Bernard D. Sherman, Inside Early Music. Conversations with Performers, Oxford University Press 2003

A Different Sense of Time

Marcel Péres on Plainchant


Newspaper reports on the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos have called their best-selling CD "an
album of 1,000-year-old Gregorian chant" or even "1,500-year-old chant." But both estimates make
the same mistake: they assume that the chants on the CD are unaltered relics from the Middle Ages.
If anything in music can be shown clearly, iťs that the chanting of modern monks bears only a
general resemblance to what was sung a thousand years ago. The very concept of an "original form"
of the chants is problematic.

Not that people haven't tried to find original forms. It can be argued that today's
historical-performance movement began (like written-down Western art music itself) with plainchant.
Like the CD's target audience, the nineteenth-century religious "[sought refuge] from the unwonted
strangeness of the present" in ancient church music.[1] Among them were a group of Benedictines at
Solesmes near Le Mans, whose attempt to resurrect ancient plainchant proved momentous. Like today's
early-music performers, they wanted to get back to the way it was-in this case to a body of chant
that, according to tradition, had been whispered by the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, into
the ear of Gregory I, the pope who reigned from 590 to 604. Today it appears that Gregory had
"virtually nothing to do with either liturgy or chant."[2] The misattribution had several causes;
for one thing, Gregory's sainted name lent authority to the Carolingian emperors as they replaced
their subjects' many chant traditions with their single official one. They did this not only from
political motives, however, but also because they believed their "Gregorian" chant to be the
authentic early Roman one. They too wanted to get back to the way it was.

The Solesmes research juto the so-called Gregorian repertory began in mid-century, and the monks
eventually collected an enormous amount of original material. In 1903, after decades of internecine
struggle, Pope Pius X threw his authority behind their project. Since then, the chant repertoire
and style of singing developed by Solesmes has been canonized and used in most Catholic chant,
including that of the monks of Silos.

But despite their stated goal, what the monks of Solesmes actually produced was very different from
medieval Gregorian chant. Regarding singing style, for which evidence is scant, it seems that what
they created reflects, as Joseph Kerman said, "the ideals of the Cecilian or Pre-Raphaelite
movements more closely than anything that can conceivably be imagined from the ninth century."[3]
It seems a textbook example of Taruskin's idea, discussed in the introduction, that historical
re-creations unconsciously reflect the re-creator's taste. In recent decades, many elements of the
Solesmes method, having to do with details such as ornamentation but above all with rhythm (which
Susan Hellauer will discuss), have been vigorously debated and revised. Some of the best work has
come from within the walls of Solesmes itself. An obvious question is whether a century from now it
will seem to reflect our era or an advance in historical accuracy (or, perhaps, both).

Nor were the actual chants canonized by Solesmes historically accurate. Solesmes, as we've said,
made the crucial assumption that there had been a pristine repertory of chant centered in Rome at
the time of Gregory I, and that the rest of Europe sang distorted variants of it. But David Hiley
speaks for most scholars today when he comments, "It is not at all certain that an 'original' form
of this type ever existed. ... The manuscript tradition is too variable for a single 'authentic'
reading to be deduced even from a small group of the earliest sources."[4]

Since the Second Vatican Council in 1963, Gregorian chant has become a rarity in Catholic churches.
As Mary Berry points aut, this has proved a blessing in disguise for modem performers interested in
re-investigating chant.[5] It has encouraged them to pursue other approaches to Gregorian chant
performance, and to explore the chant repertoires that were suppressed centuries ago in favor of
the Gregorian. In these explorations, no one has been more adventurous than Marcel Péres. Péres has
devoted his career to exploring such chant traditions as the Old Roman (which was sung in Rome,
except perhaps for the Vatican, until the thirteenth century), the Beneventan (sung in southem
Italy until the eleventh century), and the Mozarabic (forbidden in Spain at the end of the eleventh
century, but still sung in some places until the fifteenth). Péres has also explored Ambrosian
chant, which escaped suppression and was sung in Milan-though not necessarily in its original
form-until our own time, and various Gregorian "dialects," such as the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century plainsong repertoires of Auxerre, Paris, and the Italian Franciscans.

In approaching lost repertoires, Péres has collaborated with distinguished modem representatives of
non-Westem chant traditions, especially the Greek Byzantine and the Syriac (Syria was the first
Christian center outside Palestine). He argues that these repertories have important links with Old
Roman, Ambrosian, and Beneventan chant, and that his collaborations have solved otherwise
impossible performance problems. This approach, not surprisingly, has been controversial and has
often been criticized by scholars. But the musical results have been, it is generally agreed,
mesmerizing.

Part of the mesmerism comes, I think, from Péres's choirboy background. He never forgets that chant
was not music in the modern sense, but (since about the fourth century) the prayers of monks whose
lives revolved, all day, every day, around the church liturgy. In this sense, the monks of Santo
Domingo de Silos are authentic in a way that few non-monastic chant performers can be; as the
interview makes clear, Péres takes this very seriously. He emphasized this music's unmechanized,
unhurried sense of the unfolding of time, and the idea that the West's experience of time has
changed over the millennium. Perhaps the older sense of time, he implies, is part of what appeals
to us in this music. Just how different, we might ask, was that sense of time from ours?


Gregorian Chant


For modern listeners, plainchant is usual!y taken to mean what we now call Gregorian chant. You've
been exploring other aspects that chant has taken.

In a general sense, Gregorian chant means the chant of the Church of Rome. But in different times,
places, and ideological centers, the content of this repertoire changed. Today it means essentially
the repertoire that was printed in 1908 in what we call the Vatican edition, the official
publication of Gregorian chant by the monks of Solesmes. In this edition, they collated most of the
surviving manuscript versions of a specific chant and, using statistical methods, abstracted
something they called the "authentic" version of the Gregorian melody. But they were deriving a
specific chant from chants composed in different parts of Europe and different eras, ranging from
early Christianity through the nineteenth century.


So a specific chant in the Vatican edition might never have existed before Solesmes.

Right. If you want to reconstruct how it was in the Middle Ages, you have to consider many other
sources of information. Above all, you have to go back to the manuscripts themselves, because even
the same melodies often vary greatly from one place to another. Also, in the Middle Ages each place
had its own repertoire of polyphonic settings and tropes (poetic and musical comments on the
canonical texts); in the Gregorian revival of the nineteenth century, they didn't want to deal with
these important aspects of medieval music. Only polyphony in the style of Palestrina was held to
express the "Catholic spirit in music."


     Solesmes also canonized a specific style of singing, which we stilI hear today from most
groups of monks.

Yes. Regarding Solesmes, we have to be precise about which aspect of this community we are talking
about: the scholarly one, the liturgical one, or the aesthetic one.

First is the scholarly work they've done on collating manuscripts, which is very important; they
were the first to publish a collection of manuscripts in facsimiles. Second is the liturgical
aspect of their work, which has been focused on the idea that the Catholic Church most live in
unity, having throughout the world the same liturgical practices, the restored Roman rite being the
norm. So they wanted to get rid of the local traditions that stilI existed in the nineteenth
century.

And third is the aesthetic side, whereby they developed a style that was just the opposite of the
singing style of traditional church singers of the nineteenth century. These singers used to have a
very strong and deep bass voice, and their chant was highly ornamented, just the contrary of what
we're used to now. To Solesmes, that was an eighteenth-century tradition, and they could not
imagine that that way of singing might have any links with medieval singing. We must be precise in
noting that they were not at all interested in re-creating the medieval aesthetic; they wanted only
to reconstruct a tradition they believed to be of the time of St. Gregory in the sixth century. The
way of singing that the monks of Solesmes developed chiefly in the beginning of this century, then,
was with a very high voice with an almost uncolored timbre and no ornamentation.

Their publication was not meant as a critical edition; it was a useful, practical book. It was to
be used by an amateur parish choir, so they had to imagine a very simple method that would not
require that the singer be able to read complex music. Dealing with theoreticians of the Middle
Ages would have been too complicated. So they developed a method that most people could sing.


The Solesmes method of singing has been called "This very beautiful, very Romantic, and somehow
very French tradition of singing [that] has never ceased to dominate our notion of Gregorian
chant."[6] Could you explain why it might be considered Romantic and French?

Romantic, because the aesthetic beginning of this restoration was linked with the Romantic idea of
a mythic Middle Ages, the "age of faith" as they used to say. Musically speaking, most of the
elements of nineteenth-century musical performance are found in the Solesmes performances: the
legato phrasing, the lack of ornamentation.

As for it being French, that is simply because Solesmes is in France. But we most keep in mind that
all regions and cathedrals in France used to have their own styles, which disappeared after the
normalization that the Solesmes style created at the beginning of this century.

Indeed, I don't try to find the authentic way of performing Gregorian chant. I am much too aware of
all the different styles that coexisted throughout the centuries. For each manuscript, period, or
repertoire, I try to create a specific performance. But above all, I try to remain open-minded and
to change my interpretation if a new aspect I was not aware of comes into consideration. Each of my
records shows a different approach to chant.


Reconstructing Ancient Chant


There was a range of different chant repertories and styles in Europe before Gregorian chant.
Traces of some of them survive; and you've been the most active of anyone in resurrecting them for
performance. How do you go about that?

I think the revival of ancient music is a sort of equation. On one side are the documents. On the
other side is the performer, with his personality, voice, education, and skill in doing music and
living with it. And then you have the understanding of the source. By that I mean all that the
performer, and the scholars he refers to, have understood-not only of the music and its function,
but also of the nature of the tools they are using today to re-create the past. That last aspect is
why you most always work on the original notation, with good musicians who come from different
worlds, and why you most have relations with researchers not only in your field but also in other
subjects connected with yours.

In Ensemble Organum, we use singers who come from all parts of the musical landscape: from folk
music, liturgical music, early music, opera, and so on. Others are instrumentalists who come to me
to learn to sing. For me the important thing is to work with musicians who can add something to
what I think I've figured out. I try to be aware of my limits.


How about musicology: how do you use that?

I work from time to time with musicologists on certain specific subjects, but also with historians,
philologists, liturgists, and ethnomusicologists. Since 1984, I have managed a center for the
research and interpretation of medieval music at the Fondation Royaumont, near Paris. We work on
research programs that may last one year or many. The role of Ensemble Organum is to make known the
musical result of this research. We publish books, organize symposiums, and make instruments. We
also invite a group for residence at Royaumont each year; they may also be musicologists or
historians or instrument builders. We offer them the opportunity and the tools to study a specific
problem. In this way, we try to be in touch with most of today's leading personalities in the study
of medieval civilization.

For instance, we are engaged now in a three-year study of how aesthetics changed in relation to
changes in political power, in different cathedrals in Europe. We aim to figure aut how an
aesthetic gained coherence in coordination with all the aspects that made up the life of the
cathedral-the economy, patronage, architecture, painting, sculpture, music-that is, all the fields
that work towards the celebration of the liturgy.

In the project, we are studying four cathedrals. In three of them they had a complete change of
repertory at specific dates, while in the fourth, Sens, they were still singing from
thirteenth-century books as late as the eighteenth century. Throughout the centuries, they wanted
to keep the Carolingian traditions, because the Archbishop of Sens received his title of "Primat de
Gaule et de Germanie" from Charlemagne. This shows us one of the problems often met in the history
of music: how to appreciate the continuity of a tradition in one place while other musical events,
sometimes very different, occur elsewhere. We tend to think, for instance, that at the time when
Machaut composed his Mass everybody knew the work, and that everybody was doing music that way. In
history iťs been realized for several decades that this is nonsense, but in musicology you still
find this way of thinking. The popularizing history of music tends to be much too factual.[7] And
we lose what is, to my mind, one of the most important things we must be aware of, which is the
persistence in some places of some practices in music. When you realize that in Sens Baroque music
was coexisting with some forms of medieval music, it changes your conception of periods in music
history.

I have the same kind of question regarding the changing of notation in the thirteenth century from
neumes to square notation.[8] When they made this change, did they also change, in every place, the
way they sang? A lot of scholars think so, but I am not so sure.

Rome is another good example of an aesthetic shift, when the Old Roman chant was forsaken and
supplanted by the Gregorian at the end of the thirteenth century. One thing I have been wondering
about for years, but have not been able to come up with an answer to, is this: When Rome changed
from the Old Roman to the Gregorian chant, was there a change in their voice production and in the
style of the music itself? The liturgy changed, but I'm not able, even after ten years of singing
Old Roman chant, to define the difference in aesthetic between Old Roman and Gregorian chant,
because some Gregorian chants can be understood in a certain way, in which the notation refers to
certain ornamentation formulas very similar to Old Roman chant.


David Hiley notes that "the main difference between the Gregorian and the Old Roman chant concerns
surface detail: Old Roman is more ornate,"[9] much more ornamented. He adds, "In many places the
two versions [of a chant] are almost identical [in Gregorian and Old Roman chant] and there is
evidently a c/ose relationship between them." Scholars have argued over what this might mean.[10]
What is your opinion on how the two repertories may have interacted?

At first glance, the Old Roman chant seems to be more ornamented. But in the Gregorian neumatic
notations, a lot of the signs can be performed as ornaments or even formulas.


So the traditional Solesmes concept of Gregorian chant underestimated how ornamented its early form
was?

Yes. The paradox is that iťs easier to know how to perform the Old Roman than the Gregorian chant.
I have the impression that in most of the pieces (some are very different), we have in the
manuscript of Old Roman chant a sort of recording of what a skillful and creative singer could do
when performing what we call Gregorian chant. That is to say that in the Old Roman chant the
ornaments and cadential formulas had been written down, but we have very few examples of notated
ornaments in Gregorian chant.

The only thing we are sure of is that every important place had its own tradition. An example can
help us to understand this. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the first Cistercians from
Burgundy were sent to learn the Roman tradition from the singers of Metz. In music, as in all
aspects of monastic life, the Cistercians wanted to go back to the original traditions, and for
music this meant Rome. But the two Cistercians sent to Metz were shocked by what they heard there.
They could not believe that it was the true tradition which shows that chant singing in Burgundy
was very different.

Now, their mission to Metz had been instigated by their abbot, Étienne Harding. Harding knew the
Roman tradition because he had made a pilgrimage to Rome in his youth. Even if on paper the
Gregorian version from Metz looks different from the Old Roman chant, it is interesting to notice
that they sounded much the same, at least in the mind of Harding. So he decided, against most of
his monks, to follow the Metz model. It was only after his death that the Cistercians made their
reform of chant. The story reminds us that notation, even when we believe iťs precise, conveys only
part of the musical event. It never tells you the sound of the voices. By this I refer not only to
the voice production, but also to the value of the intervals, and especially to musical practices
that include the way of doing ornaments. Two melodies with different notes can be perceived as the
same if they are sung with the same vocal style, and two melodies written with exactly the same
notes can, if they are sung in different styles, be perceived as different.


Old Italian Chant and Non-Western Traditions


I'd like to ask you about your work in reconstructing Old ltalian chant.

I started to study the Old Roman chant in 1984. When reading this music, I realized I was missing
something. I couldn't understand the aesthetic of this repertoire. You can't catch it with a
standard modern Western approach; you need something else. Most of the scholars who described the
Old Roman chant talked about tedious, boring, unimaginative music, chiefly because it contains a
lot of apparently repetitive formulas. It uses a different logic from the Gregorian one, and some
musicologists, who didn't understand the way it works, concluded it was a decadent system.

I noticed that this repertoire preserved until the thirteenth century some pieces in Greek. To try
to understand what was going on in this music, I thought it would be interesting to work with a
Greek singer and a Greek musicologist. So I contacted Lycourgos Angelopoulos; it was really
intuition, because I had heard him in concert in Barcelona a few years before, and I had a sense
that he was living a lot of the things I was trying to understand-it was everyday to him. I asked
him if he could be interested in working with me on the Old Roman repertoire. He told me, "I know
nothing about Gregorian chant; I cannot be useful to you." I said, "Thaťs exactly why I wanted to
get in touch with you, because you don't have preconceptions. You'll come to Old Roman chant like a
virgin but with all your own background."

And it was a revelation, maybe the biggest of my life. After three or four difficult days, he was
able to get into the music; he brought a different mentality to dealing with the modes, the
rhythms, the intervals, and so on.


You argue for a strong Byzantine influence in Old ltalian chant. But David Hiley, after reviewing
the evidence, argues that the "overwhelming impression is that Roman chant developed largely
independently from Greek models, " and that "Byzantine musical influence can be seen to reduce
itself largely to a number of individual instances." (He saw more examples of Byzantine borrowings
in Milanese and Beneventan chant.)[11] How would you respond?

First of all, we must consider the words we are using to talk of the past. In your question you use
the words "Byzantium," "influence," and "ltalian." From the beginning you assume that Byzantium and
Italy had two distinct cultures and that the first influenced the second. But let us consider the
facts from the beginning. From the second century B.C., the Roman and Greek cultures not only had
relations, but very quickly the Greek model and its opening on Eastern cultures became the
reference for Rome. And when we go to the first centuries of the Christian era, iťs impossible to
locate the boundary between the Roman and Greek liturgical cultures. The Roman liturgy was
exclusively in the Greek language until the fourth century, and it retained a lot of Greek until
the ninth century. Even in a twelfth-century manuscript of Old Roman chant you find seven Alleluias
with Greek verses.[12]

In the mind of Boethius, the sixth-century Roman philosopher and theoretician of music, there is no
distinction between Roman and Greek music. For him, it's very clear that the theory of music is
Greek. This conception will stay the norm among most of the medieval theorists; even if some
authors are very far from the Greek original, they will go on using Greek terms in order to look
educated. This community of culture is obvious not only in music but in many other fields.

After the Gothic domination, Byzantium reconquered Italy in 533, and its domination, although
merely symbolic from the eighth century on, lasted until Charlemagne's coronation as Western
Emperor. During the seventh and eighth centuries, fourteen popes were Greek, most of them from
Sicily, where there was a very strong Greek community from antiquity until the thirteenth century.
AIso, the iconoclastic persecution in Byzantium in 726 sent many of the Greek religious to Italy.
Let us keep in mind also that the Emperor of Byzantium had the title of Roman Emperor.

Once this has been settled, it's possible to observe how with time the Italian and Greek churches
and chants evolved in different ways. Western, Eastern, and Greek aesthetics must not be considered
homogenous blocks. The different

styles found between and within the three Italian repertoires show us that important diversities
existed.

To come back to our subject, which is musical performance, we are in the same situation as a
linguist who tries to find the sound of medieval Latin by studying today's Romance languages. Of
course, for centuries there have been

differences between all these languages and the original Latin. But some words have not changed,
such as sol for "sun" in Spanish, stella for "star" in Italian. We could find thousand of examples
like them. In music it's the same process.

You find in the Italian repertoires-the Roman, the Milanese, and the Beneventan- some formulas or
ornaments that are still living in Byzantine, Syriac, or Coptic pieces. The process in
experimentation is not to imitate the models slavishly but to use their information to figure out
the dynamism of these dead musics. The common roots of Eastern and Western chant should be studied,
but not in order to prove anything.


One repertoire you've recorded did survive in a living form until our time: the Milanese
"Ambrosian" chant. But in your CD notes you point out that it was much influenced over the
centuries by Gregorian chant, and that origina/ly

it had been sung, according to Ambrose, "in the manner of the East." You worked on that, too, with
Eastern collaborators.

Yes, there we went further in our experiments. The Milanese liturgy had roots in the Antiochan
[Syrian Christian] liturgy, and at different times in its early history Milan had been in relation
with Syria and even had Syriac bishops. We tried, as a working hypothesis, to distinguish traces of
Syriac chant in the Milanese repertoire. I worked not only with the same Greek singer, but also
with experts in Syriac chant, with the Lebanese singer/musicologist, Sister Marie Keyrouz, and with
the Lebanese musicologist Elie Kesruani. They opened another field that I had not imagined at all,
because Marie Keyrouz had another approach to music, to modality, and to the value of intervals.
From the beginning, she told me something very important: "This music [Milanese chant] is a music
of intervals." That means you really have to be aware of the value of each interval, because it's
what creates the mode; the ornamentation is there to throw the intervals into relief. This was
something quite new to me. Western musicians, when singing monady, are too little aware of the
quality of intervals-but that is what produces the real character or mood of the mode.


Could you give an example?

In the offertory of the Milanese Christmas mass, Ecce apertum est, there's

a mode that alternates Bb, low B’, and high B’. When this formula reaches its highest point on a
low B’, the A is sharpened. When the formula reaches its top on the C, the B’ is high. So you can
imagine the complexity of the music. In each formula, you must always discern which note exercises
a power of attraction that redefines the value of the intervals of the scale.


And regarding the role of ornamentation she mentioned?

Marie Keyrouz is very sophisticated in the art of ornamentation. This is something we have lost in
the West. Even in Baroque music, most singers don't have enough imagination to go very far in
ornamentation. Some jazz players do it, and some Baroque players,like Jordi Savall, have a freedom
in ornamentation and a quality of nuance that you don't find in many singers. Singers like Marie
Keyrouz have this knowledge. I think what will be really important in early music in the next few
years will be the progress of singers in the art of ornamentation. In old traditions that's what
made the quality of a musician: someone was a distinguished musician because he had his own way of
ornamenting.


Ornamentation has been one of the hallmarks of your work, but in some repertory it has been
controversial; for example, some argued that there was no evidence for what you did in your
reconstruction of the Gradual of Eleanor of Brittany. How would you respond to such critics?

That they should improve their knowledge of the thirteenth century. In fact, it's from that century
that we have the first precise description of ornamentation, with the treatise of Jerome of
Moravia, a Dominican friar. I have managed to do two books on him.[13] As I said, ornamentation is
the big lacuna in the early-music revival. Now it's accepted for seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century music, but not yet for Renaissance and medieval music. I feel like saying to
those who believe people started to add ornaments on New Year's Eve of 1600: Wake up!


One other interesting area you've explored is the use of microtones-tones that fall between the
usual twelve pitches used in the modern Western scale. You say microtones were used in early chant
traditions?

There are two approaches to this problem: the manuscripts, and the oral traditions that stilI
exist. From the written documents, we know that microtones were known, because a lot of
theoreticians talked about them, and we have at least three manuscripts that refer more or less
explicitly to some microtone practices. To my knowledge, the first mention of microtones in Western
writings, after Boethtius, are in Remigius of Auxerre (d. c. 900), a Frankish theorist. In one of
his texts he uses a Greek musical vocabulary, meaning that at this time the Greek vocabulary was in
use among educated musicians. He uses this vocabulary to talk about quarter tones and thirds of
tones: so such intervals were known, though we don't know how they occurred in the music. After
that, the next book to give us this information more precisely is the Montpellier Treatise [copied
c. 1100]. In this manuscript you have a dual notation: one form uses neumes, and one uses letters
of the alphabet from A to P to cover a two-octave range. In this notation you have two ways of
signifying the quarter tone. The two other manuscripts I referred to-a twelfthcentury antiphonary
from Utrecht and another one from Cluny-have the same kind of chromaticism, often at the same
places. But as they are just neumatic manuscripts, they use different neumes' shapes to express
these variations.

Now, all this is useful information, but the problem is how to deal with it. For some examples we
were able to find some correspondence with Byzantine or Arabic theory, but for some examples we
were not. The latter cases may have involved things that had disappeared in Byzantine tradition, or
that occurred in Latin music only.


Another practice you've taken from Greek tradition in singing Old Roman chant is the use of ison
singing-the use of a vocal drone pedal point-which is first documented in Byzantine chant in the
fifteenth century, but of course may be older. Many critics find it hypnotic, but nonetheless it is
contraversial; how would you respond to critics?

There is some evidence that this practice might come not from the Greek but from the Latin. As you
said, the use of the ison seems to be known in the Byzantine tradition around the fifteenth
century, but not in other Eastern churches. The first clear description I know of this technique,
though, comes from a Western source, the Micrologus by Guido d' Arezzo in the eleventh century. For
him it was a sort of organum.[14] He teaches us that this practice was common in Rome. We know from
the Ordines Romani that by the seventh and eighth centuries there were traditions of organum
singing in the pontifical

chapel.[15] Later the anonymous author of the Summa Musice,[16] a treatise written around 1200,
describes the sort of organum that consists of a drone. He calls this manner diaphona basilica:
that's very interesting, because the term basilica in liturgical matters often refers to the Roman
tradition. So in the thirteenth century there was stilI in the vocabulary of singers a word that
seems to referred to the Roman Basilican tradition and that means a vocal drone. It is very
possible that the Greeks borrowed this practice from the Italian singers. We find in some
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Greek sources, written in Byzantine notations, some instances of
polyphony in this style with parallel fifths and contrary motion. In one manuscript a rubric says,
"This is done in the Italian way." We know that from the thirteenth century the Italians, chiefly
the Venetians, had a very strong influence in some regions like Crete and in Byzantium itself,
where there existed a strong Latin government for almost seventy years. So there is a strong basis
for this scenario.[17]

But, you know, above all it is important when you make a theory to experiment and see how it works.
In this matter, the big question is, Why do we have so few recorded instances of drone singing? Was
it so common that it was not necessary to taIk about it? or maybe some people did not consider it a
form of polyphony at all, as is the case today in Greece, so that maybe it was assimilated into
monody. Or maybe it existed in only a few places. But musically speaking it works, and that helps
us to better hear the modal structure of a piece.


Time and the Nature of Plainchant


Katherine Bergeron writes: "It may be well to ask from the start whether chant can properly be
considered 'music' at all. . . . [It had] an eminently practical purpose: to make ritual words
audible, memorable, and powerful . . . in this

sense a particular chant is hardly different from a spell or incantation, a set of specially
pronounced words designed to bring about a certain magical result[18].Could you comment on this,
and on how that affected both the way chant was composed and sung in earlier centuries and the way
you perform it?

The answer is very simple. To really restore these musics, and clarify their vocal aesthetics, iťs
berter to reconstruct the liturgies they belonged to and to believe in what you are doing.

This is what I found, for example, when I started working with Lycourgos Angelopoulos. He has
another way of approaching time. This is because he is a real church singer. He is used, for
instance, to singing for liturgies that go all through the night. So he really has experience of
the pace of the liturgy, and thaťs very important. The biggest criticism I would make of many
reconstructions of medieval music is that, listening to them, I don't feel the atmosphere of the
ancient liturgies. I think you must be able to visualize all the stages and the movements of the
liturgy whose music you are singing. To know the Eastern liturgies can help us, since today the
Catholic traditions are almost dead. I had a traditional Catholic education; and fortunately I work
with Syriac and Byzantine church musicians.


For your concerts, you dress liturgically.

Only for our liturgical dramas. It is really necessary to play dramas because iťs the best way to
get into the spatial and temporal dimensions of these musics, as iťs very rare to have the
opportunity to perform them in true liturgies. Ii is also fundamental to get used to working with
candlelight. That was a constituent part of the liturgy. With candles, you have lights around you,
but large parts of the room are darkened. Today, due to electric light, people have lost the habit
of living with the night. When people have lost the habit of living with the night, the night
doesn't exist. To live surrounded by the night gives you another way of understanding the
mentalities of the past. The candle is a living light as fragile and powerful as human life. It
always reminds you that light is not to be taken for granted; you have to be conscious of it.

Contemporary Catholic clergy have lost the sense of light and sound. Even in Europe, where we have
old churches planned according to the position of the sun, they use electric lights during the day.
For today's Christians thaťs a secondary, even nonexistent matter, but in the tradition of the
Church of all centuries it was a crucial point. Iťs a disaster that the Roman Church abandoned the
liturgy in Latin, because all the people who were able to transmit the tradition are now very old,
so we'll have a break in the transmission. But I think Latin could come back to the liturgy because
young people have an attraction to plainchant ...


As the monks of Silos found out ...

Yes, and iťs significant that the age range of the customers in Europe was 18-25, because these
people did not grow up with the Latin liturgy and plainchant. That suggests that the Church made a
mistake.


The earliest notation of plainchant had to do with the melodie gestures' motion, rather than with
the exact pitches or rhythms:[19] the time wasn't notated exactly. That was because of the oral
nature of the tradition; but does it fit in with your view of liturgical time?

Yes, and thaťs why we're a little bit lost with these notations. Now we are used to a mathematical
division of time, but we must remember that this has been true only since the end of the thirteenth
century. Before that, people had no way to write these things down.


Is this why you've been opposed to singing Notre-Dame organum with strict proportional rhythm?[20]

Yes! In the polyphony of the twelfth century, we know from the notation that this note is longer
and that shorter, but not exactly how much longer one note is than another. We can get a sense of
what this might mean from music we still have that reflects a mentality that treats time
differently than we do in the West today. For example, in Corsican polyphonic singing they don't
have a tempo with a beat, they just have the time of the chords, and when the energy of the chord
starts to diffuse it changes. Time becomes a succession of focuses of energy each with a period in
itself, and almost every chord has its own period. When you feel the end of the period of this
chord you move; iťs not something you can divide arithmetically, saying this chord is two times
longer or three times longer than the last one.

So it seems that there are two ways of perceiving time-qualitative and quantitative. The
quantitative manner began to be created during the end of the thirteenth century and developed in
the later centuries. But the older way of thinking about music co-existed as well. It's funny,
because the trend in all the spheres of social life and science of this time is to rationalize
things. For example, the first mechanical clock was invented at the end of the thirteenth
century.[21]

We did a symposium on this four years ago,[22] in which we tried to figure out how in a place like
Paris many thinkers in different fields intended to give a description of time and to find a tool
to describe it. In that century many different authors proposed a system, but the systems don't all
fit together. The most exciting of the treatises was that of Jerome of Moravia, who wanted to put
in a book all the musical knowledge of his time. Writing of polyphony, he says, "Many different
authors have their own way of describing the rhythm, and I think the best thing to do is to present
all these treatises and let the reader make up his own mind." At this time, around 1265, they knew
they were on the verge of reaching something, but it was only in the fourteenth century that a
notational system would be standardized.[23]

Even when this notational system was standardized after the fourteenth or fifteenth century, the
old mentality continued to exist. Although the mechanical clock was invented at the end of the
thirteenth century, it doesn't mean that a few years later there was a clock in every home. In the
country today, farmers stilI have to live with the seasons; for them, in the winter and summer 8
o'clock doesn't mean the same thing.[24]

Music is a tool that can help us to better understand history, how human beings used to be, used to
live. It also can help us to increase our sensibility, our aesthetic sense. When we learn the
ancient arts, we start to develop our sensibilities to be able to perceive more things in the
reality of our human relationships and ways of living. Quality of life is one of the most important
things we can learn from people of the past, because one thing we have to learn from the past until
the nineteenth century is that people had a different quality of life-one that, at most social
strata, had certain cultural advantages that we have lost, in spite of all the technical progress .
. .


. . . sometimes because of it . . .

. . . yes, but we make poorer the quality of everyday life. For instance, in churches, even in
Europe, they use microphones for the liturgy. That means we have lost a quality of hearing and of
voice production. The same thing for lighting; I talked before about candles. If you light the
church with candles, the mood you create-the quality of the space and time-is really something
different and is worth the experiment. There is no reason to lose these things.


SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

Marcel Péres has made a number of recordings for Harmonia Mundi, and even readers with little
interest in plainchant might find them fascinating. The best starting points may be the discs that
include non-Western singing, especially the one featuring Beneventan chant (HMC 901476) and the
second of those featuring Old Roman chant (HMC 901382). Both feature Lycourgos Angelopoulos, with
his extraordinary microtonal ornamentation and un-Western voice production; the results in both
cases are hypnotic-a word many enthusiastic critics have applied to it. The same adjective is often
applied to his recordings of other repertory discussed above-e.g., the Milanese chant CD (HMC
901295), which includes Marie Keyrouz.

It would be misleading to imply that the reviews have been unanimous in praising Péres's chant CDs.
One persistent critic has been Jerome F. Weber, who thinks that many of the performance practices
used have no scholarly basis; he often objects, for example, to the use of drones and of "Eastern"
ornamentation. Reviewing a recent Péres CD of Mozarabic chant, Weber says that it sounds "less like
any other recording of Mozarabic chant (few as they may be) and more like [Péres's] own recordings
of Gregorian, Cistercian, Old Roman, Ambrosian, and Beneventan, and Neo-Gallican chants." (He says
this same criticism applies to another wide-ranging director of plainchant, László Dobszay.)[25]
Weber is, however, enthusiastic about Péres's recording of the Mass of Tournai (HMC 901 353), which
he thinks is clearly the best realization of that manuscript.[26]

From the chant recordings, one might turn to Péres's recordings of later repertoire. These bring up
a theme that recurs often in the other medieval and Renaissance interviews in this book, and even
in some of the Baroque ones - English versus Continental singing styles. Fabrice Fitch describes
the difference well in his review of Péres's Ockeghem Requiem (HMC 901441): "The tenors' emphasis
on chest-tone clearly differentiates them from their English counterparts. It is as though English
ensembles match their lower voices to the high partials of the choirboy and the countertenor,
whereas ensembles like Organum start from the basses' rich, deep low Cs and build upwards."[27]
Despite reservations regarding a few pitch standard s and tempos, Fitch is enthusiastic about this
recording. Péres interpolates plainchant, treating the Requiem as the Mass for the dead it was
meant to be, and while Fitch usually experiences' such interpolations "as so many distractions from
the polyphony," here he finds them "literally awe-inspiring." He also calls Péres's recording of
Josquin's Missa Pange Lingua (HMC 910239) "superb."


FOR FURTHER READING


Plainchant has inspired an extremely active and wide-ranging body of research over the last
generation. To do justice to it all in one book would clearly be impossible; David Hiley has done
the impossible in his Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford University Press, 1993). This magnum
opus is indispensable for anyone interested in chant.

I don't know of a better introduction to chant than James McKinnon's chapter, "The Emergence of
Gregorian Chant in the Carolingian Era," and Hiley's "Plainchant Transfigured," both in McKinnon's
Antiquity and the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, and Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1991),
the single best introduction to medieval music. For those wanting more musical detail than McKinnon
aims to provide, David Fenwick Wilson's Music of the Middle Ages (New York: Schirmer, 1990) is
excellent. All these books also discuss non-Gregorian chant; those seeking a more advanced
discussion might try the New Oxford History of Music, II, rev. ed., ed. Richard Crocker and David
Hiley (Oxford University Press, 1990), Part II.

Katherine Bergeron's essay on the nature of plainchant in Companion to Medieval and Renaissance
Music, ed. Tess Knighton and David Fallows (London, Orion, and New York, Schirmer, 1992), quoted
above, is a high point in a very stimulating book. Her essay on Péres and the Silos monks, "The
Virtual Sacred" (The New Republic, 27 February 1995, pp. 29-34), has been controversial partly, I
think, because it has been misread: her real subject is not early music, but what the chant
phenomenon says about spiritual life in the 1990s.

David Landes's Revolution in Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1983) is a first-rate history of the
clock and its impact on Western civilization. Paul Fraisse's "Rhythm and Tempo" in Diana Deutsch's
The Psychology of Music (New York: Academic Press, 1982) summarizes a wealth of research on time
perception in music.
________________________________

[1] Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989), p. 181.

[2] See James McKinnon's "The Emergence of Gregorian Chant," in his Antiquity and the Middle Ages
(London: Macmillan, 1990, and Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1991). This quote comes from
earlier in his book, p. 19; the following discussion of the misattribution simplifies his
explanation, which is given on pp. 115-17.

[3] Kerman, "A Few Canonic Variations," reprinted in his Write All This Down (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994), p. 47.

[4] David Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 628. McKinnon
seems to disagree; see his "The Emergence of Gregorian Chant," pp. 111-17, where he speculates
about the possibility of a stable care repertory dating from the time of Gregory the Second (pope
from 715 to 731).

[5] Mary Berry, "The Restoration of the Chant and Seventy-five Years of Recording," Early Music 7
(1979), pp. 197-217.

[6] Katherine Bergeron, "Chant, or the Polities of lnseription," in Companion to Medieval and
Renaissance Music, ed. Tess Knighton and David Fallows (London: Orion, and New York: Sehirmer,
1992), pp. 101-3. Mary Berry, "The Restoration of the Chant," describes Solesmes chanťs "smooth
expressive legato with its undoubted 'spiritual' quality . . . lilted accents, and the softening of
the melodie peaks which gives the style its extraordinary elasticity."

[7] On this point, see Reinhard Strohm, "Centre and Periphery," in Companion to Medieval and
Renaissance Music, pp. 55-59, or in his The Rise of European Music (Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 62-105. Machauťs Messe de Nostre Dame, from c. 1360, is the earliest surviving cyclic
setting of the Ordinary of the Mass to show "conception as a unit." As Philip T. Jackson writes,
"In Dne of the ironies of music history, there is no evidence that Machauťs unparalleled work had
any direct influence on future developments" (Companion, 120).

[8] From the ninth century to the twelfth, the term "neume" referred not to a form of notation,
blit to "a sounding melody, or phrase, in particular One which has no words" (Hiley, Western
Plainchant, p. 345). Nevertheless, today the term has gained currency as a label for the kind of
notation used from the ninth century to the thirteenth. Neumes did not record either pitch or
rhythm precisely; their function was to indicate a melody's direction and contour, as well as
certain nuances of performance. This partly reflected the orality of the tradition-the notation
aided people who had already learned the repertory-and also the concept of the music, where
"melodie identity meant identity of contour, not a literal identity of notes" (D. Fenwick Wilson,
Music af the Middle Ages [New York: Schirmer, 1990], p. 25). This is true of main modal traditions
elsewhere in the world.

Square notation, developed in the second half of the thirteenth century, used a four-line staH
indicating the height of each pitch with square fiate heads (originally developed by Guido of
Arezzo in the eleventh century); the notation gave some rhythmic indications as well.

[9] Hiley, Western Plainchant, p. 532.

[10] Scholars have contended that this could mean that the Roman style, in the two centuries before
it was finally written down, grew more elaborate compared to the forms in use

when Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, had the pope send Romans to teach their form of

chant to the Franks (thus creating Gregorian chant); or that the Franks didn't understand elaborate
music, so they simplified what they learned from Rome. There is also evidence that the Gregorian
chant had influenced the Old Roman by the time the latter was written down. See Hiley, pp. 561-62,
for a summary of scholarly arguments. Péres argues for another interpretation.

[11] Hiley, Western Plainchant, p. 527. Leo Treitler rejects the connection of Old Roman and
Byzantine chant too, in chat the oldest records of Byzantine chant were written down in the twelfth
century and bear no resemblance to Old Roman chant. As for modem Byzantine chant, he says it
originated in 1300, when the Old Roman chant repertory was no longer sung, and he adds chat it has
since been influenced by centuries of Turkish occupation. See "Remembering 'Early Music,'" in
Thesis 8 (Fall 1994), pp. 32-33.

[12] See Hiley, p. 538.

[13] Jéróme de Moravie, un théoriticien de la musique dans La milieu intellectuel parisien du XIIe
siecle (Paris: Créaphis, 1992); and Jéróme de Moravie, Traité sur la musique, ed. Christian Meyer,
trans. Esther Lachapelle, Guy Lobrichon and Marcel Péres (Paris: Créaphis, 1996).

[14] "Organum" meant several things, bul in this context it meant, in general, singing two ar more
related lines, as opposed to just the single line of plainchant. See Sarah Fuller, "Early
Polyphony," in New Oxford History of Music, II, rev. ed., ed. R. Crocker and D. Hiley (Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 484 et passim.

Guido describes several organum practices, and he notes lhal practices varied fmm Dne 10cale to
another. His text has been published in English translation in Warren Babb's Hucbald, Guido, and
John on Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). The section suggesting what we call ison
singing is on p. 80 (section 211).

[15] The Ordines Romani were "Frankish reports of Roman practice." See Richard Crocker, "Liturgical
Materials of Roman Chant," in New Oxford History of Music, II, rev. ed., p. 139.

[16] Summa Musice, ed. and trans. Christopher Page (Cambridge University Press, 1991). The
description of diaphona basilica is on p. 124.

[17] Péres recommends Michael Adamis, "Some Instances in the Byzantine Manuscripts Indicating a
Relation to the Music of the West," in Polyphonies de tradition orale: Histoire et traditions
vivantes, ed. Michel Huglo and Marcel Péres (Paris: Créaphis, 1993). On the other hand, Dimitri
Conomos's "Experimental Polyphony in Late Byzantine Psalmody," in Early Music History 2 (Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp. 1-16, suggests lhal ison was introduced juto Greek singing several
decades after any Italian influence-which was in any case quite "isolated"-had run its course.

[18] „Chant, or the Politics of Inscription," in Knighton and Fallows, Companion, p. 101.

[19] See above, fiate 8.

[20] Organum at Notre Dame in the thirteenth century seems to have been sung using what

are called "rhythmic modes," codified around 1240, whereby notes had specific durations relative to
each other. There were six rhythmic modes, all in triple meter; they were developed for singing
polyphony, blit their interpretation is not entirely clear. (Their application to monophony is much
more troublesome stili.) Hendrik van der Werf writes that a belief in the omnipresence of modal
rhythm in Notre Dame polyphony "is now waning." He specifically notes that in polyphonic passages
in "sustained pitch" style-as opposed to "pitch against pitch" style-the fiate lengths were
probably not modal; his interpretation is congruent with Péres's (van der Werf, "Early Western
Polyphony," in Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, p. 112).

[21] See David Landes, Revolution in Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1983), p. 53, though he
considers references to clocks from before the fourteenth century a little uncertain.

[22] Proceedings published in La rationalisation du temps au XIIe siecle (Paris: Créaphis, 1995).

[23] Christopher Page's essay "Ars Nova and Algorism" in his Discarding Images (Oxford University
Press, 1993), pp. 112-39, relates the tise of measured music to scientific trends of the era,
especially the wider adoption of Arabic numerals-but not to the clock. Page also discusses the
issue of time and notation in his interview, and arrives at conclusions opposite to those of Péres
regarding medieval polyphony.

[24] I am not convinced that clocks had much impact on the development of quantitative rhythm; see
the Postscript to the Christopher Page interview, where I mention my reasons briefly. This is not
to say that I think Péres is necessarily wrong about rhythm in Pérotin or in Corsican chant; blit
that the explanation for the change to more quantitative rhythms in music might lie elsewhere.

[25] Weber, Fanfare 19 (November/December 1995), p. 453. 26. Personal communication, 1996.

[26] Personnal communication, 1996.

[27] Early Music 22 (February 1994), p. 155.