https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfBMUSNpcjU

@CantorCole - could I trouble you with one more question? What is the role (if any) of the "pulsing" sound that sometimes really sticks out in some interpretations -- I think perhaps at St. Meinrad's? Where volume/intensity seems to pulse on/off between syllables or triples? Is this a feature of the Gregorian "interpretation wars"? or is this is a side-wing idiosyncracy of some choirs? From what I am learning right now, that seems to be perhaps a feature of Solesmes style?

Is the pulsation you refer to crescendo and decrescendo, or repercussion?

Well, I would just nitpick and note that it’s all rhythmic.

I do recommend the exercise that @Charles_Weaver does: compare the various schools, as best we can do, either by listening when possible, and by reading Dom Pothier’s principles which he explicates the chant Justus Dominus, then trying it on your own, and so on and so forth with Mocquereau, the Graduale Triplex, what Patrick Williams or others propose (mensuralism/proportionalism and semiology — there is a Venn diagram here; some semiologists follow Cardine and Solesmes, others are more proportionalist, some lie in the middle).

I find that the chant has less of an obvious pulse with the Mocquereau method — particularly if you listen to Fontgombault, Triors, and others in that tradition. I grant that Santo Domingo de Silos, in the recordings rereleased in the 90s, sang with a somewhat straight reading of the neumes so, for instance, the ictus is felt in Gloria XI in perhaps a way that is too much. The ictus is seen but not heard — unless you’re like me and know the score well enough or know that there is a tendency to give a (slight) accent to the first note of most compound neumes, to isolated notes below a bistropha or tristropha, to what Mocquereau and Gajard call the disaggregated neume, and so on.

As far as the bistropha and tristropha, they are somewhat relaxed to me, but they are held in the classical Solesmes style maintained, e.g. by the Fontgombault part of that monastic family. However, they have long privileged the virga, and since the Vatican Edition lacks the bivirga, you can’t tell it apart from a bistropha. Mocquereau and Gajard added the bivirga to later editions, and the Vatican adds an episema to what appear as bistropha for the communion of Christmas at the Mass in the night, In Splendoribus. These neumes are virgae in the manuscripts.

There are also neumes like the salicus where Mocquereau’s best explanation (that the middle of the three notes is lengthened or sung expressively) no longer holds for scholars, but where it is stuck in the repertoire for many, many people.

The combination of these things could give rise, I suppose, to feeling like the arsis and thesis are too much — and I hate singing by myself in order to record so apologies if I made a mistake, but I do tend to sing in the Fontgombault style myself. The dynamics, for me, tend to be on the individual neumes, and because those shape a portion of the chant, then the overall melodic line has a general rise or fall (or paradoxically, the music comes to a quiet end while individual neumes are treated with an increase in volume).

This should work.

Has anyone ever made an "infographic" to help explain the different schools of chant interpretation, and how they sit in relation to eachother? Like, plotting them on a graph, with X-axis being "how standard is the length of each note" and Y-axis being (something else)? And then arrows drawn between the plot points, indicating which school came out from which? I CANNOT tell, for instance, from these forums, if the following are all discrete schools, or if some of these are synonyms?:
1. Equalist
2. Old Solesmes
3. Mensuralist
4. Proportionalist
5. Solesmes as modified by Mocqereau
6. Solesmes as it is done today at Fontgomblaut
and how Van Biezen fits into this?

& Are there sub-species of semiologism? Or is that just one monolith?

Any help (or a napkin-drawn info-graphic?) would be amazing! @FSSPMusic @Charles_Weaver @madorganist @MatthewRoth

@father_ben_jefferies
I feel like I already did my due diligence with the YouTube presentation and am unlikely to draw up an infographic. Some use "old Solesmes" to refer to what others call "classic Solesmes," i.e., the method of Mocquereau and Gajard, which is what is still used at Fontgombault, Triors, and Clear Creek, and others use "old Solesmes" to refer to Pothier's accentualism. Proportionalism is one type of mensuralism. Van Biezen is proportionalist, as are Vollaerts, Murray, and Blackley. Semiology includes a wide range of interpretations from nearly equalist (Kelly) to nearly proportional (Coro Gregoriano de Lisboa) to arabesque (perhaps I would put some of Vellard's in this category), but most of it is nuanced equalist. My chant glossary may be helpful:
https://www.ccwatershed.org/2023/03/12/chant-glossary/

If you are inclined to make your own table, you might ask the following questions:
Are long and short values normally in 2:1 proportion?
Is there a steady beat?
If yes, are there frequently tuplets or irregular proportions?
Does it sound like it has a meter or time signature, e.g., 3, 4, or 6 beats to a measure?
Is the normal syllabic value long or short?
Is it divisible?
Do textual considerations affect note lengths beyond what is notated in the manuscripts?
Is the middle note of the salicus normally long or short?
Is the top note of the scandicus and salicus normally long or short?
Are long-short forms of the pes and clivis rather common or very rare?
How long is the prolongation or rest at end kind of bar line?
For each kind of bar line, does the bar line add time to the preceding note, take time away from it, or add a silent rest?

@Liam

And I'd be curious how likely congregations are to follow these schools when singing the chants of the Ordinary from the Kyriale.

I sincerely doubt there are any congregations where the majority are thinking about ictus placement, arsis and thesis, or the assignment of normal, augmented, or diminished value relative to the time it takes to pronounce each syllable when singing the Ordinary of the Mass. I would also wager that the clergy aren't thinking about that during their chants—nor should they be.

I took a stab at such a table, for the classical Solesmes method, although it's sort of odd.

The second document is my summary of the notation as presented in Laus in ecclesia. (It's meant to be printed as a booklet and should scale to A5 nicely.) Even without the chapters from later in the book that give some idea of interpretation, and which will be followed up on in books II and III (whenever they appear, in English or in French…), I think that studying this and listening to, say, Fontgombault or Triors recordings will give some insight into this style of singing.

@father_ben_jeffries

I don't have an infographic, but Patrick's video is nice and there was also this recent thread, in which I made a side-by-side recording of four different ways of singing:

https://forum.musicasacra.com/forum/discussion/21458/my-thoughts-on-chant-rhythm-and-a-few-other-things/p1

I am hoping to write a book on the subject of different ways of approaching the rhythm of the chant. I haven't done much writing this academic year, since I've been very busy with teaching. I think there is a gap that could be filled by a history of the subject that doesn't take one side or the other, but it may be a while before I can produce such a thing.

You list the following approaches:

1. Equalist
2. Old Solesmes
3. Mensuralist
4. Proportionalist
5. Solesmes as modified by Mocqereau
6. Solesmes as it is done today at Fontgomblaut

And you also ask about Van Biezen.

I would frame it this way: the question of Gregorian rhythm is quite complicated, primarily because the chant has been in continuous use for well over a millenium, but with no consistent performing tradition. Instead, there has been a steady trickle of reforms, renewals, rises and falls in the popularity and vitality of chant within the musical/liturgical life of the Church. The performer today has to sort through an often-confusing mix of historical research, present tradition, local liturgical custom, ecclesial legislation from Pius X to the present, and general questions of musical style and taste. One could reasonably conclude that we ought to follow historical research above all these other factors, but this leads to further difficulties, since the relevant historical evidence has been interpreted differently by different people.

So there are various solutions that people propose, and that I would say #1 is not really a school, but rather a it seems to describe a way the chant was often sung in the late middle ages. As the name implies, every note would be the same length, setting aside all the various issues of rhythmic differentiation.

#2, Old Solesmes, is, in my terminology, the same as the Pothier method, which is also called Accentualism. The best books on the subject are by Dom Pothier himself and by Dom David, who was Pothier's secretary. Someday I would love to translate these into English, but who knows when that will happen!

#3 and #4 are different names for the same thing. Van Biezen would also be in this category. The writings by Dom Murray that Matthew recommended above are an excellent (if polemical) introduction. The Vollaerts book is also very good, but much more detailed. There are a ton of resources on Patrick's website.

I would also say that #5 and #6 are the same. There are indeed differences between Mocquereau, Gajard, and the present cantors of Fontgombault, but these are relatively minor. The big, systemic answers to the questions of Gregorian rhythm are the same.

I would add to your list the style of semiology, which is used to describe a rather wide range of approaches. I would define its usual usage this way: a method committed to historical research into the earliest neumes as the primary source for the performance practice of rhythm, but, are at the same time, resistent to a strict proportionality in note length between long and short neume signs. Instead, the large-scale rhythmic organization is generally a modification of the other "free rhythm" approaches like those of Pothier and Mocquereau. Elsewhere you asked for recordings in this style. Alberto Turco is representative. Lately I also have been enjoying the recordings of Consortium Vocale Oslo.

So to sum up, there are basically four main important interpretive styles in use since the end of the nineteenth century. Many of these could be further classified into subcategories, as with the differences between Vollaerts and van Biezen. These four main approaches (giving all the different names that people use) are:

1. Accentualism/Pothier/Old Solesmes
2. Classic Solesmes/Mocquereau/Gajard/Fontgombault
3. Semiology/Cardine/New Solesmes
4. Mensuralism/Proportionalism

This list is maybe a little skewed, since three of the four of these are "free rhythm," and really all three of these share a common ancestry from the abbey of Solesmes and ultimately dom Guéranger. So perhaps one could also reduce these four to two: "the nuance theory" and "proportionalism." With that caveat in mind, I still think the fourfold division is sensible. Part of what I have tried to do in my research on Mocquereau is to relate his ideas to trends in the broader field of music theory around the beginning of the twentieth century, which is really what distinguishes him from the Solesmes methods developed before and after his time.

For the sake of completeness we must add a few other approaches like that of Marcel Pérès. Many performers nowadays are quite comfortable saying "we don't really know what the rhythm is so we are going to create our own based on our stylistic preferences, or on various historical hunches, or on our own musical instincts." This often leads to extraordinarily beautiful results, as with the Sequentia recordings of the chant of St. Hildegard.

Surely we have some semiologists on this forum who can answer that? My understanding is that the Cardinian semiologists expect not only the choirmaster but the singers as well to read the adiastematic neumes (usually giving preference to St. Gall) and eschew using rhythmic editions just as Cardine eschewed the Graduale Lagal. In his Kommentarband for the Novum, Göschl explains that the square notation of the Vatican edition was left unreformed for that reason, although the Novum does reproduce more of the neumatic breaks than the old edition.

As for proportionalism, singing every long as a quarter note (crotchet) and every short as an eighth (quaver) will get you most of the way there, observing grace notes for what Cardine calls the special torculus and the pes initio debilis, likewise for the short-long form of the clivis. But what about contradictions between Laon and St. Gall? What about three short notes between two longs and similar syncopations? Hence the need for editorial decisions. After a while, singers get a sense for the rhythm of centonizations and stock phrases, some of which are inconsistently notated by the first-millennial scribes or omitted altogether. This also underscores the necessity of editorial decisions.

As for readings, Murray's Gregorian Chant according to the Manuscripts [link corrected] is my number 1 suggestion, followed by Van Biezen's "The Rhythm of Gregorian Chant" in Rhythm, Meter and Tempo in Gregorian Chant.

“[S]inging every long as a quarter note (crotchet) and every short as an eighth (quaver) will get you most of the way there...”

Fair enough, but from which editions? In the usual old editions, there are no formal longs and shorts, of course. Do you mean, then, from the Triplex? Or am I missing something obvious?

“Pérès like linguistics popularizers seems to think that the farther away from the mainstream tradition one is, the more conservative it is, and this across all features and in all places.”

LOL. Indeed “how Etruscan really sounded” and “will Welsh speakers understand ancient Gaulish?” popularize reconstructed speech that's curiously similar to... reconstructed classical Latin!

Fair enough, but from which editions? In the usual old editions, there are no formal longs and shorts, of course. Do you mean, then, from the Triplex? Or am I missing something obvious?

From the adiastematic neumes, and one needs a duplex or triplex edition to do so, or an edition with added rhythmic signs—as you said, "reflecting someone else's palaeography."

Proportionalists tend to prefer Laon neumes; however, lacuna and melodic disagreements mean that one must turn to SG manuscripts.

I don’t know. I do not myself believe it has been irrefutably established that the ground truth is proportionalist. I’d be more inclined to take a neutral position; not “it doesn’t matter” but “it matters a great deal, only I don’t know for certain because I see conflicting evidence, and it would be good to teach several sides of the issue to those interested in it to stimulate further research.” This is how we go about teaching other controversial issues in performance practice. Pretty much everything about the act of composing, performing, and analyzing music has been controversial or at least disputed at some point.

My skepticism of proportionalism takes two forms. One form is that I agree with what you seem to be suggesting: there is a great variety of signs in the manuscripts that suggests more than two possible note values. It seems at least plausible to me that there might be a whole range of duration, ornament, and accent that we have only an imperfect record of.

The other form is really a broader critique of proportionalism for not considering the possibility of rhythmic flexibility in the chant, hinted at especially by Guido and his horse. In other words, even the possible proportion between durations does not preclude other rhythmic considerations like phrases, pauses, changes of tempo, nuances of time, etc.

I’ve written about Guido's horse before and taken some pretty sharp criticism for it as well; both my thoughts (1 and 2) and the critique can be found at CCWatershed. The sort of free rhetorical interpretation of Guido (already in Pothier and reinforced in Mocquereau and so on) conforms to my own musical instincts in a way that might color my own thoughts about proportionalism. To me, it is not a virtue or a sign of historicity to have a fixed and invariable tempo when performing medieval or any other music. I am pretty sure Patrick disagrees with me vehemently on this point.

In general, and I’m thinking as a performance-practice teacher mostly focused on baroque music here, applying metronomic thinking to any music before the nineteenth century is too mechanical/anachronistic, and even in the nineteenth century there was plenty of rubato. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, there is abundant evidence that that tactus (the all important combination of arsis and thesis that measured and governed musical motion) was not rigid but responded to fluctuations of affect and considerations of phrasing. Anyway, that’s a whole other controversial topic for some other forum!

Suppose for the sake of argument that long and short signs in the early manuscripts really do have something like the relationship of our modern eighth and quarter notes. To me it does not immediately follow that there needs to be a perceptible isochronous meter (beat, tactus, call it what you will) that could be calibrated to a metronome. In many other ancient Christian traditions there does seem to be a steady beat, but I don’t see why that should color our approach to the unique and extraordinary variety of information in the early Gregorian notation, which really does seem to have a uniquely beautiful relationship with the accentuation and declaration of the sacred words.

Still, these points of skepticism wouldn’t prevent me from singing Patrick’s way if I ever had the chance to visit with his choir. And my point remains that I think it is quite possible for a group to learn to do this with not much more difficulty than that of a group learning to sing the Mocquereau method well.

At any rate, everyone interested in chant rhythm ought to learn to sing proportionally because it is an important theory of how the rhythm of the chant works. This is true whether you accept all the arguments or not.

*Edited 4/21/24 to add a few links.