Solesmes method Salicus
  • rarty
    Posts: 96
    What is the original "Solesmes-method" way of singing the second-to-last note of a Salicus—the type marked with an ictus sign/vertical episema?

    In the few Solesmes books I've looked through, all distinguish the Salicus from the Scandicus by the vertical episema under the penultimate note. But some books (a Graduale from the 50s, Mass and Vespers from 1957, and the Latin Liber Usualis from 1961) make a point to note that the vertical episema is there to mark the ictus, and not to indicate a lengthening.

    But the English 1961 Liber Usualis notes that the note with a vertical episema in a Salicus is sung similarly to the note before a quilisma. This is how I have observed it sung most often, but that is only my experience. Is this a later development, or is this the way it was always meant to be sung by Solesmes/Dom Moquereau?

    Note: I don't mean to bring up the suitability, authenticity or anything else... just the historic fact and the current praxis.
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,424
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  • incantuincantu
    Posts: 989
    http://media.musicasacra.com/pdf/mocq-web.pdf

    Chapter XI
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  • sjudge
    Posts: 6
    Dom Mocquereau's position (as stated in the above chapter) relies on the same sorts of arguments and evidence that Dom Cardine used to reach an opposite conclusion regarding the second note of the Salicus. I don't recall Cardine addressing Mocquereau's arguments directly in Gregorian Semiology. Did he (or someone else) do so elsewhere?
    Thanked by 1M. Jackson Osborn
  • incantuincantu
    Posts: 989
    The difference can be explained by Mocquereau's assumption that a "normal" note is short and that modified notes are therefore long. Cardine was more willing to accept that a normal note (one per syllable) is long—or at least the length of that syllable. The most recent scholarship reveals that a single note per syllable may be either short or long, and that its length cannot be determined from the neume form alone.
    Thanked by 4M. Jackson Osborn CHGiffen JonathanKK sjudge
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