More on chant

From Old Zhou:

Amy asked about this part of the interview:

It was once very moving to hear the assembly sing the Te Deum, the Magnificat, the litanies, music that the people had assimilated and made their own – but today very little is left even of this. And furthermore, Gregorian chant has been distorted by the rhythmic and aesthetic theories of the Benedictines of Solesmes. Gregorian chant was born in violent times, and it should be manly and strong, and not like the sweet and comforting adaptations of our own day.

Based on my own experience with chant in various parish churches and monasteries, as well as some study of the history and artistic performance, I'll make a couple of comments.

1. "Gregorian Chant" (TM) can be a subject of endless debates, just like liturgical translation or any other liturgical music, because it depends on several factors: (a) living tradition; (b) historical evidence; (c) ecclesial authority; (d) the actual folks doing it right here and now.

2. Solesmes got the Vatican seal of approval, but there was a lot of debate about what they put out. And it continues. I recommend the book "Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes", by Katherine Bergeron (U. Califorinia Press, 1998) if anybody wants to read some of the history from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, these events from 1905:

It was this problem of legitimacy that ultimately brought the work of the commission to a standstill, the proponents of "living tradition" facing off uncomfortably with the Solesmes archaeologists throughout the months of February and March. To resolve the conflict, Pothier finally resorted to a higher authority. By the beginning of April 1905 he had heard from the pope's secretary of state, Cardinal Merry del Val, who wrote: "His Holiness has charged me with declaring to your Most Reverend Paternity that, when He decided to return to the ancient Gregorian chant, He did not intend to make a work so exclusively favoring the archaeology of this chant that we could not admit today certain Gregorian melodies that have come down over the course of centuries." The letter went on to assert that "it would not be contrary to the intentions of His Holiness that the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican Edition of the liturgical books give preference to certain less ancient compositions, provided that they truly have the character of Gregorian music."

The traditionalists had suddenly gained considerable ground. Still, the judgment was not forceful enough to convince the Solesmes editors themselves, who continued sending polemical missives to Rome in defense of their own work. According to Combe, by the end of June they had drawn up, with the support of de Santi and others, something of a manifesto to place before Pius X, in the hopes of reversing the actions of the Pontifical Commission. The document's central paragraph asserted, once again, the unimpeachability of the Solesmes scholarship, whose scientific methods exceeded even the limits of canonical authority. The authors cheekily pointed out that the pope himself could not have imagined such results:

Because the School of Solesmes offers us such an ensemble of guarantees, and because the difficulties raised by their opponents have no solid foundation, lacking all basis in science, we, the undersigned, declare ourselves ready to support the authors of a work undertaken for the honor of the Church, a work that until now has not only justified but surpassed the Holy Father's highest hopes.
The manifesto did no good. Within days, a second letter addressed to Pothier from Merry del Val brought the dispute to a decisive end. It announced a change of plan—a "simplification," the text stated euphemistically, "in the work of the editors." The new Vatican edition would be based on the Benedictine gradual published at Solesmes in 1895, a book that represented, as everyone knew, the work of Pothier, containing the so-called living tradition that he knew by heart, and that Mocquereau had labored to correct by hand. But the cardinal's letter announced that, from this point on, it would be Pothier alone who took charge of any corrections to the melodies, using, as he saw fit, the "paleographic studies pursued under the wise direction of the most Reverend Abbot of Solesmes." An additional clause put these exalted studies in their proper place, stating that "the Holy Father [would] take under His supreme authority and protection the special edition of the liturgical books that He called Typical, otherwise leaving the field free for the studies of learned Gregorianists." The Vatican did not prohibit scientific research with this ruling. It simply relegated such research to an undesignated "free field," as if condemning the monks to the very site on which Mocquereau, and later his entire school, had first staked their scholarly claims—the world of the staffless Saint-Gall neumes, whose signs floated freely, as they say, in campo aperto .

It was not exactly Siberia, but it was a punishment nonetheless. The Solesmes monks were, with this decision, indirectly censured for their extremist position regarding the Church's musical traditions. In this respect, the conflict surrounding the Vatican edition—and the pope's reaction to it—would seem to anticipate another, more serious conflict that visited Pius X during the same decade, the crisis involving what, in Catholic circles, was tellingly known as modernism. The term referred to the teachings of certain Catholic intellectuals around the turn of the century, scholars who sought to update traditional theology through historical discipline.


In this heated debate in the early 20th century, Mocquereau and the monks of Solesmes were the "modernists" working with manuscripts and historiography and philologies and all manner of modern "scientific" approaches in an attempt to reconstruct the "authentic" Gregorian traditions. On the other side were Pothier and "traditionalists" who supported a living tradition of liturgical singing.

I would put Bartolucdi in the "traditionalist" camp, among those who favor the (simpler) living tradition of chant over the more elaborate, "modernist," "scientific" approach developed in the restoration at Solesmes.

I imagine that some people have trouble thinking of "Solesmes" as the "modernists" opposed to the "traditionalist," but that is the case in this debate. The terms are derived from the aproach and methods used in determining and evaluating chant (actual living chanting and listening, as opposed to more "scientific" methods based on manuscripts and philosophical systems and approaches).

3. The elaborate Gregorian Chant of Solesmes provides a contrast to the Plainchant or Plainsong tradition in much of the Church, Eastern and Western, throughout the centuries.


In conclusion, I think Bartolucci's point is that what we need to restore is the "manly," earthy, simpler chant from the heart, from the soul of regular folks raising their voices to God, rather than the often very elaborate, very challenging, very technical sort of chant scientifically reconstructed at Solesmes.

And that is an idea with which I agree!