That is supremely interesting.

Pes, I'm happy you are taking a break from your work to do some light reading ;)

It's still possible that such intuition/"psychological interpretation" is still culturally and temporally based, i.e. living in a culture that is constantly bombarded by music in which every second or third beat is stressed. Would an Indian accostomed to hearing measures extremely different from modern European measures have the same intuition? Would a European in the 11th century?

Ioannes, it's a good question. Flamenco musicians think rhythmically in terms of typical accents in a twelve-beat cycle. Each palo, or form, has a slightly different typical distribution of these accents. The art, in fact, is to maintain the basic feeling that the typical structure remains in place (that the piece is a martinete or a solea, for example) while the performer does his artful best to play with that structure -- in short, not to offer a typical ('boring') example of the form.

In chant, the task is similar: to keep a sense of rhythmic integrity at the same time one conveys as free, conversational liquidity. The underlying structure should be perceptible (the chant is not chaotic), but not amount to a straitjacketing.

I'm not a musicologist by trade, by the way. I have no professional stake in this discussion. I just find these things interesting.

The theorist referred to is the German Hugo Riemann.
Most often opponents to Dom Mocquereau's theory use this fact against the latter.
However, it can be seen from http://www.musicasacra.com/pdf/mocq-web.pdf that:
1) Dom Mocquereau quotes Hugo Riemann in footnotes of Part 1 Chapter V
2) The note on page 64 (as appearing—it is page 56 for Acrobat Reader!) mentions the fact that he first translated Riemann's work
2) but that, when later making his own comments and publishing articles, he used different words, implying different, more movement oriented, concepts:
Quote:
[German text removed] Die Musik, 1903-1904 No. 15, p. 159: Kin
Kapitel von Rhythmus.
That is to say : " Dom Mocquereau has translated literally my terms " schwer "
and "leicht" by heavy and light, but in the course of his own exposition, he
has substituted terms which are infinitely better, those of elan (for Auftakt) and
repos (for Schwerpunkt), terms suggested to him by the ancient expressions,
arsis and thesis (elevation and descent). These terms are more universal and
more philosophical by far, since they make us understand their own functions
and mutual relation provided they be placed in their true sequence : elan-repos,
and they bring out the fundamental error of changing this normal sequence;
the terms themselves emphasize the unnatural rhythmic result of such
inversion. "
End quote

The ictus is inescapable, as Hindemith asserts. We can't sing or play more than three notes without perceiving an ictus on more than one of them.

My quarrel with Mocquereau concerns his insistence that the placement of the ictus does not coincide with verbal accents. Feeling an ictus independent of verbal accents requires active exercise of the imagination. And when imagination succeeds in the attempt, further effort is required to avoid misplacement of stress. Mocquerau's placement of the ictus is counter-intuitive and, as far as I can perceive, has no effect on performance. I have an old recording of chant from St. Wandrille (Pothier's monastery), and the style of the singing is indistinguishable from the Mocequereau-Solesmes style. Lucien David's (accentualist) rules for placement of the ictus make much more sense to me than Mocquereau's.

Acknowledging the ictus--which is present whether we acknowledge it or not--does not imply rejection of semiology. We can acknowledge the ictus without assuming that all beats are of equal duration and also with due attention to what the manuscripts show us about which notes are most important.

Why do most semiologists bristle at any mention of the ictus? Because it is not shown in the manuscripts? If, for the sake of argument, we concede that the medieval scribes were not conscious of inevitable binary and ternary rhythymic groupings, are we bound to concede that these groupings don't exist? Obviously, we are not. Semiologists fear, I think, that acknowledging the ictus will lead to placement of equal emphasis on every ictus-bearing note. Their fear is not without basis. Perhaps we need one symbol to mark a primary ictus and another to mark a secondary ictus that falls on an unimportant note.

These conversations seem to always get so personal--i.e. "us and them". I'm trying to stay away from them in general because they can be polarizing. Still, it seems important to discuss different approaches in objective and disinterested ways so that the issues can be understood without bias or prejudice.

Mia--Semiology in no way, shape or form relates to the idea of metrical music, aside from the obvious situations such as perhaps metrical office hymns. Semiology doesn't at all rely on "ictic" groupings of pitches as a means of organizing small groups of pitches within a chant. As Bruce has said, though, the chant melodies still naturally organize themselves into smaller groupings, just as speech does. Semiology would organize these groupings as they are implied in the way that the text would be spoken for syllabic and quasi-syllabic melodies, and would identify structural pitches withing larger neumes and melismas by means of the "neumatic break" and through an understanding of the adiastematic manuscripts in the Graduale Triplex. So groupings happen, but they happen around the implied emphasis found in the text and in the melody as it is received from the text.

Your definition of chironomy is a bit of a narrow one. There are other methods of conducting chant that use the name "chironomy" aside from the method that was popular in the first half of the 20th century. Dom Cardine, for example, has written a short treatise on conducting chant but it has nothing to do with Mocquereau's rhythmic theories. Dom Saulier and Fr. Columba Kelly conduct chant and teach chironomy but have no use for concepts like "arsis and thesis."

Mia--I know that you don't intend to polarize :) Nor do I, nor does anyone. It just tends to happen in conversations like these for reasons that I am not sure yet that I quite understand.

Your description of "ictus" is very immersed in Mocquereuvian theory. You might consider taking a course or seminar in Semiology in order to better understand what Bruce is talking about with verbal accent. I don't think that he's suggesting that the fullness of the ictus as it is defined by Mocq. should be applied strictly to word accent. I think that he's proposing that the sign could be used in a different way, with different implications, to better express the way that a chant is organized from the Semiological perspective.

Re: chironomy -- I have not yet found a book that is comparable to some of the classic "chironomy" texts, in terms of method and thoroughness. Cardine does have a little book called "Direction of Gregorian Chant" but it is a little lofty and vague. I wouldn't recommend it as a course in chironomy. Perhaps you could consider taking Fr. Columba Kelly's chant seminar. He has his students begin singing immediately with simultaneous hand gesture. I have continued to do this so much so that I often find myself making chironomic gestures while singing, even if I'm not directing other singers! It's just habit, but is very helpful for me in shaping phrases.

I started my journey in chant by reading the method as found in old reprints of the Liber Usualis, and have continued through the reading of Gregorian Semiology. But, for better or worse, my musicality is informed by the heavy dosage of Chopin that I took as a young piano student (tempo rubato, etc.)

Regarding the Mocquereuvian ictus, I remember Dr. Mahrt mentioning in one of the advanced Colloquium chant seminars in 2008 something along the lines of, "'One-two one-two' is sometimes 'one-two-three-four…'" Having experienced what that sounds like from my more intense piano-playing days, that phrase has remained with me.

At the end of the day, it's about getting the singers under your responsibility to sing their prayer well, to pray their song well, and to make it rise "like incense". Even the simplest chant in the Jubilate Deo collection, when given proper shape, can be made to soar.

All this is preface to saying that I consider myself nothing more than a chanter and chant director on the endless road to mastering his craft, I suppose. I confess, though, that I tend towards a conducting style that is informed by the St. Gall neumes.

Adam wrote,

I have continued to do this so much so that I often find myself making chironomic gestures while singing, even if I'm not directing other singers! It's just habit, but is very helpful for me in shaping phrases.

I have not had the privilege of taking a course with Fr. Kelly, and yet I find myself doing what I think is similar (or at least a pale imitation) to what you describe!

I think like a church musician when ringing bells in English "change ringing". Each of the bells rings once in each change, but in a different order each change. Everything hinges on the rhythm being even - from whoever is ringing the lightest bell (swings faster) to the largest bell (swings much slower).

But that's not my point relevant to the topic. My "counting" has become very "interior", and needs no numbering system. On six bells, I hear the timing "Dah - dAh - daH - DAh - dAH - DaH" (sorry, I can't think of any better way to type it!). I don't think in numerals, just beat patterns. Now the melody of each change is different, and a passive listener might pick up melodic "accents". But the active listeners - those ringing - must attempt to keep the rhythm as equal as possible. I think this relates to chanting - in layman's terms - there are melodic, rhythmic, and textual markers along the way, and none of them indicate any particular accent. They just exist because of the 3-fold structure of the chant.

M. Jackson Osborn wrote: As for the 'ictus' in chant, we all know that the sign to remind us of it is foreign to the early manuscripts. Fr Columba Kelly, one of the most emminent of our chant scholars is often heard to say that he has never heard nor seen one.

I have been unable to find a shred of evidence for Cardine's theory of "values" in any of the ancient manuscripts I've yet seen. I read in an OCP article that Fr. Kelly is "one of the world's experts" on Gregorian chant, so it would probably be very easy for him to do so. Can anyone here provide an ancient manuscript that describes in detail Cardine's theory of "values" ?

An oversimplification, I realize, but I tell my choir that chant is sung speech. That if something sounds awkward or ridiculous when spoken, it will likely sound the same when sung.

(I hope you folks realize that you are adding to a discussion that has been idle since December 2009!)

LOL

The ictus is there to help choirs sound good. You can take it or leave it.

I had a teacher who got irritated with people constantly bashing the ictus. When he heard talk like this, he would always challenge the person to "bring in a recording of your choir next Sunday." That usually ended the conversation.

The underlying message was basically this: "If you don't like the ictus, don't use it, but show us how well you're doing without it!" I don't remember anybody ever taking him up on the challenge.

Is there a highly recorded ensemble that does use the ictus? Would be interesting to hear examples of both approaches.

I should add that I don't have an "dog in this race," as I have sung with choirs that find the ictus helpful, and others which don't (to varying degrees).

Oh. Agustoni. Or Columba Kelly.

@jennyh I'm not sure your statement concerning the ictus being designed specifically as a teaching tool for amateur choirs is correct, although it may be useful as such.

@scottkchicago Alberto Turco has a number of recordings on the Naxos label that do not use the ictus and that are well worth a listen. As for those that do... pretty much every major label chant recording.

This is a well-resurrected topic which shouldn't have lain dormant for so long!

I am firmly in Fr Columba's and Cardine's camp, although my own performance method sounds very little like Fr Columba's... this owing to my preference for a more meticulous performance and choral aesthetic when directing scholas (as opposed to congregations). As for the ictus as a teaching aid: one could only guess at the value of what it teaches when the sign for it is an hardly-hundred-year-old invention, and when, in fact, (as Fr Columba would assert) it doesn't exist. There is nothing it teaches that is valid... other than as exemplary of a performance method which is an historical curiosity. It's rather like teaching an organ or piano student to play Bach as though he were Brahms.

About mensuralism, though: there is some appreciable scholarly opinion that particular chant genres, such as the sequences and office hymns, were indeed measured. And, they seem readily to lend themselves to such treatment.
What are your various opinions on this?

Also, back to the ictus and 'the Solesmes method': I will temper what I said above by adding that I do think that this method should continue to find a place in our performance repertory, and should be kept alive by those who genuinely are committed to this aesthetic. It deserves a place along side of what Renaissance chant or Baroque chant may have sounded like, or the informed speculations of Marcel Peres and others. But, in deference to respectable current chant scholarship, it should not be taught or regarded as definitive. It, like other styles, is appreciated and understood as the time-bound and out-dated progeny of its day.

Semiology is the answer.

I, by the way, will be discussing this next week in my workshop Beyond Square Notes in Boston, MA.

M. Jackson Osborn wrote: How free, liberated, the chant does indeed sound when sung with free energy according to semiological principles and Fr Columba's own profound scholarship, which is quite in tandem with what is being done these days at Solesmes, and has been done there at least since the '73 introduction of Liber Hymnarius, which broke so much new ground. While I do not agree with ALL the 'quirks' of Fr Columba's method, it is a starting point and leads toward a style which is likely far more representative of what the early notations would tell us. Only by ignoring or devaluing these notations can one continue to regard the so-called Solesmes method (not to mention JW) as having any more legitimacy that that of a curious relic of history, a representation of how chant was done (or butchered) for most of the twentieth century in much of the world; though not at Solesmes, and certainly not in large areas of Europe which had little truck with esoteric French theories.

Several weeks ago we here in Houston were treated at the Co-Cathedral to a major liturgical event for which the music could not have been surpassed at very many, if any, places. There was one glaring wart, however. The chant for the occasion was rather highjacked by those who sing it according to the antiquated Solesmes method with its curious way of singing the salicus, its bizarre and backwards way of interpreting the quilisma, and in general, its slavish attention to the proper performance of every neume in its artificial sequence of patterns of 2 and 3 with little if any note taken of the words, which are the guiding energy of chant. Perhaps at some time in your lives you received a paint by number set which produced a rather stodgy, inept and artless portrayal of some given painting This is rather what chant sounds like according to the 'Solesmes-Ward' method. The text goes begging, and the tune is a 'paint by number' disaster.

The Mocquereau method is but one of many historical ways of treating chant which have lost any claim to authenticity and have no standing at all in the field of chant scholarship.

Semiology is the answer.

Actually, I'm really not interested in Mocquereau. I was simply noting the fact that Cardine's theories of "values" are not found in a single treatise ... until the 20th century! He's speculating based on his understanding of what he was able to locate in the manuscripts. He's free to speculate and try to make sense of what he can, just as Antoine Dechevrens, Oskar Fleischer, Hugo Reimann, Vollaerts, and a whole host of others have in the past.

His speculations may be true, or they may not. Anything's possible, but one thing is for sure: his theories appear for the very first time in the 20th century. I've not found them clearly stated by any medieval theorist or writer.

I'm sure there are great choirs out there that don't use the ictus, but that wasn't my point.

Simply, if the ictus helps your choir sound better, use it. If not, then don't. But whether "Anonymous 4" does or does not use it really has no bearing on this point.

By the way, you will use some kind of "ictus" regardless. If you don't understand this, ask an orchestral player, and he'll explain.

Jenny -
There are multiple recordings of Fr Columba's schola singing Gregorian chant in English and Latin, as well as his own chant compositions. You can order these from St Meinrad's Archabbey. For downloadable music for his English adaptations of the Gregorian masses go to the Sacred Music Project (now called Illuminare).

In other words, "sing it like it's music."

Roger will never really die, eh?