Would also be happy with any recommended online tutorials? Have searched for this but not found it,

Thanks for the reference to the square notes workbook. i see one for sale on amazon.com, but it can't be posted to ireland, perhap i might be able to get my hands on it somewhere.

I have looked at the rules for marking the ictus- for example in the Parish book of chant.

My problem is that after that, what do I do with it? What chant I have learnt is from knowing how to read the music (pitch and length of notes etc) and listening to it sung, for example on youtube.

I know that the ictus stuff is meant to help me develop a rhythm for the chant, that it can b useful in teaching a new schola how to stay together, but for the life of me I can't work out why or how.

Thus the parish book of chant:

Marking all the ictuses helps the conductor and singers see the groups
of twos and threes that form the basis of chant rhythm. This is further
reinforced by counting out the resulting patterns, beginning with one on
the ictus, followed by two and, as necessary, three on the non-ictic
notes. Just as solfeggio reinforces the relative pitches of a melody,
counting instills a clear sense of its underlying rhythm.

but the PBC also says

Of itself, the ictus is purely organizational, and indicates
no qualitative change in the rendering of the note—not emphasis, not
lengthening. The basic rhythmic groups of twos and threes are further
combined to form larger groups that either tend to rise (arsis) or fall
(thesis).

Well if it is purely organisational, what is it meant to convey to me as I sing?

And as for arsis theses, that is something wlse I have a question about..
Which is why it seems to me if I could have someone who could sing m an example...

Thanks for the reference to the Brager by the way, very useful

It you take the Communion antiphon for Advent III, here are the ictus beats for the incipit which is pretty basic.

The first ictus mark is placed on the first note of the first neume, which is the downbeat.

The second ictus mark is placed on the first and third note of the second neume since it has four beats and there is no single note following it.

The third ictus is on the dotted punctum since it is a note of length.

So you have three groups of two beats each, which is pretty straightforward:

You have to sing the notes with the ictus marks with a very slight "push" which, since it's in two's, is like reciting a trochaic meter of poetry: 1 2 1 2 1 2:

By the shining Big-Sea-Water, or if you want to use the Latin syllables:

Di-i ci-i i-i te-e

In the Solesmes method, the ictus is important for directing the choir (see Technique of Gregorian Chironomy by Robert Carroll on the musicasacra.com).

The ictus also plays a role in training the choir to follow the director's chironomy and sing with a unison voice. The book Basic Gregorian Chant and Sight Reading by Sr. Mary Demetria describes this training. Note that the expectation is that the choir will be taught to sight-sing chants in solfege. The rhythmic ictus is incorporated via hand motions in a kind of proto-chironomy.

The ictus does not by itself indicate that a note is stressed since emphasis of particular notes is determined by word accents, the melodic line and other Solesmes notations. The intended results of the method can be heard in Solesmes recordings from the Dom Gajard era. As someone pointed on another thread, you can't really sing the ictus any more than you can sing the measure bars in modern music.

But it's still taught at the Chant Intensives.

Bonnie, it's hard to explain in words what the ictus is as I've heard it demonstrated by the former Benedictine chant master I know. It is a very slight stress, but not so as to lengthen the note or over-accent it, but you do feel it, just as you would render the meter in a poem ---you don't want to beat it to death, and of course you want to pay attention to the natural word accents, but there is a rhythmical framework.

All I know is that learning to sing chant by the Benedictine method of my friend was a watershed moment for us. His chanting was light, flowing and serene, and that is what we have tried with his help to replicate, and following the ictus marks (which is basically being able to find the downbeats) has been the single most important component of learning that particular style of chant.

Dom Mocquereau (who more or less invented the concept) on whether the ictus is more in the mind than in the voice:

The ictus indicating the grouping of notes should be rendered as in any music of legato character, namely with infinite gradations of nuances.

a) Sometimes our ear is made aware of the subdivisions of the rhythm
by a shade of intensity given to the icdic note itself.

b) At other times the subdivisions are veiled in mystery, hidden in the smooth legato of the phrase, and are perceived intuitively through the context.

c) In most cases, however, these secondary subdivisions disappear utterly, absorbed in the flow of the legato phrase and in the powerful undulations of the music as a whole. The ictic "touch" is then so tender, so caressing, as to become imponderable, a spiritual rather than a material force. The interior sense alone perceive it, if it be perceived at all.

[. . .]

The student should begin by giving the ictus a delicate shade of emphasis that can be heard. It will serve to sustain the voice as it passes from note to note. Gradually he should diminish the force of the ictus until, finally, it disappears materially, remaining merely a mental support, an intuition, a feeling for form.

- Le nombre musical gregorian, pp. 433-434

So ideally - no stress or any other vocal marker on the ictus, most of the time, except if you're learning, and then only provisionally...

My personal understanding of the ictus has evolved significantly over the years. I generally now think of it as a method of keeping the schola together, singing with a unison voice. It helps the timing part of that equation, but not the pitch.

Most interesting, as the schola's skills improve, I find it far more useful to use the natural cadence of the stressed syllables as the launching point. Then for extended melismas, to use the groupings of the neumes themselves - they already suggest patterns of up to 4 notes or so. When the singers align their thinking around those, it becomes pretty easy to stay together rhythmically.

And honestly, it feels much more authentic to the music itself. There's probably a reason why it was written as a salicus rather than just 3 punctums smashed together.

> I do not have an experienced schola or chant teacher to sing with,
> and am looking for some help.

Hummm... My first thought when I read your post: « Hey! I'll come and teach you. » Although being a bit far from you (England / Berkshire). Maybe some day...

Cole also covered some semiology in the advanced men at the colloquium.

Yellow journalism.

As many will be aware, I am firmly ensconced in the semiological building. This makes me a gladsome disciple of Fr Columba, Dom Cardine, Dom Saulnier, et al. However, I am not hide-bound to their style, particularly as concerns the choral-tonal aesthetic which I cultivate in my singers of chant. I am also influenced heavily by such as Alberto Turco, and even Marcel Perez and others whose (more and less educatedly speculative) interpretations have a convincing aspect as regards what early chant likely sounded like, though (as we all know) pinning down with unquestioned certitude just exactly what fourth, eighth, eleventh, etc., century chant actually sounded like is an exercise in futility; but a futile attempt which will bear greater fruit than assuming that the romantics of the XIXth and XXth centuries had nailed it for us for all time! They didn't! Nor, I think, would they claim to have. Only their followers have. These followers are rather like a Frenchman of the XVIIth century who was absolutely certain that plainchant musical was the authentic chant for all time, or, ditto denizens of the Medicean era, the Pustet era, and on and on. This finality has never happened and never will.

In asserting that no school of interpretation can claim absolute authenticity (in relation to a given historical decade), it behooves none to behave as though his and her school of thought is definitive. There likely are, though, some that have greater claim to unbiased scholarship and rigourous academic research than others, and whose findings are likely (quite likely) less flawed than others, others, for instance, who put such painstaking effort into ferreting out that red herring called an ictus. It doesn't exist. The above quote from le nombre musical is yet another exercise in that most musically worthless and highly, wildly, subjective balderdash which characterises much of chant literature of the last century.

If, though, one likes locating this red herring and finds his results rewarding for one reason or another, then I will egg him on and listen respectfully to his interpretation. If it is truly artful, respectful of text, and accomplished with admirable musicianship, then I can but appreciate it on its own terms. I would do this much for the 'authentic' chant performances of any past century, whilst recognising that few, if any, of them resemble the aesthesis, the approach, and the motivations of the earliest scholas and cantors.

If one doesn't understand semiology and what it's all about, one will never understand what real chanting is, nor learn how truly to chant. It's all in those little squiggles, my friends. They tell you what to do with your voice, your intonation, your diction, your (very, very elastic) rhythm-tempo on every syllable of every word and clause. Square notes give you very little more than pitches (which are not in themselves chant), and digging around for red herring ictuses will get you nowhere. But if that is your idea of chant, do it well, and do it with consummate musicianship. Nuance is everything.

St Augustine (of Hippo) gives us this from his Confessions: 'The psalm was recited with such minute inflections that this recitation was more like speech than chanting'. Such was early chant, which, elsewhere, Augustine related as being almost unutterably beautiful. I'm sure, very sure, that were any of us present and asked his cantors how they located the ictus they would have said 'the wwhhhaaaaatt?'.

MJO, thank you for your heartfelt words which are the most convincing explanation of the "little squiggles" that I've ever seen. I have some rudimentary understanding of semiology, but I'll have to keep digging to find what it is that makes you love it so much. It just seems like it would be difficult to transmit it to a schola who wasn't trained in the method unless they were an incredibly intuitive group.

It seems to me that the ictus marks help one to recognize the base units in chant, which are the neume configurations. I see them almost as the metrical feet in a poem.

For example, in this Sunday's Alleluia incipit, I automatically see two dactyls and a spondee which you'd scan something like this: / - - / - - //



Of course you add the units together in a seamless way as you would a string of pearls, but it's the ictus marks which enable one to identify the base units.

@tomjaw thanks, its on its way. Much appreciated.

Richard is right to point out the utter unecessity of these red herrings ictuses in the above examples. Not only are they purely editorial (non-historic) markings with no precedence in the paleography of chant notation, they are confusing. Confusing because they imply (at least to me) a rather stolid performance of groups of two and three neumes more or less equalist in execution (the which to imply is precisely their inauthentic purpose!). Whether the performance is done as a seamless string of pearls or not, that is not what is implied by the notation. The alleluya's torculus should receive a certain push on the first part of the neume and an increase in 'tempo' towards the slightly arrested final part. Ditto the performance of 'dicite' in the above example. None of this exists in the mind of those who imagine that they are following a method with a current Solesmes pedigree. Too, the cephalicus which expresses the first syllable of 'alleluya' should rather quickly enter into a briefly vocalised 'L' for the lower, liquescent part of the neume, yielding something similar to 'ah-LL-Le...'. The red h ictus placed here would never betray such an approach. In fact this is not the first of a 'three note' group. It begins an energetic drive that is not released until the last syllable of the word has been vocalised. This is more nuance that is foreign to our ictites and not-Solesmes-method enthusiasts, but is quite obvious in the light of paleographic familiarity. Even those who are quite happy, thank you, following the not-Solesmes-method should obtain, read, and inwardly digest Dom Cardine's Gregorian Semiology. They might find their eyes opened! (And, I fully expect that someone will challenge my own solutions here. I claim no infallibility.)

This is all very illuminating in more ways than one.

I always wonder how semiologists are singing the Ordinary of the Mass for which no neumes are present; just think of such melismatic pieces as Kyrie II from the Editio Vaticana. I asked my chant teacher that question and her answer was rather vague (something about flowing IIRC).

When I first learned about square notes, my understanding was that the notation let you know what notes to sing, but these did not indicate duration, that the actual melody was passed down from chant master to chant master over the generations

That's why I was unwilling to try and sing chant without some type of formal learning.

Here is an example of "beat" being used in the context Gregorian chant from p. 15 of The Solesmes Method by Dom Joseph Gajard (1960):

THE SOLESMES METHOD
Free Musical Rhythm
PART I
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES
What are the fundamental principles of the Solesmes Method? Here they are, and merely to state them will show how greatly they differ from those of speech rhythm.
1) Gregorian rhythm is specifically of a musical nature and is not the rhythm of speech.
2) Every step in the rhythmical synthesis is clearly defined: (a) the indivisible primary beat; (b) elementary rhythms and binary and ternary compound beats; (c) composite rhythms.
3) There is complete independence of rhythm and stress.
4) Hence there is complete independence of the rhythmic ictus and the tonic accent, and rhythm which is entirely free in its movement.
5) The words are subordinate to the melody.
6) Traditional interpretation and expression are followed. These are based on the concordant evidence of the oldest manuscripts.
I shall take up each of these points briefly, since I cannot give them the full treatment they require here.

The Introduction Rules for Interpretation to the Liber Usualis also uses the term "beat" in the same way as used by incantu.

Thanks for your explanations, MJO. I have always appreciated semiological scholarship, but it just seems a bridge too far when you have limited time and must work with mostly non-musicians. For our schola, our aims have been uniformity, lightness, movement and consistent phrasing. We have made enormous technical progress, but I know there is a whole world of meaning in the propers that we have not touched. You have inspired me to keep digging.

That is the aim, venerable brother. : ) I have been so affirmed lately by something Mrs. Ward said about the power of Gregorian chant, especially in my own experience with the propers since we have little in the way of material resources in our Latin Mass community, but we have the most glorious music we can muster, lots of sweet babies in the congregation and a splendid corps of altar servers.

This is the extraordinary passage from Mrs. Ward:

"During the past ten years I have had frequent opportunity to observe the formative effect of Gregorian chant upon young and old, and its infallible power to bring about a vigorous renewal of the Christian spirit. In a village of Italy the awful cataclysm of World War II had completely transformed the people. Everywhere among them there was discord, strive, quarrels, hatred instead of the unity they had once known.

Religious ceremonies had no meaning for the people. All contact between the soul of the priest and the soul of the people was wanting. The great need was to reconstitute this contact by calling the people to take part in the divine liturgy, and thus form a group tending towards a single aim. This miracle has been accomplished by the Gregorian school.

The divine prayer of Sunday, intoned with that lightness, delicacy and soaring quality, ended by uniting the whole people. All took part in an attitude of devotion. It was as if Jesus were saying, "Peace be with you." The eucharistic hymn with its solemn and majestic rhythm ended by enveloping all hearts. The contact was re-established; priest and people were no longer isolated, and the liturgy had regained its inexhaustible force in the education of the people."