@5744SHAW

I learned from Eaton's dissertation that Duruflé wrote the following in a set of program notes (1980) to the Requiem:

Thus I have endeavored to reconcile as far as possible Gregorian rhythm, as it has been established by the Benedictines of Solesmes, with the requirements of the modern measure. The rigor of the latter, with its strong beats and weak beats recurring at regular intervals, is in fact difficult to reconcile with the variety and flexibility of the Gregorian line, which is nothing more than a series of successive impulses and relaxations.

The strong beats had to lose their dominant character to take the same value of intensity as the weak beats, in such a way that the Gregorian rhythmic accent or the Latin tonic accent can be placed freely on any beat of our modern measure.

Thus, a lot of the rhythmic suppleness that you hear both in the Requiem but also in the Messe cum jubilo and in the chant-based motets is a direct consequence of Mocquereau's theory. That theory was once the dominant way to sing chant in the Anglosphere and is still present in Church circles, but it is no longer considered the cutting edge of medieval performance practice, the practitioners of which generally favor semiology, mensuralism, or some other sui generis approach. Hence Incantu's comment.

As Matthew says, I have maintained that Mocquereau is best considered as a turn-of-the-twentieth-century theorist of rhythm quite apart from the question of chant performance practice, and should be read as part of an ongoing discourse about: what exactly an accent is; the nature of musical meter; what is the nature of upbeats and downbeats; and how this interacts with text accentuation in Latin or in various other languages. Mocquereau in general is what you might call an upbeatnik, believing that all musical motion is a movement from an upbeat (arsis, élan) to a downbeat (thesis, repos). Other nineteenth-century writers who are somewhat along the line of Mocquereau are Momigny, Lussy, and Riemann. There were and are also plenty of downbeatniks (i.e., those who believe that music is best chunked in time units that begin on downbeats, and the upbeat is sort of an aftereffect). Among these we might include A.B. Marx (the good Marx!) and Heinrich Schenker.

Duruflé and Messiaen were both heavily influenced by Mocquereau's theories in their compositions. I also find Mocquereau's ideas about rhythm/meter in general to be very sensible and musical. Plenty of others here and elsewhere disagree about their value! I have long been an incorrigible upbeatnik.

Charles,

You've responded to my inquiry with grace and with compelling expertise. I appreciate it deeply.
It's enormously informative--and brand new to me--what you have to say about Mocquereau and his influence upon Duruflé. I knew none of it previously and now have something worth further pondering. Thanks for that!
I will re-read your message and may return to you with further questions.
Jim Frazier

@Liam

Absolutely, I think language has a lot to do with it. There is an excellent article out there by my grad-school advisor William Rothstein about "National Metric Types." His point in that article is that, on the whole, native German speakers are more downbeatnik and native French speakers are more upbeatnik. This difference becomes more apparent when you are looking at phrase rhythm (or hypermeter). Ask, for instance, which measures of Beethoven's Ode to Joy are strong and which are weak? The most interesting cases are when people cross national style boundaries (like Mozart's Italian operas). Haydn's emperor hymn was originally barred one way and then turned around, and of course his music has heavy Italian influence.

These styles/language patterns also seem to change over time as well, and the language a composer speaks is not completely determinative. For instance, there is no more downbeat-heavy (thinking of the phrase level) composer I know of than Poulenc; he is practically the opposite of F. Couperin in that way.

In his more recent book on Italian opera, Rothstein suggests that we should develop different ears for different language/meter styles: a wonderful idea. He offered a course on rhythm that was one of the most interesting classes I've ever taken. We spent a ton of time on Beethoven.

I believe that Mocquereau's theory as laid out in Le nombre is one of the best and most coherent statements of an upbeat way of thinking.

@Charles_Weaver
Regarding language - also remember that Durufle was writing for French Latin, not Italian Latin, which makes the “uptick” or “lightness” - even that more pronounced. If his Requiem is sung in French Latin, it is an entirely different experience than sung in Italian Latin (we tried it in a conducting lab in grad school - and it was amazing).
@5744SHAW
Although there were mensuralist theories at the time of Durufle’s compositional writing, Mocquereau’s theory was perhaps the best-known and most widely-practiced. Mocquereau was trying to develop a theory that would appeal to musicians with little experience with Gregorian chant, since it had all but disappeared until the Solesmes revival in the mid-19th to early 20th-centuries. It was widely successfully. However, Mocquereau was the best paleographer in his monastery and refuted his theory at the end of his life, knowing it was incompatible with the neumes he was studying.
All that is to say, Durufle was a product of his time.

Mocquereau was the best paleographer in his monastery and refuted his theory at the end of his life, knowing it was incompatible with the neumes he was studying.

Citation needed on this too. I would be most eager to see it if true!

However, I heard Madame Durufle singing some parts of the Requiem while she was explaining it. It was not Italian Latin. It was French Latin..you can hear the difference.

Just saying....

Duruflé conducts his Ubi caritas (French choir):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzGnfxsEF0g
Sure sounds like Italianate church Latin to me.

I must’ve been mis-remembering something! I apologize! Dom Mocquereau never recanted his rhythmic theory. However, I found some other interesting pieces of information that point at least to the inconsistencies between his rhythmic theory and his research of the neumes. When asked by Pope Pius X in 1904 how long it would take for a performance practice of Gregorian chant to be produced, he replied, “Oh, about fifty years”. The Pope essentially told him he only had a couple years to figure it out. That is revealing because it shows that he knew from his neumatic studies that understanding all the neumes would take decades(1), but he was given an ultimatum to produce a theory that could be disseminated throughout the world. What ensued was his Solesmes method. Cardine, importantly, saw his work as a continuation of Mocquereau’s scholarly work, stressing that Mocquereau was concerned that someone would continue in the pursuit of a more critical edition of Gregorian chant(2). Cardine was never convinced of the theory(3), and I find it difficult to believe that Mocquereau could reconcile his theory of two’s and three’s with the manuscript evidence that pointed to the contrary. I know human beings are full of contradictions - myself having plenty - but these are very large contradictions. I guess I wonder if he ever had private reservations about the system he was promoting.
I’m sorry again for the mis-information! Not intended!

1. “The Role of Semiology”, Fr. Columba Kelly, published in Sacred Music (no volume number given), originally given at a conference on Gregorian Semiology between June 26-28, 1988 at California State University, pg. 6.
2. Ibid, pg. 6
3. Private interview with Professor Godehard Joppich, Frankfurt, March 2005, pg. 6.

https://isidore.co/misc/Res pro Deo/Greg Chant/semiology_sacredmusic.pdf

In practice Mocquereau is not wrongly applying the golden rule. It’s much more sensible at the end of lines or words (and trying to get people to not separate out syllables is a challenge no matter what). But Fontgombault has long modified certain examples of the clivis where only the first is explicitly marked long.

But I can only refer people back to Dr Weaver’s post and let them see for themselves.

And in Moc’s defense he does put the episema over both notes sometimes, plus it’s Pothier who gave him this tradition!

As an addendum, the whole controversy over rhythmic signs and the reception of the Vatican edition meant that the time was not ripe for semiological editions in the early twentieth century. I think this was why Mocquereau preserved these investigations for his more speculative rather than practical publications. Happily, living as we do more than a century later, it is possible to read Pothier, Mocquereau, Cardine, and Guilmard as part of a single tradition of performance with many varied branches.

But the Cardinian semiologists still prefer SG to Laon anyway…

Well you probably have an idea of what I might say: it is perhaps not that earth-shattering in their view, and for whatever departures Cardine — and Saulnier — made, they did not jettison the traditions of the abbey, and indeed despite removing printed signs they sing as if they are there. Saint-Benoît du Lac added them I. by hand. Who knows what the Solesmes monks do in choir now, especially since the Liber Hymnarius is now without signs and also without Cardine’s preface.

Even if, perhaps, the dogmatization comes out at the last minute in Mocquereau’s writings, if the Laon tradition really was that big of a deal, it’d come up in PM.

I also do think that while it is possible that we have exhausted our sources, the idea that Mocquereau et al. had not fully understood something leads me to, well, get nervous; what will the next revolution be? I’ve posted before the article on the Deus in loco sancto introit, I’m pretty sure. The rhythmic and melodic questions are separate but certainly overlap, and for various reasons, I’m dubious of attempts to reform the melodies even if they are less, well, clunky than the attempts to reconcile mode 5 and tone 7. (I tell Matthias Bry every now and again that I’ll eventually buy his books, but we’re not changing Christmas or Tenebrae.)

To circle back momentarily to the OP's point, it is Mocquereau's theory—specifically that chant (and indeed all music) has downbeats and upbeats but that the downbeat is not necessarily strong—that was so influential on Duruflé.

I don't know how Mocquereau's paleographic/semiological views might have evolved. At any rate, his description of the Laon source in PM 10 seems pretty clear. But again, he was limited by what he could print in his chant editions, which still had to adhere more or less to the Vatican edition. The Solesmes theory as we have it (and as still transmitted by Laus in Ecclesia etc.) is designed for users of the Solesmes books, who don't have all the paleographic information to hand. It produces a good result (a subjective judgment, but one I still experience viscerally and frequently when chanting or listening to chant). We must indeed admit that as a historical reconstruction of ninth-century performance practice it is way too full of conjecture to pass muster. But inasmuch as that is not the goal of most chanters or most conductors of Duruflé, it can still be useful.

If we add the relatively late St. Gall 376 to the mix, relying on St. Gall sources alone, we get definitely long notes at five of the seven syllabic breaks, circled in red:





The notes at syllabic breaks circled in blue are of a neutral character open to some degree of interpretation, not marked definitely long or short, but when we compare the manuscripts to each other, the correct reading becomes clear. My position is not that the Laon Gradual is "disruptive or inconsistent with what those more aligned with Cardine hold about chant," but rather that it is a preeminent manuscript source of great antiquity that merits serious attention. It absolutely refutes the long-short pes and clivis misinterpretation of the Solesmes method, but I suppose that inconvenient fact alone may be disruptive and inconsistent enough! Acknowledging the length of both notes doesn't require any modification to the notes of the Vatican edition, just a longer episema. If the golden rule really means no long notes at syllabic breaks, it isn't much of a rule when it applies only 14% of the time.

If you "don’t really care about the long-short thing," then why make the claim that, "Mocquereau is not wrongly applying the golden rule"? Your position seems incongruous, as Mocquereau's misapplication of the golden rule presumes that it involves proscribes long notes before syllabic breaks rather than breaths or rests. As I have shown above, this has nothing to do specifically with Laon and can be demonstrated entirely from the St. Gall sources.

1. The thirteenth-century golden rule was a proscription against breath before a syllabic break, not against a long note there.
2. The Preface to the Vatican Edition misinterprets the golden rule as pertaining to note length.
3. The Solesmes editions do not respect the long note values of the various manuscripts at syllabic breaks, both single-note and longer neumes, presumably because of the golden rule, but see no. 5 below.
4. This is a fundamental difference between the classic Solesmes method and Cardine's semiology.
5. The Solesmes editions often write a long-short form of the clivis and pes in contexts other than immediately before syllabic breaks, even within a melisma far removed from the syllabic articulation, and the clivis sometimes also before quarter and half bar lines. Now here's my question: What Vatican edition rule applies in such contexts that would have constrained Mocquereau?

Here is my initial claim above, which opened up this whole can of worms:

[Mocquereau] managed to convince nearly everyone that the long clivis and pes quadratus were long-short figures rather than entirely long, based on a faulty application of the "golden rule" principle, and he erroneously treated the normal syllabic value as short and indivisible on that same basis.

I stand by what I wrote. Are we really not in disagreement here?

The thirteenth-century golden rule was a proscription against breath before a syllabic break, not against a long note there.

Certainly that it is your interpretation. But even if it’s right: in practice long notes lead to breaths. So I see how Pothier got there, and if Mocquereau has to work within that, then I can also see why he wouldn’t push back.

Notably, and this is why I’m just not that interested in the long-short question, in actual practice coming from Fontgombault no less you hear long-long at places where it will not introduce a breath in an inappropriate place.

Whether they lengthen the second note mid-word is another matter. The In Paradisum is a place where this can actually work practically. Dom Gajard certainly hints at that the possibility. But context matters too.

I suspect the tradition of the abbey, consistency, and context are the answer as with nearly everything. In other words lengthening both notes when only one is written long at a bar would not faze Mocquereau and that he felt that it was redundant. Again, take the Nocturnale chants. That’s a perfectly valid approach but honestly I’ve heard a lot of what amounts to yapping from people who don’t like rhythmic signs at all; I would say that they should be happy that Mocquereau did not intend (as best he could and with some exceptions) to completely determine performance by means of musical notation and that you had to know the bigger picture or otherwise judge for yourself. Maybe this is why Saulnier went the other way and removed the signs (to our detriment given the abbey’s change in official interpretation in the new Liber Hymnarius).

I think you are being way too harsh with Mocquereau here. I am going to defend him by trying to explain his motivations for his seeming inconsistency on this question. Please understand that I am not necessarily defending his semiological interpretation; I am merely trying to explain how he arrived at his interpretation.

Mocquereau wrote about this issue with the clivis with a little more clarity in PM 10, which is not so far removed in time from Le nombre. Here too he suggests that sometimes only the first note is long in the SG clivis, but that sometimes there are other circumstances that make both notes long. This naturally raises the questions: what can be his motivation or purpose in arriving at this conclusion? Why can the clivis-with-episema, which he elsewhere equates to the non-cursive forms in Laon and Chartres, be interpreted as sometimes long-short and sometimes long-long? The answer, as I have suggested before, is that he felt constrained by the rules of rhetorical chanting as handed down by Pothier and enshrined in the Vatican Edition preface to allow the second note of such a clivis to be long only at the ends of groups. I refer here both to the golden rule (which I would paraphrase as "no lengthening of the last note of a non-final syllable, which cuts the word up like a centurion tearing the seamless garment of our Lord") but also to the general principle that the most usual function of length within the system is an ending function: mora ultimae vocis. For Mocquereau, when editing chant, to lengthen the end of a neume is to make a mora vocis, that is, doing so creates the end of a rhythmic group of some size.

You are welcome to dismiss this idea! But to respond to my explanation of why Mocquereau's editions are the way they are by attacking the golden rule itself misses my point. What I am suggesting is that Mocquereau accepted Pothier's idea of the mora vocis, both as a principle of good performance and as a binding rule of interpretation to be followed in his making his chant editions. I believe with some confidence that it is why the second note of the non-cursive clivis is only marked as long in the Solesmes editions either when combined with a following quilisma-group or when it is at the end of a rhythmic group. By marking the episema over the first note, he is taking a rhythmic cue from the early manuscripts but not trying to add a mora vocis where there should be none, and therefore he does not disturb the basic connecting-principle of rhetorical chant performance. That is why I say that his interpretation is not really a semiological one. He has other factors at play.

In particular, he was writing all this at a time when his critics were attacking the Solesmes rhythmic signs as undermining the free rhythm of the Vatican edition. I am not suggesting that he argued disingenuously. I am saying that he was even more strongly constrained by this controversy to moderate the number of rhythmic signs added to his editions and to avoid especially too many ending-function lengthenings (mora ultimae vocis), in which I include any indications that the last note of a particular neume is long. Obviously the situation was somewhat different later and is even more different now.

As both Matthew and I have said, within the Solesmes-chant tradition, it is common now to allow the episema on the clivis to affect both notes. This is something you can already see in Gajard, and it has become even more pronounced under the influence of more recent scholars like Cardine. This represents a shift in the understanding of the relative weight of the golden rule and semiological concerns, especially as the controversy over the inclusion of signs drawn from SG/Laon died down over the course of the twentieth century.

The turn of the twentieth century was really just the beginning of the performance-practice movement. Both Pothier and Mocquereau, like other scholars and performers of the time, believed that they could find one style of performance that could apply to the whole history of the Gregorian melodies. For both of them, this involved a style of rhetorical delivery that I would say is a highly creative and evolved development of the idea of the mora vocis, drawing especially on Guido's Micrologus chapter 15 and on the golden rule. Mocquereau later folded into this the rhythmic indications of SG/Laon/Chartres etc. This idea of combining sources that are separated by centuries from one another to come up with a performance style is very characteristic of the early decades of the performance-practice movement. It is also very different from the approach of later scholars like Cardine or yourself, who narrow the diachronic focus of interpretation.

It is for this reason that I think it's a little unfair to criticize writers of the Mocquereau era for their semiology. Performance practice has changed a lot over time: consider Wanda Landowska and Jean Rondeau! I don't know whether Mocquereau would have thought that the non-cursive clivis was always long-long in the ninth century, because he doesn't seek to answer only that question in his writings, since he is not only a semiologist. Or at least it's impossible to separate that question out from all the other layers of interpretation and musical ideas that go into his synthesis.

For my own part, I am unreserved in my admiration for Pothier and Mocquereau and Gajard and Cardine in their writings! Long live Dom Guéranger and his chanting progeny! They are all a constant source of inspiration for me. My attitude as a chanter leans more toward the earlier writers on that list with regard to performance practice and to what degree I wish to replicate a ninth-century performance style (to the extent that this is even possible). In my own case, this is all tied up with my own scholas of which I have been a part but also my newly adopted Abbey of Clear Creek (I recently became an oblate). It is from within this community that I am inclined to be more lenient with Mocquereau's paleographic/semiological musings.

That was rather long-winded, but I hope within it there is a good explanation for Mocquereau's motives and my own.

@Charles_Weaver, I appreciate your lengthy and thoughtful reply. As I said, I want to give Mocquereau the benefit of the doubt. I am not "attacking" the golden rule either. It refers to a breath and possibly a mora vocis, not to the episema, and certainly not to the normal syllabic value. The German edition of Pothier's Der gregorianishce Choral (1881) states it succinctly in chapter 9:

Let us therefore hold fast to the rule, which Elias Salomon rightly calls a golden rule: Within a single word, one must never take a breath immediately before a new syllable.
[Halte man daher die Regel fest, welche Elias Salomon mit Recht eine goldene Regel nennt: Innerhalb leines Wortes darf nie unmittelbar vor einer neuen Silbe Athem geschöpft werden.]

The problem is that they misinterpret that normal syllabic value as short and indivisible, equivalent to an eighth note rather than a quarter note. That error permeates their entire system of interpretation and the entire "tradition" of that abbey, already invoked in this thread. Their principle of the shortness and indivisibility of the normal syllabic value simply doesn't correspond to what is notated in the oldest extant sources. The misinterpretation is not unique to Solesmes but is also to be found in the writings of P. Wagner and perpetuated with Cardine's "diminished syllabic value," when said value is notated with uncinus or tractulus in the manuscripts.

Congratulations on your admission as a Benedictine oblate!

I don’t think God cares whether one note is longer than the other

@francis, that's not exactly the point when we're discussing the oldest notated rhythm. If the chant handed down from the Fathers of the Church is itself sacred—not just the words, but the melodies—does God care if musicians tamper with the rhythm? Maybe rephrasing the question that way will give you a different perspective. If so, the next step is to determine which are the authentic versions and which are the tampered versions. Is holy mother Church infallible in matters of musicology, and can she promulgate a tampered version? If you compare the official chant from the time of Leo XIII to the official chant promulgated by Pius X, the two versions are so contradictory that the answer to the second question has to be a resounding yes.

When one brings the element of Gregorian chant into a polyphonic composition, one is forced to deal with rhythm directly. Choices have to be made or the end goal cannot be attained. It’s as simple as that.

Yes. Duruflé followed the Solesmes rhythm, and that is the style referred to as based on incorrect rhythmic theories. You can view the original thread from @incantu here:
https://forum.musicasacra.com/forum/discussion/9072/the-horizontal-episema-over-the-clivis/p1
If you think your eyes are glazing over now...

Here's the next sentence in the older thread, not previously quoted here:

It is an entirely different matter to go about peddling this mixed-breed chant as beloning to the pedigree of any 9th or 10th century source.

I have written very similar words myself. Some people use a literal interpretation of the Solesmes method. Fine. Some use their own take on the Solesmes method. Fine. Some use Cardine's semiology. Fine. Some prefer the Vatican edition without rhythmic markings. Fine. Some adopt a rhetorical/oratorical/accentualist style of chanting. Fine. Some simply do whatever they want to the chant and call it "free rhythm." Fine. Some put it in the vernacular. Fine. Let them! This list could continue. What is not fine is for them to present their version as authentic first-millennial performance practice. Keep the alterations in their own historical context instead of trying to pass them off as the original version. There is conclusive evidence in favor of long and short note values in 2:1 proportion. After several years of exploring first-millennial sources, I have found no evidence whatsoever in favor of a contrary interpretation.

PS - See also The Received Historical Narrative.

Which flavor do you prefer? It appears to be antiquarian when one reaches back and INTERPRETS through one's best guess how the chant was executed... and try to label it as authentic.

None of the above! Stick with a performance practice that corresponds to the oldest notated sources. The information there is the most reliable we have. @francis, do you think that the Vatican and Solesmes editions are not largely antiquarian, or that the Medicaean edition represents an evolution rather than a deliberate mutilation, along with its successors up to the time of Leo XIII?

If Durufle offers us one possibility of dealing with chant, then Tournemire offers us insight also. In his l'Orgue Mystique suites, Tournemire pushes together repeated notes, sometimes changing the shape of the chant and tinkers with the chants quoted for his compositional needs. Also, Tournemire is using an old antiphonarium to quote antiphons used in the office.

For what it is worth, Tournemire spent a lot of time at Solesmes and was friendly with a number of the monks there.