 'Rhythmic Pro-
portions in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Chant' (Leiden, 1958) was
much read and discussed. The results of Vollaert's investigation
have now been taken up by Dom Gregory Murray in his new book on
Gregorian chant.2 It seems to me that the conflict between the
adherents of the school of Solesmes, who speak of rhythmic nuances,
and the mensuralists, who maintain that certain signs and letters
added to the neumes demand doubling of the rhythmical value,
will never be solved if the problem with all its implications is not
put on a broader basis.
In January 812 A.D. a Byzantine legation was sent by the
Emperor Michael I to the court of Charlemagne at Aachen. From
the 'De gestis Karoli Magni' by a monk of St. Gall (now ascribed
to the poet Notker Balbulus)3 we learn that on the Octave of
Epiphany the Emperor listened to them singing in Greek the group
of antiphons beginning with 'Veterem hominem'. He ordered one
of his clerics who knew Greek to translate the antiphons and to
1 Cf. D. A. Mocquereau, 'Examen des critiques dirigees par D. Jeannin contre l'ecole
de Solesmes', in 'Monographies Gr6goriennes', vii (Paris, 1926).
2 Dom Gregory Murray, 'Gregorian Chant according to the Manuscripts'. pp. vi + 97.
Musical supplement, pp. 31. (Gary, London, 1963, ?I 5s.)
3 See G. Meyer von Konau's edition, Book II, chap. 7 (St. Gall, 1920).
343

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344 MUSIC AND LETTERS

take the greatest care that the Latin words fitted the melodies as
well as the original Greek. This tale was always treated as a legend.
But the late Jacques Handschin, with the help of Oliver Strunk,
established its truth. In a study 'Sur quelques tropaires grecs traduits
en Latin'4 he showed that the Latin antiphons are a shortened
version of a group of Byzantine troparia for that feast.
What can we infer from the report of the Monk of St. Gall?
From several facts transmitted to us we know that Charlemagne was
an experienced music-lover. He took great care to have plainchant
sung in its original shape and admonished the monks to go back to
the way it was sung in the days of Pope Gregory the Great. The fact,
therefore, that he-a man of action, not a scholar-was able to
listen to Byzantine chant as if it were plainchant shows that he did
not feel any stylistic difference between them in sound or execution;
otherwise he could not have ordered the introduction of these new
melodies into the Latin service of his chapel at Aachen, where the
singing was considered a model for all the churches in his realm.
It is noteworthy that the essay 'De Karolo Magno' is by the same
Notker Balbulus5 who in the famous letter to his friend Lantpert
sent a list of litterae significativae, i.e. letters added to the neumes, to
explain how they should be executed: c, for example, stands for
celeriter and indicates a quick singing of the note or group of notes to
which it is added; t - tene (or teneatur or trahatur) indicates a lengthen-
of the note; s = sursum, the most frequent sign, indicates that the
neume to which it is added should be sung higher than the preceding
one. All the signs which cover the whole range of variation in per-
forming the chant were described in A. Schubiger's 'Die Sangerschule
St. Gallens vom achten bis zwolftenJahrhundert' (Einsiedeln, 1858),
but nobody, as far as I know, has drawn the obvious conclusion
from the end of the letter in which Notker writes: "Salutant te
Ellenici fratres". Were the "Ellenici fratres", the Greek monks,
merely guests in St. Gall? Certainly not. At that time thousands of
Orthodox monks from the monasteries in Asia minor had fled to
the West to avoid the persecution of the Arab conquerors of their
country. The Popes had settled them particularly in the churches
of the Po valley, which had been abandoned by their priests when
the Lombards invaded the country. These Greek monks, mostly
Melkites, had to convert the Lombards from the heresy of Arius.6
4 'Annales Musicologiques', ii, pp. 27 foil.
6 Cf. Wolfram von den Steinen, 'Notker der Dichter und seine geistige Welt', 2 vols.
(1948).
6 Cf. A. de Capitani d'Arzago, G. P. Bognetti & G. Chierici, 'Santa Maria di Castel-
seprio' (Milan, 1948), particularly the chapters by Bognetti on the historical background.

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THE INTERPRETATION OF PLAINCHANT 345

These 'significant letters' of which Notker gives a list are very

similar to the signs and letters, the 'Great Hypostases', used in late
Byzantine notation, and there is no doubt that the very ingenious
and highly developed Byzantine system of notation had influence
upon the neumes of North Italy and St. Gall. Byzantine notation
was above all a system of signs for the correct execution of the
melodies. In its first phases the signs indicated mainly the nuances
of rhythm and expression; only at a later stage were the intervals
indicated as well, at first approximately, finally with great precision.
There were from the beginning signs to denote rhythmic and
dynamic nuances, and the Byzantine theorists, unlike those in the
West, give exact indications of their meaning. Thus the klasma is
defined as a sign that "lengthens slightly" the duration of the note
to which it is added; the gorgon is equivalent to c of the litterae
significativae, and means celeriter. The diple is the only sign for doubling
the value of the note; it has the same function as the Western
bistropha. There is, however, no indication in the Latin manuscripts
that the innumerable lengthening strokes indicate the doubling of
the note value. They stand for the prolongation of the note, and the
little vertical stroke in the Solesmes editions permits the soloist or
regens chori to produce the right kind of lengthening.
To those of us who are accustomed to the innumerable additional
signs in Byzantine notation it seems astonishing that Dom Gregory
Murray pays so much attention to the litterae significativae. In his
analysis of the Gradual 'Christus factus est' he reconstructs the
melody from a comparative study of four manuscripts: Codex Laon
239 (published as vol. x of the 'Paleographie Musicale'), and three
St. Gall manuscripts: Codex 359 (vol. ii of the second series of the
'Paleographie musicale'), Codex 339 (vol. i of the 'Paleographie
Musicale') and Codex 121 from Einsiedeln (vol. iv of the 'Paleo-
graphie Musicale'). In Codex Laon the first neume has, apart from
its lengthening sign, a t = tene; this t is missing in the three St. Gall
manuscripts, moreover Codex 359 has no lengthening sign. Dom
Gregory writes on p. 33: " 't' is added as an extra warning. Of the
three St. Gall manuscripts, only 359 neglects to add an episema
to the virga". Do we not know that neumatic notation was con-
stantly changing and that the notation became gradually more
precise? The t is not an "extra warning", but is simply an additional
sign like the 'Great Signs' in late Byzantine notation, added in red
ink, just as today we set a horizontal stroke above a note and add
ten. (= tenuto).
Let us now turn to the interpretation of the theorists in favour of

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346 MUSIC AND LETTERS

fixed rhythmical values. Vollaerts and Dom Gregory support their

hypotheses about the rhythmic interpretation of plainchant by those
passages of the theorists in which they obviously speak of classical
metre in order to show that they are learned musicians, not merely
singers. In his 'Die Musikanschauung des Mittelalters' (I905)
H. Abert has shown explicitly that medieval musical aesthetics were
based on Pythagorean and Neo-Platonist ideas. Cassiodorus in-
fluenced the theorists of the early Middle Ages more than Boethius.
His writings are based on those of Greek mathematicians such as
Ptolemaeus and Alypius, and Latin authors like Mutianus, Apuleius,
Censorinus and Augustine. It is Cassiodorus's definition of music as
"disciplina vel scientia quae de numeris loquitur"7 which has
caused so much misunderstanding-though, from his own indica-
tions, one should have inferred that the definition was of Pythagorean
origin and goes back to the mathematical treatise of Nicomachus
of Gerasa, who lived in the second century A.D. and exercised great
influence on the Neo-Platonists. Of even greater importance was
Cassiodorus's definition "Musica quippe est scientia bene modu-
landi"8 which goes back to St. Augustine. In his monumental work
'St. Augustin et la fin de la culture antique'9 H. I. Marrou, discussing
the six books of 'De Musica', points out that it would be "un con-
tresens tres grave que de traduire musica par notre 'musique'".
For Augustine, "musica est une science mathematique au meme
titre que l'arithmetique ou la geometrie". In all this, however,
Augustine is not original; the definition of music as "scientia bene
modulandi" (that is the knowledge of the proportions) goes back
to the great Roman encyclopedic scholar, Marcus Terentius Varro
(116-27 B.C.), as H. Abert has shown.10 From the same source,
i.e. Varro, Cassiodorus derives his interpretation of rhythm and
metre.

We find similar references to ancient philosophers, grammarians

and mathematicians in Byzantine theoretical treatises. There is,
however, an illuminating passage in a treatise by Nicholas Mesarites,
written about 1200, on the Church of the Apostles at Constantinople,
to which I drew attention in I927.11 Here the teaching in a school
attached to the Church is described. There are classes for children,

7 Gerbert, 'Scriptores de Musica', i, p. I6, para. 2.

8 Ibid., par. 4-
pp. 197-203.
10 H. Abert, 'Zu Kassiodor', Sammelbinde der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, iii
(1901-2), pp. 439-53-
11 E. Wellesz, 'Byzantinische Musik' (Breslau, 1927), p. 46. The passage from
Mesarites is reproduced in my 'History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography', 2nd ed.
(Oxford, 1961), pp. 62-3.

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THE INTERPRETATION OF PLAINCHANT 347

who are taught singing, and also for young men who "make con-
ductor's movements with their hands in order to guide the beginner".
Teaching in the theory of music, however, is completely separated
from teaching in singing. They argue with each other, discussing
terms unfamiliar to most people or even unheard of, such as nete,
hypate and parhypate, mese and paramese, instead of strings. These
terms, taken from ancient Greek musical theory, are not found in
the treatises on Byzantine music. The passages from Mesarites show,
therefore, that writing on the theory of music, particularly on
rhythm and metre, belonged to Neo-Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic
speculations. It had nothing to do with Christian chant, which is of
Syro-Palestinian origin and was in no way connected with Greek
or Roman music.12
How could metric rules which are based on the difference
between long and short vowels and syllables possibly be applied
to Latin, which for centuries had lost the distinction between long
and short vowels and had developed stress accents? We know,
moreover, that the liturgical language in the Roman churches was
Greek until the last quarter of the fourth century; singing in Greek
continued very much longer. A Roman theologian who was known
under the name of Ambrosiaster wrote in his commentary on the first
epistle to the Corinthians13 that the people in Italy enjoyed singing
in Greek "because they liked the sound of the Greek words" (sicut
adsolent Latini homines Graece cantare, oblectati sono verborum)
"though they do not know what they sing".l4 This shows that it
is useless to discuss those parts of the theoretical treatises which
repeat or expound Cassiodorus and Boethius, because the authors
of the treatises tried to maintain the ideal of classical learning.
Exactly the same thing happened in the Byzantine Empire, where
Syriac hymns, translated into Greek, were commented upon as if
they were of classical Greek origin. They were, however, based on
isosyllabic stanzas with two to three stress accents to each line.
Turning to Latin hymns we see the same phenomenon, as F. J. Raby
has shown in his 'History of Christian Latin Poetry'.15 Even when
they are written in an archaic metre like the hymns of St. Ambrose,

12 For further information about this subject see G. Pietsch, 'Die Klassifikation der
Musik von Boetius bis Ugolino von Orvieto', in 'Studien zur Geschichte der Musiktheorie
im Mittelalter' (1929), and 'Die Musik im Erziehungs- und Bildungsideal des ausgehenden
Altertums und fruhen Mittelalters' (1932) by the same author in the same series. These
two studies are indispensable for the student of the Scriptores de Musica.
13 Migne, 'Patrologia Latina,' xvii, col. 255 b.
14 See my article 'Recent Studies in Western Chant', The Musical Quarterly, xli (1955),
pp. 177 foil.
15 2nd ed. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, I953).

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348 MUSIC AND LETTERS

who used the classical iambic dimeter, the vowels were no longer
divided into short and long, but into unaccentuated and accentuated
syllables. The hymn 'Aeterne rerum conditor' need not have been
sung in a 3/4 rhythm, but as we find it in the 'Antiphonale
Monasticum':

Ae - ter - ne re -rum Con - di -to

Ae - ter - ne re - rum Con - di - tor

We find an exact parallel to this poetical procedure in Byzantine

hymnography. John Damascene, one of the most famous poet-
musicians (c. 675-c. 748) wrote some kanons in iambic metre which
one can also read according to their stress accents. The signs of
Byzantine notation are, as already mentioned, above all signs for
performance, indicating precisely the rhythmic value of each note;
they show that these Byzantine iambic stanzas were sung exactly
as is indicated by the notation of the 'Antiphonale Monasticum'
of Solesmes: the melody underlines the stress accents of the stanza.
I transcribe the beginning of the first Ode from Codex Grottaferrata
E. y II fo.I8r:

E - so - se Ia - on thau - ma - tour - gon. de - spo - tis

_ r ) , "^ r^ ^ ) j^nA
i - gron tha - las - sis ki - ma : cher - so - sas pa - le

Studies in Gregorian chant are at present at a critical stage.

Recent liturgiological investigations have radically changed the
historical basis on which they stood. More than ever the first question
every scholar must ask is: are we talking about plainchant in the
ninth, or the tenth, or the eleventh, or the twelfth century-and
from which region? Books like that of Vollaerts, and even more the
practical guide of Dom Gregory Murray, illustrated by a number
of chants to prose texts, may have a disturbing effect upon the
maintenance of the uniform style of singing which has now been
achieved after many years of hard work. The artistic and aesthetic
value of this style is expounded with remarkable clarity in Alec
Robertson's 'The Interpretation of Plainchant', the book from which
I borrowed the title of this article. The notation of plainchant in the

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THE INTERPRETATION OF PLAINCHANT 349

present liturgical editions permits a free interpretation of the various

nuances; the transcriptions according to Dom Gregory would put
the performance back into a strait-jacket.
Nobody denies that much of the elementary teaching of Solesmes
60 years ago can now be omitted, since we are used to singing
without thinking of bar lines and have got rid of the too elaborate
harmonizations of the melodies; indeed we prefer unaccompanied
plainchant. That the School of Solesmes, however, is fully aware of
its main task, namely to provide printed chant books which are
based upon the best manuscript tradition, can be seen from the
imposing work now in progress-the production of a new edition
of the Gradual.16

16'Le Graduel Romain. Idition critique.' II: Les Sources (I957). IV: Le texte
neumatique, i (I960), ii (1962) (Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes).

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