I must add two additional comments about Cole's article:

On p. 21 he refers to the letter "r" as standing for "rursum," meaning "elevate." This should of course be "s" and "sursum," as in "sursum corda." The medival s often looks like an r, numerous examples of which can be found in the above St. Gall notation of Tollite hostias.

Secondly, I've noticed a trend in this and other articles of using the term "semiology" to refer to the neumes themselves, rather than to the study of the neumatic signs (e.g. p. 23 "If you try to sing everything marked in the semiology..."). I find this confusing, and have not been able to track down a primary source that uses the term semiology in this way. I wonder if it stems from a mistranslation of Cardine's original French, or if I have personally misread the term to mean "the study of paleographic signs." Anyone?

I'm happy someone's receiving SM from any of the past three years.

Update, rec'd Fall 2012 on Friday the 14th!

@JulieColl, Marier's text "A Gregorian Chant Materclass" as well as his compositional style represent a fairly classic Solesmes style. A fundamental principle of this interpretation is that the punctum represents a single, indivisible unit. Neumes of two notes have a value to two pulses, those of three notes three pulses, and so on. The only modification to this basic unit is one of lengthening, not of shortening.

The practice at the time the Laon and St. Gall manuscripts were recorded was that of variable length, where a single virga or tractus (transcribed in the Solesmes editions as a punctum) could be either long or short. The clivis was (with certain exceptions) generally understood to be short, unless marked with an episema or t(enete). In this sense, the clivis with episema is not long compared to the "punctum," but rather it is not short.

Remember that the Vatican and Solesmes editions were both prepared by Solesmes. It follows that the best method for interpreting them is the method set forth by their editors, viz the Solesmes method. To perform according to the so-called semiological method (which is really not a method at all), one must make recourse to other editions.

While the Graduale Triplex does provide much of the paleographical material necessary to perform according to the earlier traditions, it is cluttered with dots, ictus marks, and episemata that do not necessarily relate to the corresponding manuscripts. The Graduale Novum, in addition to being laid out in a way that makes it easy to read the three lines of notation, is free from the unnecessary and confusing clutter of the Solesmes rhythmic signs. The melodic restitutions it contains may be a subject of debate among those whose primary purpose is to prepare licit music for the liturgy, but nevertheless often make it easier to see the connections between the early staffless notations and the later received melodic traditions. Far from being a Holy Grial of chant, the Graduale Novum still contains numerous examples of diverging rhythmic and melodic traditions. But at this point, it's the only single complete resource I know of that can serve as a satisfactory performing edition for 9th and 10th century chant.

This is immensely helpful! Thank you.

Do you mind if I ask how you initially learned Gregorian chant? Was it with the Solesmes method, and if so, was it difficult to transition from the Solesmes method and the Graduale Romanum to interpreting the markings in the Graduale Novum?

And one final question: what are the pros and cons of learning to sing the propers in the Graduale Novum as opposed to the Graduale Romanum?

Thanks for any insight you can give me. I know someone who sings the propers from the Triplex and it is, even to my untrained ear, quite different and actually more captivating in a way.

I learned Solesmes chant. Right from the beginning, I had to memorize the neume chart of clivis and pes, torculus and porrectus, climacus, scandicus, etc. And after all of that, I was told that they are all sung exactly the same way, i.e. with one pulse per note. I knew this could not be correct, and so went to dig deeper into the manuscript traditions.

For a while I, too, dabbled in mixing information in the manuscripts with the Solesmes editions. After all, the Solesmes edition is based on a thorough comparative analysis of the chant manuscripts. But the major breakthroughs of chant scholarship of the past 30 years render the 100-year-old Vatican edition obsolete.

The pros of using the Novum? It enables a performance that more closely approximates the earliest recorded chant traditions. For me, it has opened my eyes to new possibilities in interpreting music of all other time periods. The idea of unequal eighths, for example, is essential to the performance of Baroque music. I also happen to find a good performance of the medieval style to be more beautiful than its 19th century counterpart.

The cons? It's nearly impossible to sing all the Gregorian propers every week with the Novum. One would have to have a director who has large amounts of chant committed to memory in order to begin to approach this repertoire. (Being able to read an individual chant is not sufficient). And the amount of rehearsal time it takes to perfect a single chant would be prohibitive for most choirs.

However, I do think there's a tremendous benefit from knowing which aspects of current chant performance that are commonly accepted as an absolute are based on misconceptions. Even if you choose to follow the Solesmes method, you can avoid splitting hairs about things that, in the proper context, don't really matter.

To add to that category: closing to consonants on quadratic liquescents. The real question should be whether the liquescent is one of augmentation or diminution, or whether it is sung on one pitch (as a long) or two (as two shorts). If you're not going to ponder these questions, just make sure you pronounce it clearly in a way that is appropriate to the room and don't make too much of a fuss about it.

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MHI - You're lucky then. The traditionalists here in Australia have all sorts of ideas of what liturgy was like before Vatican II.

We have some who think chant has been used continuously for two thousand years without alteration or revision. I have run into that attitude, too, HM. When I tell them it fell out of popular use for centuries, and was essentially reconstructed in France during the nineteenth century, they are a bit shocked - especially the part about it not coming from the angels directly to Gregory the Great.

Chant is a living medium and changes over time. It comes into fashion and falls out of fashion. And no, it wasn't invented by Rossini, which is what many of the older folks actually heard before Vatican II.

especially the part about it not coming from the angels directly to Gregory the Great.

Shocked. SHOCKED!

Chant is a living medium and changes over time. It comes into fashion and falls out of fashion.

The Latin language also, despite what some of it's weirder chapions would have you believe.

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cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

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Hmm! Those "Renaissance Latin" scholars sound about as self-righteous, arrogant, misinformed, and obnoxious as some of the modern day organ and chant scholars. Who would have thought?

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Erasmus noted (unhappily) that one could, only with great difficulty, comprehend Latin while going from one country or region to another. For reason: everyone pronounced it the same way that he pronounced his own language. Our Italianate 'church Latin' pronunciation is a convention hardly more than 150 years old. A glaring hold-out for regional pronunciation is alive and well in Britain, where university Latin continues to be almost comically Anglicised.
I do rather agree with Adam that it would seem that Latin did not remain static. While being impressed with MHI's mastery of Latin, it seems to me that he is not correct on this issue.

It is interesting to note that up until well into the last century all the great universities of our western civilisation required that doctoral theses be written and delivered in Latin. Now, none do. Oxford and/or Cambridge were, I believe, the last hold outs. (A XIX. century school boy could write and speak more Latin than a modern PhD!) And one can be pretty certain that in Germany, Latin sounded like German... ditto everywhere else. When I do French alternatim literature on recital I always have the chant sung slowly with a very heavy French accent, sometimes with some mensuration here and there, and even ornaments and accidentals. It is clear that in past times chant performance was very heavily influenced by contemporary musical style, and that it sounded almost like the native language of the singers.

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I'd take a horizontal episema over a clivis any day!

This may have more influence on new English chant technique than it ever will on the Triplex.

Interesting. Can you elaborate?

In fact, the Vatican edition was not prepared by Solesmes.

What Bruce E. Ford writes is not entirely untrue, and perhaps I oversimplified the summary of my original post. If you really want the whole story, read Pierre Combe's The Restoration of Gregorian Chant: Solesmes and the Vatican Edition. But I think it's splitting hairs to say that the Vatican Edition was not the result of the work of Solesmes, or that the Vatican Edition and the Vatican Edition with Added Rhythmic Signs are essentially different texts. Jeff O. has written extensively on the "hidden" (or not so hidden) rhythm of the Vatican Edition which includes—wait for it—a Solesmesian (if I may) mora vocis. You may point out differences between Pothier and Mocquereau all you want, but from our vantage point in history they both appear to be fruit from the same tree. [This is not in any way to discredit their immense contributions to the study of chant, or to suppose that we'd know what we know now without their having laid the groundwork. It just so happens that they both went down rabbit holes tbased on theories hat turned out to be largely inaccurate.] Those distinctions do not interest me (at least not in regard to the present discussion).

Why, for instance, should the second note of the salicus (represented in the mss. by the oriscus) be emphasized, rather than the note that follows it (which the semiologists judge to be more important)?

This would be like a native English speaker walking into a Mexican restaurant and saying, "Yes, I would like a burrrrrrrito, please." People do, but it just sounds oddly macaronic to me. Why say just one word in Spanish, when "burrito" is a perfectly acceptable English word?

You may eschew the traditional lengthening of the ictic second note of the three-note salicus (rendering it as a scandicus) without interrupting the overall Solesmes aesthetic. I would probably do that myself if adopting an equalist reading. But how would one, as Bruce E. Ford suggests, "emphasize" the note that follows the oriscus? By lengthening the top note? Well, in the Solesmes method, the top note is already treated as a long, so then you make the figure, what... long-long-double long? (or if you're considering the top note as a "short," would you make the first two notes double-shorts?) And then what do you do with the notes that precede and follow the salicus? To sing just this one figure according to the Medieval tradition and the others with a mostly equalist approach would make the salicus stand out unnecessarily from the rest of the phrase (as would lengthening both notes of the clivis with episema, the subject of my original post).

In editing the Solesmes editions Mocquereau did plenty of "picking and choosing" from among the many rhythmic indicators found in the manuscripts.

In a sense this is true. Not every episema and tenete is mapped onto the square note edition. Others have been added where they are not found in the manuscript (implicitly or otherwise). But the fact that what Mocquereau meant by these symbols is entirely different than their meaning in the manuscripts greatly overshadows the few discrepancies there are between the texts. In other words, the presence or absence of a dot or episema in the Solesmes Edition is basically useless for rendering a 10th century reading of the chant, unless the melody has already been memorized by the singer.

The "Solesmes Method" is itself an "unhistorical hybrid." Why does Incantu condone it while condemning other such hybrids?

No, with over a century of performing tradition, and having inspired great composers such as Duruflé, the Solesmes method is, I would say, a historical hybrid. In fact, not even a hybrid (what are the component parts?). I'd say it's a 19th century invention, arrangement, etc. And I condone it (in the liturgy) because it works; but it's not the only method. There are other contemporary methods that are effective for getting groups to sing large amounts of chant rather quickly, for better or for worse. My objection was to the idea that the Solesmes Method could be reconciled with the manuscript tradition through a series of small modifications, as Cardine seemed to be suggesting in Beginning Studies in Gregorian Chant. I maintain that the two approaches are more or less mutually exclusive.

One could, if they wanted to, perform chant from a number of different historical editions. The trend nowadays when performing polyphony, for example, seems to be to perform the chant according to the tradition known to the composer. That's all well and good, but in my opinion it amounts to singing about 900 years worth of polyphony with ugly sounding chant. That's my opinion, but I won't say it's historically "inauthentic" (whatever that means). Personally, I perform polyphony of all time periods with the earliest chants I can find. It's anachronistic, but I find it more beautiful and more interesting. But mixing a dash of semiology into an otherwise equalist reading—especially if one hasn't yet realized that "c" does not always mean "fast" and that the absence of an episema or tenete doesn't necessarily mean a neume isn't long—all the while pretending to be somehow more historically accurate, is in my opinion a fool's errand. I feel this way because it's a mistake I made early on in my semiological studies, and I mean to caution others not to do the same.

I'm not urging anyone to use the Vatican edition, because some if its melodic readings obscure the modality of certain pieces and/or obliterate melodic accentuations. In my English adaptations I corrected many of its readings by referring to Benevento VI.34. On the other hand, I am not convinced that the version of a chant with the best manuscript pedigree is always the most satisfying. I wouldn't always choose the readings in the Graduale novum.

Cardine's theory of the "three values" is his theory, and he has the right to say what it means. According to Jean Claire, he taught that the degree to which the three values differ is very slight. The difference between a diminished syllabic beat and a syllabic beat is the difference in the time it takes to sing a syllable consisting of a vowel only and the time it takes to sing a syllable consisting of a consonant and a vowel. The difference between a syllabic beat and an augmented syllabic beat is the difference between the time it takes to sing a syllable containing only a consonant and a vowel and the time it takes to sing a syllable containing an initial vowel, a consonant, and a final consonant. (See his article, "Dom Eugene Cardine, Etudes gregoriennes XXIII (1989), 11-26.)

In Beginning Studies Cardine also said that the symbols used to signify augmentation did not always imply lengthening but could imply other kinds of emphasis. (I can't give a page citation because I lent my copy to someone who has not returned it.) What other kind of emphasis is there besides stress?

When the three values are interpreted as he interpreted them, the difference between a Mocquereau-based or Pothier-based performance and a true Cardine-based performance is not dramatic. Most performances purportedly based on Cardine's teachings are hard to distinguish from Vollaerts-Murray-Blackley "proportional rhythm" performances. I have never heard a performance that conformed fully to Cardine's teaching. Recordings from Solesmes produced under Claire's direction come closest; but he did not attempt to incorporate all the nuances conveyed in the pre-diastematic neumes. (I think Claire's approach was sensible; and I don't like the performances based on semiology that I have heard, such as those of Gloria Dei Cantores.)

How would I emphasize the third note of the salicus? If an important note followed it, I would lengthen it--ideally, less than Mocquereauvians lengthen the second note, but often to the same degree. (Why waste five minutes over this?) If an unimportant note followed it, I would simply accent it. (This is pure Ford, I admit. The reason for it is that in speech, when one accented syllable immediately follows another, we lengthen the first. We cannot do otherwise and still observe both accents.) I would treat the note following the quilisma in the same way.

There is an ictus not only in all music but in all speech; but it is an accent-based ictus (modo Pothier). We cannot pronounce more than three syllables or sing more than three notes without placing stress on more than one of them. The second stress may be slight; but it is there. When we sing five notes in a melisma, the secondary stress will fall either on the third or fourth of these notes. If some singers place it on the third note and others on the fourth, the sound will not be as good as if they all place it on one or the other. In melismata, I would take care to place the ictus at "neumatic breaks" and on notes that appear modally important (cf. Saulnier).

What I favor is a modification of the Pothier approach that gives emphasis to some of the notes identified in the "signs" as important. I think that's better than sticking strictly to Mocquereau and emphasizing other notes. I see no reason to take an "all or nothing" approach--especially when the meaning of "all" is questionable.

I am not convinced that the version of a chant with the best manuscript pedigree is always the most satisfying. I wouldn't always choose the readings in the Graduale novum.

Fair enough. The Graduale Novum does not give definitive readings of the melodies, nor does it claim to. As you well know, the gap between the adiastematic manuscripts and the fixed pitch of staff notation is substantial. In some cases the evidence in any two sources suggests at best a divergent tradition. But these examples are relatively few and far between, and it remains that the Graduale Novum is (to my knowledge) the best complete resource, i.e. containing both pitch and rhythmic information, for performing chant according to the 9th and 10th century tradition.

Most performances purportedly based on Cardine's teachings are hard to distinguish from Vollaerts-Murray-Blackley "proportional rhythm" performances. I have never heard a performance that conformed fully to Cardine's teaching.

Cardine's contribution to the field was his catalogue of neume forms and the comparative method used to decode their meaning. This research is of course foundational to the field of semiology, but it does not represent a conclusion or method. I would not claim that my performances conform to his teaching, since Cardine didn't teach a method of how to perform chant according to the earliest notated traditions. He was attempting to reconcile the Vatican and Solesmes editions with a new, deeper understanding of the neumes on which they were based. I believe if he were alive today he would have discovered that the corrections to the Vatican Edition necessary for a Medieval performance of chant extend beyond a few melodic changes and the extension of the episema over the clivis. [Vollaerts, by the way, does supply a sort of method which is taken up and added to by Murray. It's unfortunate that Kelly, as a result of his dissertation on the cursive torculus of St. Gall, threw the baby out with the bath water when dismissing Vollaert's theories wholesale].

...the degree to which the three values differ is very slight. The difference between a diminished syllabic beat and a syllabic beat is the difference in the time it takes to sing a syllable consisting of a vowel only and the time it takes to sing a syllable consisting of a consonant and a vowel.

This is true when we are discussing the neume element on which the syllable is pronounced (either a single note, or the last note before a new syllable). I like to give the example of the following two syllable words:

eo
ego
ergo
tergo
tempo
templo
templum

If we were to sing each syllable on a single virga, "eo" would be shorter than "templum." The variation would be less between words closer together on this chart and greater for those farther apart. That's the primary syllabic value, which is variable. The variable length of syllables is generally not notated in St. Gall and is only occasionally indicated in Laon by the size of the uncinus. The difference is admittedly "very slight."

However, if in a given stereotyped melody we ornament the first virga by making it a pes or clivis, we have created two notes that together have the value of one syllable. Again, the difference between a pes or clivis on the first syllable of "eo" and the first syllable of "templum" will be very slight. But the diference between either one of the two notes of the first syllable and the virga of the second syllable is not very slight. It approaches a ratio of 2:1. This is not a strictly "proportionalist" interpretation, since we have already discovered that the value of 1 (i.e. the syllable) is variable.

I did not know the recordings of Gloria Dei Cantores, but I've just now listened to some samples from their website. They're obviously not using the Graduale Novum melodies for chants like Factus est repente. But their rhythmic reading is nearly identical to my own amateur choir in their performance on Pentecost. [The execution is not perfect, but the intent is the same]. How is it that we arrived at this conclusion independently of each other, when I do not strictly follow the teaching of Cardine, Vollaerts, or Kelly? I believe an increasing number of performers are making more and more accurate interpretations of the earliest manuscripts, thanks to resources like the Graduale Triplex and Graduale Novum and that soon we will see a method or treatise that addresses this kind of performance. None of the book currently available adress these issues in any sort of comprehensive way.