AST WEEK I had the distinct pleasure of being on the faculty of the CMAA’s annual colloquium. It was my first time attending this event. There is so much good work going on there toward the promotion of chant and polyphony in the context of the sacred liturgy, and the week was packed with beautiful liturgical celebrations and insightful talks. For my own part, my purpose was to offer four lecture sessions on different approaches to Gregorian rhythm—a topic that regular readers here are well acquainted with. In the past, I have discussed a sort of pluralism, i.e., learning various different approaches in order to understand better the questions that arise when thinking about the rhythm of Gregorian chant. Similarly, at the colloquium, I did my best to argue convincingly for each of four different ways of thinking about Gregorian rhythm, all of which we have featured on the blog before: accentualism (Old Solesmes, Pothier), Solesmes (Classic Solesmes, Mocquereau), semiology (New Solesmes, Cardine), and mensuralism (proportionalism, Vollaerts). The advantage of pluralism is that through it we come to understand the various priorities and points of emphasis that have shaped several different schools of thought, each of which arise from asking different legitimate musical questions. The more we understand these different approaches, the more we can deepen our understanding for us as performers and students of chant. Someday, I would like to turn my research on these various methods into a book, if only my teaching schedule would allow.
What is accentualism? • Probably the most unfamiliar approach on offer in my course was that of accentualism. One of the participants told me it wasn’t clear what this topic (accentualism) even meant, which almost dissuaded her from attending. Clearly I should do a better job naming my classes; perhaps “One simple trick to eliminate unsightly rhythmic irregularities in your singing” would have been better. So what is accentualism anyway? Briefly, accentualism is a system of free, rhetorical rhythm developed for Gregorian chant based on the ideas of Dom Guéranger and developed most fully by Dom Pothier. Here at Corpus Christi Watershed, of course, Jeff has made it a particular mission to promote the work of Dom Pothier. In the context of this blog, this has often taken the form of a via negativa, especially a contrast with the work of Dom Mocquereau. As a result, our coverage has focused on the notation of the melismatic mora vocis (MMV), the avoidance of the horizontal episema, and differing approaches to singing syllabic cadences at phrase endings (what Jeff the ever-alliterative has called trochee trouble).
There is much to learn on all these points, and I encourage you to peruse Jeff’s many posts on the subject, since he does a good job contrasting the accentualist style with Mocquereau’s more widely known theory. But there is also much more to say about accentualism itself than can be learned from this exclusively apophatic approach. Today, I will take a more direct tack, as I have done previously with a translated excerpt of Pothier’s 1880 book. First, I will present a practical and very specific lesson. Further down, I will summarize some general points that you can use in your own schola.
A Practical Lesson From Dom David • There is an interesting book from 1919 (Méthode pratique de chant grégorien) in which Dom David (the secretary of Dom Pothier and a chief promoter of his method of performance) describes the accentualist approach in some detail. You can find the book, in French, here. In preparation for my colloquium class, I translated a chapter of the book that gives a practical lesson in applying the method—one of two such lessons in the book. The other is on the Kyrie of Mass VIII and deals with how to organize the rhythm of a melisma by neume and pitch contour; perhaps I can present that lesson some other time. For now, take a look at how David approaches an Agnus Dei melody in the neumatic (less melismatic) style:
David details a three-part process that you could apply to any Gregorian melody. First, you consider the proper pronunciation and accentuation of the text, making an attempt to sing using pure Roman vowels and clearly articulated consonants (including double consonants). This should involve actual recitational chanting with your choir, looking for uniformity in pronunciation and accent. Next, you consider how the character of the text and its place in the liturgy affect considerations of tempo and dynamics. Last, the melody is analyzed so that each neume is given its proper accent, which is then arranged hierarchically (in both dynamics and time) according to the text accent and grammatical structure.
This approach involves much freedom, and it leaves the singer responsible for many artistic decisions. It is easy to imagine different readers arriving at rather different performances based on reading this same chapter. After having spent some time with these instructions, I made a quick recording with an iPhone in my hotel room here in Rome, where I’m visiting this week:
Two Principles • Let’s get down to the actual principles at work. How can we summarize accentualist chanting? Any approach to Gregorian rhythm has to have some kind of basis on which to organize the notes of the melody in relation to each other. For accentualists, the rhythm arises from the pronunciation and accentuation of Latin. There are two elements that are foundational; these can be learned very quickly and can shape a remarkably sophisticated musical performance: accent and distinction. The rhythm of the chant relies on these two.
The First Principle: Accent • First, a Latin word is pronounced with a tonic accent. That is, in speaking, one gives a higher pitch to the accented syllable of the word, while also pronouncing this accented syllable with a dynamic emphasis. (Note that the accentualists’ dynamic emphasis is in contrast to Dom Mocquereau’s theory, which favors a light tonic accent.) The accented syllable is not long in itself, but should also have a bit of what Dom David calls “elasticity” in time. This suggests a certain tiny amount of stretching on the accented syllable.
When you sing a Latin word, the accented syllable should govern all the other notes of the melody for that word. The word is pronounced with a single impulse or attack of the voice. In a syllabic chant, this means both emphasizing the accented syllable (dynamic stress and elasticity in time) and deemphasizing the final syllable that follows. In a more elaborate chant (such as most chants of the Mass propers and ordinary), you will emphasize the first note of the highest neume within the accented syllable. In David’s terminology, this note governs all the other notes of the word. The word itself should have a quality of unity, represented by idea of a single vocal impulse, culminating in the accented note and carrying through to the end of the word.
When you have more than one note per syllable, since the organizing principle is the rhythm of a Latin word, the neumes found on a single syllable are also considered to be like words. For instance, a two-note neume (clivis or podatus) can be like a two-syllable word, with an elastic dynamic accent on the first note, followed in a single impulse by a softer note. A three-note neume (torculus, porrectus, scandicus, or climacus) will have an elastic dynamic accent on the first note, followed in a single impulse by two softer notes. In singing these neumes, you might first sing the notes as words with a syllable on each note and the accent markedly observed (e.g., Deus for two-note neumes and Dominus for three-note neumes). Then you can go back and sing the neumes in a single syllable but maintaining the rhythm and accentuation of the syllabic version. This allows the proper performance of both neumes and melismas to arise from speech rhythm in a particular way. Much of Pothier’s thinking on this subject is based on the famous fifteenth chapter of Guido (two contrasting views here and here).
The Second Principle: Distinction • Once you’ve arranged the neumes in terms of their dynamic accent, it remains to create larger groups. This is partly accomplished by subordinating one accent to another in terms of dynamic level. To take an example from Dom David, in the words “Agnus Dei” the second accent should be louder than the first in recitation, which helps to group these words together. But the hierarchy of a chant melody is greatly reinforced by applying the second principle—distinction. A Latin sentence is given meaning by separating the parts from each other with a little bit of time. Think of the beginning of the prayer “Pater noster, qui es in coelis: sanctificetur nomen tuum.” Here, each word gets its accent, but also one applies a tiny bit of distinction between each word so that the syllables don’t run together. One adds more time at the comma and even more at the colon.
In music, these distinctions are accomplished by stretching out the last note of each word. “Length on the last note” is the clearest and most correct translation of Guido’s “mora ultimae vocis.” (As an aside, “vox” in medieval music treatises usually refer to pitches as they sound, which we might call tones. “Nota” only refers to the signs on the page. So it’s not the human voice that is being lengthened but the last tone (“vox”) of the word!) You add a little time to the end of each word’s melody to separate the words from each other. You add more time between grammatical units in hierarchical fashion, adding the most time between clauses and sentences. In Pothier’s view, the amount of time should not be calculable or countable but rather rhetorical or oratorical. The barlines of the Vatican edition partially do this hierarchical job for you, but one can go further, synthesizing the barlines into a complete rhetorical-rhythmic framework.
The idea of the mora vocis also extends to melismas. It is in this sense that we can take the instructions of the preface to the Vatican edition (explained in many posts by Jeff) about how to add time between groups of neumes. A long melisma can be organized like a Latin sentence, with the individual neumes forming the words, each marked by an initial accent, and grouped into a hierarchical arrangement by the selective use of additional time at the end of the neume to separate groups. The white space shown between groups in the Vatican Edition can help with the formation of this hierarchy.
Bringing Accentualism to your Schola • In my little recording, I did my best to follow Dom David’s instructions, while also trying to pay attention both to a smooth and prayerful vocal production and to my own musical sense. This way of working on chant is both musically and intellectually satisfying. While there is obviously extra freedom involved in singing such a chant alone, I do not think it would be difficult to incorporate this style of performance into a group, especially after teaching the group about the principles of accentuation and time described above. If you are looking for alternatives to either the method of Dom Mocquereau or more recent styles based on the rhythmic signs in the early manuscripts (semiology or mensuralism), this style of Pothier’s may be a fruitful avenue to consider. In this view, you don’t need to think about ictus, rhythmic signs, or long and short notes. Instead, you take the rhetorical principles of accent and distinction as your starting place.
Why Bother, if we aren’t Accentualists? • This goes back to the initial idea of my lecture at the colloquium, which I entitled “Accentualism for Non-Accentualists.” Suppose you don’t want to commit to this style of singing regularly. Instead, suppose you are committed to some other approach for reasons of spirituality, scholarly conviction, tradition, sentimental attachment, or what have you. Should you bother learning Pothier and David’s method? I think you should.
It is nearly impossible to understand any of the later developments springing from Solesmes (e.g., Mocquereau, Gajard, Cardine, Guilmard) without grasping Pothier’s insights on accent and distinction. Mocquereau’s ideas of arsis and thesis and the greater rhythm are merely a systematization of Pothier’s. It is very tempting to compare the relationship between these rhythmic systems to that between the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Similarly, the accentualist and free rhetorical framework provides a solid foundation for performances based on semiology. It is not difficult to see that the melismatic mora vocis is pretty much the same idea as the neumatic break or coupure. For mensuralists, as well, there may be some wisdom to be gleaned from Pothier, even if one rejects the idea of unmeasured or “free” rhythm. For even within the framework of strictly proportional long and short values, accentualism can provide a way to organize dynamic shapes that helps foster a performance that is both musical and prayerful.
