I see no reason why you could not use the melodic readings from the Graduale novum for a piece like the introit Reminiscere and follow Mocquereau's rhythmic interpretation, if you chose.

Nor do I. My objection was not to introducing new melodic readings into the Vatican melodies, but to taking a small part of the rhythm of the manuscript tradition and mixing it with a technique that is otherwise incompatible.

The example of the Bach editions, however, is not exactly analogous. A better example would asking how one ought to give the most historically informed performance of Bach's "Es ist genug" using the score of Berg's violin concerto. The resulting discussion would read like a missing chapter from The Glass Bead Game.

But for the sake of argument, let's take the Schirmer Bach edition as an example. Let's say a particular note is marked with an editorial mordent that is absent from Bach's autograph. Here are some valid questions:

-What did Schweitzer mean by this mordent?
-Would Bach have played or expected a mordent on this note?

But it is absurd to ask "What did Bach mean when he wrote this mordent that Schweitzer put there?" or to conclude "If Schweitzer didn't mark a mordent, that means Bach didn't want any ornamentation there." One could either follow the edition as it is (which would be lovely, if not always exactly aligned with period performance practice), or one could try to perform according to Bach's intent.

Now imagine Schweitzer had gone through and replaced 80% of Bach's eighth notes with quarter notes. Wouldn't the discussion of how to perform the mordent on a single note become even more ridiculous?

There’s much discussion above of the influence on chant performance of liturgical practice, academic enquiry and place. Some of those commenting and lurking won’t have read Charles Coles’ article, so it’s worth saying that one of the advantages of doing so is that it includes observations on how a particular place is accommodating the tension between the first two.

The site only displays the last few entries in this discussion, and I am frustrated, because I want to ask Incantu certain questions about his interpretation of note values.

I will however respond to one of his statements. He wrote: "Nor do I [see any reason not use the melodic readings from the Graduale novum... and follow Mocquereau's rhythmic interpretation]. My objection was not to introducing new melodic readings into the Vatican melodies, but to taking a small part of the rhythm of the manuscript tradition and mixing it with a technique that is otherwise incompatible."

I do not share his objection.

I agree with Incantu that adherence to a more-or-less equalist interpretation is a practical necessity for church choirs. I once encountered a pamphlet by Robert M. Fowells, called Chant Made Simple. I thought it ought to have been called, Chant Made Extinct because it advocated an approach to rehearsal and performance requiring more time and effort than any church choir, professional or volunteer, could possibly invest. (The choir was to learn to sing the chant by rote, imitating the director's singing, with all its rhythmic nuance, before being given the score.) Such an approach might work with a professional group preparing a performance to illustrate the Cardine-mediated-through-Whomever interpretation, but would never work in a church where chant is sung regularly.

Because I believe that there is an ictus that falls on every second or third note in chant, whether we acknowledge it or not, and whether or not we follow an equalist interpretation, because it is impossible to pronounce more than three syllables or to sing more than three notes without placing some degree of stress on more than one of them. Like Pothier, I equate the ictus with a stress (sometimes intense and sometimes slight). I believe, further, that acknowledging and marking the ictus facilitates conducting and performance.

I see no reason why church choirs should adhere to the melodic readings in the Vatican edition where they are unsatisfactory. But whether they are singing from the Vatican edition (in the majority of cases where its melodic readings are satisfactory) of from the Graduale novum, I see no reason why they should not make the ictus in syllabic passages coincide with the verbal accents and place it on the notes of melismata that semiology identifies as the most important. I like the way chant sounds when they do. I am not offended if they underline some such notes by stress alone and others by greater-than-ideal lengthening. I think that's better than not underlining them at all. The "all or nothing at all" approach strikes me as unnecessarily arbitrary. In this I stand in good company--that of Cardine and Claire. (I am not imputing infallibility to these two; but I think their position on question of chant performance deserves respectful consideration. Perhaps Incantu has thoroughly considered their position and still rejects it. OK.)

Mocquereau's notion of an immaterial ictus, unrelated to stress, is his own invention, and it is an invention that I have found distinctly unhelpful. I have heard choirs misplace verbal accents because of it. I walked away from it thirty years ago and have never looked back.

Mocquereau's notion of an immaterial ictus, unrelated to stress, is his own invention, and it is an invention that I have found distinctly unhelpful. I have heard choirs misplace verbal accents because of it. I walked away from it thirty years ago and have never looked back.

I do not begrudge those who find Mocquereau's ictus organizationally helpful, but I agree it does not always appear in the wisest places musically. My opinion has been countered by the argument that he was making his ictus choices based on information in the manuscripts. From my basic experiences studying the neumes, I find this to be quite unlikely. Would I find support on this?

Cole's piece http://charlescole.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/cole-article.pdf

Incantu: I'm also do not understand what you had in mind when you wrote: "Is an eighth note long, or is it short? It depends on whether you're counting quarters or sixteenths. In the Solesmes method, all notes not marked with a dot or episema (or in the case of the salicus, the vertical episema or ictus) have the same value. You can call that value "long" or you can call that value "short." It's all relative."

Did you mean that within a multi-note neume the duration of a "long" was twice the duration of a "short," or were you just invoking eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and quarter notes in a loose analogy?

Do you mean that church choirs could employ "the earliest known practice of chant performance" if an adequate performance edition were available?

Absolutely! If we had a good performing edition of the chants, they would be no more challenging than singing a psalm tone or an Anglican chant (which, by the way, are both fairly difficult to do well).

With all due respect to Fowells, Chant Made Simple is an excellent introduction to the various graphic forms of the St. Gall family of manuscripts, but it is woefully inadequate as a teaching aid for chant performance. Let's ignore for the moment that it uses melodies from the Graduale Triplex, or that the author frequently falls into such "truthiness" traps as suggesting a group of three notes symbolizes the Trinity, or that a large number of short notes suggests that a certain chant should be sung "lightly" (should a mostly syllabic chant be sung... heavily?!). The real problem is that the readings rely almost exclusively on the St. Gall notation (making no distinction between the idiosyncrasies of the various scribes!) and do not consider the generally more rhythmically precise Laon notation.

I suspect the same problem exists in the Lagal Gradual, as it absolutely does in the various chants I've seen in Fluxus notation (although the fault is not in the notation itself). A deeper study of the St. Gall notation, as well as careful comparison with Laon, reveals that the St. Gall scribe generally means what he says, but he very often does not say what he means. In other words, the graphic evidence in an individual chant is not enough for a satisfactory performance. Therefore, no matter how it's transcribed (and I find the Lagal notation difficult to read at sight without a micrometer), any literal transcription of the St. Gall neumes is going be insufficient. For my transcriptions I have not merely translated the various graphic forms into modern notation, but I have done what I think no editor so far has done, viz realizing the implied meaning of scribes through context (e.g. where he intends a long clivis but does not write an episema). How can I be so sure about these deductions? Well, read my book. In the meantime, I will say that I have as much confidence in my readings as I do in any urtext edition of Bach, Kirkpatrick's editions of Ives, etc. And they certainly haven't prevented anyone from performing those works.

Incantu,

I would welcome the opportunity to read your book if I knew its title and/or your name.

And as for the relationship of longs to shorts-- you have answered my questions about where you stand. Thank you.

... or you can run through it before Evensong then sing the service as you do in that place, because that's what happens in a living performance tradition. I can imagine an Anglican director of music with an interest in historical performance styles letting that inform her development of the choir's psalm-chanting (much as Charles Cole wrestles with the integration of Gregorian scholarship with his responsibilities at the Oratory), but that's a different proposition to beginning such a work from scratch. You'll see the difference, I hope, as I'm aware of the necessary qualifications: that Anglican Chant is much, much younger than Gregorian; that the representation of pitch in the sources is unambiguous; and that it didn't suffer the apparent break in performance tradition that Solesmes felt it had to deal with. I hope the analogy is informative, though.

Just for a lark, I searched for recordings of BWV 56 and For behold on Youtube, and the first result for each of them features a performance with perceptibly uneven eighths. (If you don't believe me, ask a string player to play with strictly even eighths and compare).

To be completely honest, I did mean "a melody" (vocal or otherwise) and not an ostinato accompaniment. For the most part in these two recordings each pair of eighths is equal to the next, but the first eighth of each group is noticeably longer (in duration and intensity) than the second. Actually, in the Handel they start out fairly even and then become increasing uneven within the first measures (which, in a sense, is another level of unevenness!). Then they slow down considerably before 30 seconds has passed.

But let's not get derailed by this. There's certainly more difference between the short clivis and the long clivis than there is between their individual members.

It's interesting to me how influenced by the existence of metronomes (specifically) and modern (that is, post-enlightenment) conceptions of time and duration (generally) is our sense of rhythm here.

Back in my teaching days I was once at a World Music Drumming seminar, where all the music is learned by listen-and-repeat, nothing is shown written down. One of the patterns had a three note phrase.
Attendee: Is that a triplet, or a dotted-quarter--dotted-quarter--eighth?
Will Schmid: Yeah, man. Right on.

Agreed about metronomes, Adam.
I often think about the acapella vocal music many of us are trying to restore... are metronomes and equal temperament tuning anachronisms?
I heard of an (organist, and one not friendly to singers) choir director in my diocese who made the choir sing chant to a metronome. Yikes. The singers detested chant as a result.

To be completely honest, I did mean "a melody" (vocal or otherwise) and not an ostinato accompaniment

Perhaps I should not have chosen Baroque works. Let's concentrate squarely on the Renaissance and, in particular, on Palestrina. Many of his works have melismatic vocal lines of consecutive eighths; for example, "Sicut cervus" has numerous such passages, almost none of which would seem (to me) to be places where Palestrina himself would have expected much, if any, tempo variations.

We do not know exactly what performance practice of the period was, and hence contemporary practice, even when historically informed, may or may not accurately reflect the composer's concept and intentions. There are numerous recordings of "Sicut cervus" available, and I suppose one of the best might be the one included here. I invite everyone to examine this or other recordings for the possible absence or presence of tempo variations in the performance of various series of eighths.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsw1kdLqfec

I think this particular performance is very much influenced by 19th century chant practice, and the idea that sacred music is supposed to be soft, slow, and even.

I doubt a group of four soloists, trained in medieval hexachord theory, singing from partbooks without barlines, without a conductor beating anything other than the tactus, in a reverberant acoustic, etc. would have performed the piece in this way in Palestrina's time.

Singers of Palestrina's time were so accustomed to improvising embellishments that by 1600 Caccini started to catalog these "divisions" and write them explicitly in his Nuove Musiche. I can't believe singers of the calibre Palestrina no doubt worked with would have given the kind of bloodless, even-keeled performance one hears from practitioners of the slick modern style such as those heard in this recording (or those of the Tallis Scholars).

I'm not saying that Palestrina's singers would have sung Sicut cervus like it was Moro, lasso. But I do think they had the same technique. And that technique probably would have prevented them from rendering the staggeringly beautiful, highly idiomatic vocal lines as some sort of metronomic automaton. Especially since the modern metronome wasn't invented until the early 19th century.

As for my comment about "no composer before the 20th century," I will admit that it bordered on the polemical, but certainly not preposterous. This conversation, however, definitely borders on being off topic, so lest I detract from my original argument, this will be the last I say on the matter.

For more on the subjects of musical notation and performance practice for music before Beethoven, I recommend reading The End of Early Music by Bruce Haynes, which although he doesn't address Gregorian chant explicitly has greatly influenced my views about the "received tradition," masterpiece worship, authenticity, prescriptive v. descriptive scores, etc.