Modal melodies for exercises
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,247
    I have a recent post on my favorite warm-ups and would be interested in hearing what Gregorian melodies that a) people should know and b) the intervals can be borrowed to to solfège (in addition to just going up and down with intervals in the classic Ward-Mocquereau exercises), vowel exercises, singing with nasal consonants (the /nu/ exercise favored by many Ward practitioners for example) or with English even.

    Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka did a really good class on solfège and modes in winter/spring 2023. I was reminded of that today as I did a vowel exercise… and discovered that I was singing /i/, /e/, /a/, /o, and /u/ on La-Sol-La-Sol-Fa; Do-Re-Do-Si-La; and finally So-La-So-Fa-Fa which is the Adoremus in aeternum.

    For example, for mode I: the Ave Maria antiphon (either the rosary one or the OG one) or the Gaudeamus introit and similar, or the antiphon Amen dico vobis from the 24th Sunday after Pentecost; mode II: the O antiphons or the Heu mihi family, the Salve Sancte parens introit; mode III, maybe an introit like for Sept 29, or to keep it simple, an office antiphon in the 3a2/g family (this gets us close to the classic tone of the Pange Lingua too) or the Salva nos of Compline; mode IV: a 4A antiphon on the one hand and maybe part of one of the introits (Nos autem, Reminiscere, In voluntate tua) or the offertory Justitiae Domini…) or the Subvenite (urgh, it’s my favorite mode now); mode V, in addition to the Adoremus antiphon, a gradual like Christus factus es; mode VI, the Requiem introit probably…if I was more insane, the invitatory for Easter or for the dead; mode VII, Dixit Dominus or Assumpta est from the office, Deus in adjutorium from the Mass…In Paradisum… mode VIII, something in the family of Hic vir from the office, the first tone of Iste confessor, the offertory Ave Maria, or one of the mode VIII communions. I hopefully am clear that if you work with a proper in particular to break it down to a snippet or a few that captures the major motifs and the notes of the chant, if not all of the intervals.

    The psalm tones are also quick and good ways to get into the mode, either the introit tones or the office tones.

    I realize that I have regular exposure to quite a bit more of the repertoire because we sing five propers plus Vespers and 95% of the time the full Gregorian ordinary…so I’m willing to use responsories and such that many will never touch unfortunately.

    And obviously you can pick any chant and roll with it, above all if it’s a chant which you need to rehearse anyway or want to teach. We did Mass X minus the Gloria for giggles this summer. But I want
  • francis
    Posts: 10,790
    Can I get a PDF of the solfege exercises? I saw Jennifer demonstrate these this past Saturday and want to add this to our pedagogy days of instruction. thanks.
    Thanked by 1LauraKaz
  • Charles_Weaver
    Posts: 70
    This puts me in mind of something I'm really interested in lately, which is melodies chosen either by tradition or through the design of theorists to demonstrate the typical melodic patterns of the modes. What I would like for my students is for them to develop something like the feeling I have for what each mode does: what its parts are; how each degree functions; what its characteristic moves are. But it's kind of tricky to impart this knowledge without just singing a whole lot of chant. Of course, I'm teaching instrumentalists at a university who are interested in early music but not necessarily interested in singing chant for its own sake. Anyway, there are some ways people have tried over the centuries to distill the essence of the modes, and that's what I'm working on for that purpose.

    I'm attaching two short examples of this. One file is the rather well known collection of Carolingian-era melismas (noanoeane, etc.), coupled with the later inclusion of the same melismas in some traditional melodies whose words start with the numbers of the eight modes. You can find those later melodies also in Suñol's textbook.

    The other file is from a book by Ornithoparchus, a sixteenth-century theorist. The example uses the tonic and dominant of each mode and a short melody to show the basic melodic patterns that go with each. I'm charmed by this example's succinctness and plan to use it in teaching in the near future.

    One might also look at the office antiphons for Corpus Christi, which are modally ordered.
    ornithoparchus_tones.pdf
    22K
    typical_melodies.pdf
    17K
    Thanked by 2francis MatthewRoth
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,247
    But it's kind of tricky to impart this knowledge without just singing a whole lot of chant.
    tbh in the year and a half since the modes class, I realized this. We did an interesting blending exercise where we had to follow and not look at the chant. I realized that we were in mode IV (or maybe II). And that really helped because we had a mode IV chant last night in practice (the Offertory for Christ the King) where at the full bar, people kept missing the minor third…it happens, but it struck me that the minor third there is characteristic of the mode, skipping Mi for Re or going Sol-Mi instead of Fa-Mi until the end (not universally, as some full bars have a half-step, but often). And I realize that your average schola probably doesn’t care about modes, or they glaze over it, but Laus in Ecclesia teaches the fundamentals of modality in the final parts of level I.

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