Chant Watching

I've heard wonderful and charming stories from Australia about the burgeoning chant movement there, how it is responding to the various chant masters who have visited in the past, who are there now, and who visited in the days of World Youth Day. Of course I ask about interpretation and approach, because this subject is very interesting. As one example, some people who had heard that the caricatured view that the Solesmes approach puts emphasis on music at the expense of text were stunned to find that visiting master Scott Turkington centered so much of his teaching on the text. For those who had expected otherwise, this was intriguing. This little anecdote prompts the following reflection.

One of the many, many glories of Gregorian chant is its hypersensitivity to interpretation. No one will ever know for sure how it was sung in the 8th century, and it is only thanks to recording technology that we know for sure how it was sung in the early 20th century. Nothing about interpretation is finally settled. Then there are the different editions of music: Vatican, Solesmes, St. Gall, Cistercian, Dominican, modern notes. Indeed, the tradition of singing chant extends for so long throughout so many countries and according to so many different groups and chant masters, there a limitless line of models one can follow. It is probably true that no single chant has been sung the same way twice.

We notice this even in our own choirs. The chant sounds different on Sunday than it did at rehearsal three nights before. The schola up the road uses a different approach, breathing in different places, speeding up here and slowing down there, emphasizing this line as versus that line, bringing out this part of the text instead of that, and so on. Also, as you rehearse and become more familiar with a chant, it changes shape. We find ourselves singing passages we love with more affection. Sometimes we get too carried away, infusing chant with too much of our own expressions and decide to pull back and let the music speak for itself.

There is also the question of what we are seeking to do with out interpretation of chant. Do we really aspire to sing it as it was sung in the 8th or 8th century, presuming that is even possible? Perhaps. But what if that turns out not to be what our ears consider to be beautiful? This happens sometimes with "authentic" performances: we are intrigued but not edified. Also, that approach might be criticized as a form of antiquarianism that eschews development. Even the term restoration doesn't quite resolve all issues, since you can restore to an original state or restore to an ideal state.

Given the endless numbers of issues here, it shouldn't surprise us that chant singers love few things more than listening to other people sing chant. We offer praise and sometimes criticize. I felt this during the Australian papal Masses. We listen to the introit and communion with our Graduals nearby, and we puzzling why the singers took this episemas but not that one, why the move through this phrase but not this one, why the director gave the instructions he did, and how this or that Latin phrase was pronounced. We find things to praise and of course to criticize.

Sometimes there are arguments and disputes. Some of these appears on forums and blogs, with people firing off one liners using language that no outsider could possibly understand (ictus, semiology, salicus, repercussion) and invoking names that are known mainly within the world of chant (Mocquereau, Gajard, Ward, Cardine, Berry). Sometimes these disputes are white hot and come across as wildly exaggerated.

People who look at the world of chant from the outside might interpret all of this as pointless wrangling. After all, look where we are today. In our local parishes, there are no propers. The ordinary setting is lacking in every way. Otherwise, there are hymns of varying sorts. Chant makes no appearance week to week. We are supremely fortunate if we hear something approximating Pange Linqua on Holy Thursday, or sing the simplest Sanctus and Agnus during Lent. Given this situation, can we really afford to have all these disputes, to be so critical of others, to have such splits and arguments, at the very time when there is so much to do just to put chant back in the ears of Catholics again?

I hate to invoke what might appear to be a cliché here but I really have come to see these disagreements as signs of health and vigor. There will never be a settled and fixed method or manner of singing this music. Yes, there are bedrock principles but many ways in which these can be applied, such that the results will always vary.

To return to a theme I've mentioned earlier, similar discussions and disputes lasted for many decades during the period in which the Jewish people were struggling to regain their language identity in vernacular Hebrew. The scholars fought with each other, sometimes bitterly. There were several traditions of Hebrew, and splits within each of those. Finally a full dictionary was written, and nearly all the scholars in this area exhibited fury and had fainting spells over it, even if the people at the grass roots loved it (think of the Liber Usualis here).

In the end, what happened in the case of Hebrew? The dictionary served as a guide, a reference, but not as a blueprint. As a vernacular, probably a quarter of the words in the dictionary never made it to common use. Many more words were invented by the language-users themselves, much to the disapproval of the language scholars. The language took its own shape in use. It was a marvelous and even amazing victory of an implausible movement rife with hopeless factionalism.

So can we expect factions in the chant movement? Most certainly. And why? Because the stakes are high, because scholars are involved and have their own ideas, because human beings are always and everywhere struggling to find the perfect thing are we are uncertain what it is and how to go about it. This should not deter us. On the contrary, it should energize us and make us realize that there really is hope for real success here. In the end, we can expect as much variety in parish practice as has existed throughout all Christian history.

The chant is example of that "pearl of great price" spoken about in scripture, and which is sung about in this song, which has been sung the following way. It's not the way I would do it, but it is still marvelous to hear.