Ensemble Organum's authenticity
  • Chrism
    Posts: 868
    The recordings of Ensemble Organum has been a very popular meme of late. They are said to sing a "more ancient" form of Latin Church chant. The result sounds quite Byzantine.

    Question for the scholars: Is this interpretation of the ancient manuscripts widely accepted or merely a living exploration of some radical theory about a unity of origin for Byzantine and Latin chant?
  • David AndrewDavid Andrew
    Posts: 1,204
    I just spoke with Fr. Columba Kelly, OSB, at St. Meinrad about this very issue today.

    Ensemble Organum's performance practice is, in many respects, great bosh. (That's MY way of putting it, NOT Fr. Kelly's!)

    What Fr. Kelly will tell you is that EO's performance practice doesn't follow or subscribe to the best of scholarship with respect to the interpretation of chant as it developed in Western Europe.

    David Hiley's book on Gregorian Chant talks about the issue of performance practice and scholarship as it applies to the application and execution of chant in the Church now, and addresses this topic in one of its chapters.
  • jgirodjgirod
    Posts: 45
    That the result sound Byzantine is not a wonder: Marcel Peres has been to eastern Europe to study this chant.

    Before, he was promoting the style of the old cantors from the country in 19-th century up to the middle of the 20-th, claiming they were the live tradition of chant; actually these used to sing (shout would be more accurate) very slowly and very loudly.

    I attended last year an EO performance, knowing some of the pieces they interpreted (but not by heart). One strange thing, but I had heard of it already, is that they sing the 4th mode not with a minor third but with an oriental third. For the rest, it was all like if they were singing one neum for each written note (and therefore a complicated mellism for each written neum), including during the psalmody!
  • incantuincantu
    Posts: 989
    For the rest, it was all like if they were singing one neum for each written note


    I'm not exactly sure what this means.

    Based on my study of 10th century manuscripts as well as contemporary theoretical and historical writings, I think EO's interpretations of the chant are plausible as a recreation of pre-notational performance practices, and just as viable as an "authentic" living tradition as the Solesmes version (which, take it or leave it, has at least a century of practice behind it). I don't imagine, though, that his readings are verifiable as historically "authentic."

    Peres certainly makes some interesting and controversial choices. For the recording of the Tournai Mass, they sing note for note what's on the page even in the cases of what most editors take to be obvious scribal error on the ground that if there had been errors in the well-used manuscript, they would have been corrected. They also do not apply any ficta that is not expressly indicated, even though the few indications do suggest the kind of alterations that the composer felt were necessary (a concept that could have been applied in analogous sections).

    I find most of their recordings absolutely beautiful and inspirational. They will certainly make you think about familiar repertoire (e.g., the Machaut Mass!) in a different way.
  • JamJam
    Posts: 636
    Well, Ensemble Organum sings a lot of different kinds of chant. you kind of have to be specific which kinds you're talking about.

    When it comes to this Old Roman Chant or the Chant of the Knights Templar, it makes sense that the chant would have a very Byzantine sound. The latter is because, well, the Knights were in a Byzantine area, and basically adopted the local style of singing chant, adapting their Latin texts to it. With the Old Roman chant -- I'm thinking of particular CDs that I own btw, which is what I'm linking to -- half of it was still in Greek, so it makes sense for it to still have a kind of Greek feel to it. That CD sounds far less Byzantine than the other of course, but it still has some ison and things of that nature.

    Does Peres claim to be historically "authentic"? I always kind of saw them as interpreting the really old manuscripts in plausible ways, like incantu said, since, who can really be sure what things sounded like before the advent of sound recording devices? The best thing we can do is reach as far back as possible into living traditions, such as that of modern-day Gregorian chant and Byzantine chant, and make educated guesses as to how things would have been in certain time periods.

    As for the Byzantine chant tradition, I don't think there was the same kind of weird thing that happened to it in the middle ages or whatever... Granted, I don't know much about it, but I don't think there is a real parallel with the whole things getting weird in the middle ages and then getting "renewed" at Solesmes and so on. Not to say Greek chant is exactly the same as it used to be, but it's progression has been steadier, perhaps?

    I love Ensemble Organum, by the way. A combination of Byzantine chant and the Latin language? That just makes me squee inside! I've even memorized Crucem Sanctam (from the Templar CD) and can sing along with it, because it was one of the few songs I could understand mostly without translations, and it's so theologically rich and lovely. And of course their Salve Regina with ison is only my favorite piece of music of all time--!!

    For the rest, it was all like if they were singing one neum for each written note (and therefore a complicated mellism for each written neum)


    Are you referring to fluctuations on microtones, maybe?
  • Chrism
    Posts: 868
    With the Old Roman chant -- half of it was still in Greek

    Is this true? Hiley says that the earliest Old Roman chant manuscripts date from the 11th Century.
  • JamJam
    Posts: 636
    As for that, I'm talking about a specific CD which is subtitled, "Periode byzantine," if that's any clue. Inside the CD it says,

    Rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century by Dom Andoyer, Old Roman chant posed numerous problems, particularly ideological ones: how to reconile the dominant ideology of the period of the Gregorian chant composed by Saint Gregory (6th century), which was to have been the universal chant of the Catholic Church, in Rome dating from before the 13th century; 11th and 12th century manuscripts of Gregorian chant transmit only the Old Roman chant. What is more, this repertory is unsingable if we apply the theories of the 19th and 20th century Gregorianists of the indivisible first beat.

    [...]

    In certain ways the Old Roman presents itself as a direct testimony of Old Byzantine chant. Thus the Greek alleluiatic verses, preserved in the Old Roman manuscripts, would have been direct evidence of the use of the Alleluia as it was practised in Byzantium in the 8th century.

    The early chant of the Church of Rome took shape during the 7th and 8th centuries. Its distinctly Oriental character, which gives it the aspect of an ornamented cantillation, is by no means surprising when one remembers that a this period Italy was not only dependent on the Byzantine Emperor, but was also a land of asylum for a large Greek colony which had sought refuge there...


    I didn't mean that half of all Old Roman chant is in Greek (I don't know any precise fractions), rather that half of the songs on my CD of it are in Greek. But as I gather from this CD intro, there was a not insignificant amount of Old Roman chant still preserved in Greek.

    The manuscripts may date from the 11th century, but they weren't originally composed in the 11th century.
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