ART. IV. 1. Graduale Romanum. Typis J. Hanicq, Mechlin, 1848, 2. Vesperale Romanum, Typis J. Hanicq, Mechlin, 1848. THERE HERE has been for some time a general movement towards the restoration of the Gregorian Chant in many parts of the Continent. The Cardinal Archbishop of Mechlin, the Cardinal Prelates of Cambrai and Lyons, the late Archbishop of Paris, the martyr of the barricades, the Bishops of Langres and Auch, have all in letters written at different times within the last few years, urged upon their clergy in the most earnest and forcible manner, the necessity for their considering the practicability of teaching the Gregorian Chant, generally to the children in the village schools, and to the Church choir, with a view to effect a beneficial improvement in the beauty and popular charm of the Celebration of Mass, and of the ritual offices. The many great and crying scandals of the system of profane music that has come into our churches, the experience of its powerlessness to interest the hearts of the multitudes of poor, whose sympathies are all on the side of the good old chant of Mother Church, and many other causes, have conspired to draw forth a widely spread desire over the whole of Europe, that some effective measures should be taken with a view to its restoration. The first step in this work was felt, by the wise and virtuous Prelate who fills the seat of Primate of Belgium, to be an enquiry into the possibility of recovering the purest extant traditions, as to the true Form of the Roman Song. For the printed editions which have appeared in the different towns of Europe, contain so many capricious varieties, as to stamp many of them at once with the character, of being little else than counterfeit perversions of the true original. Seven years ago, this Prelate communicated with the celebrated Abate Baini, the director of the pontifical Choir, whose attention for some years previously had been turned to the same subject; with the Abate Alfieri and other persons of distinction; and finding that among his own clergy the subject had been much studied and excited great interest, M. l'Abbè Jannssens, professor of Plain Chant in the Seminary, undertook the journey to Rome to collect information, and in the mean time the best editions and MSS. of the Roman Song that the North of Europe furnished, were diligently examined and collated. In the first month of 1847, M. Edmund Duval, a pupil of the Conservatory of Paris, who also for years previous, at the desire of the Archbishop, had been engaged in researches on this subject, was sent to Rome, to compare the result which his labours had hitherto accomplished, with the best Roman editions, and the manuscript copies preserved in the rich libraries of that ancient city. He was engaged for ten months in these researches, during part of which time he was assisted by his able friend and colleague, M. l'Abbè Jannssens. The result of these indefatigable labours, which were examined and approved by a large body of ecclesiastics, and other persons appointed by his Eminence, in the spring of this year, to report upon the manner in which the task had been executed, is now in part given to the public, in the Graduale and Vesperale which M. Hanieq has recently published, at a remarkably moderate price; a favour for which the lovers of Gregorian Song are indebted to the Editor's disinterested zeal, as they will be to his knowledge and indefatigable perseverance, for the purest printed version of the Roman Song hitherto published. The remainder will follow in due time. But it is time to investigate the principles, and the manner in which the editions now published have been prepared. For it is a question of the utmost practical importance, in the important work of restoring the Gregorian Chant, to feel a reasonable degree of certainty that the form of it proposed for use is a practically faithful transcript of the original that was compiled and composed by St. Gregory. All great works have met with obstacles and suspicion on their first appearance; it might therefore be too much, perhaps, to expect that the merits of the present editions should encounter no envious or misinformed opposition; more especially since the subject is that inflammable matter, music. The old proverb will be remembered Και πτωχος πτωχῷ φθονεει και ἄοιδος ἀοιδῷ But to proceed. The first question that the revisers had to dispose of was one that has occupied a good deal of discussion, viz:-whether the manuscripts in Saxon or Lombard notation, which consists of 40 or more different signs, and which are written without the employment of clef or lines, admitted of being deciphered. M. Fetis, a name well known to the continental musical world for his learning and research, claims to have discovered the secret of deciphering these manuscripts, and for some time the revisers of this edition in vain attempted the task of trying to discover the same secret, until a happy hazard threw in their way the following dissertation which the Abate Baini left among his papers. From the light it throws upon the question, and the great celebrity of its author's name, our readers will feel an interest in seeing the subjoined translation from the original Italian. DISSERTATION OF THE ABATE BAINI. "Preface. It is certain that the Greeks employed the characters of the Alphabet as musical signs, up to the time of St. Gregory. "St. Gregory, chosen Sovereign Pontiff (590) deceased 604, ordered that in the Latin Church, the song should be no longer noted with Greek letters, but with Latin in their stead. "A little time after St. Gregory, the practice of writing the song by means of letters, whether Greek or Roman, was given up, and signs or notes substituted in their place, as may be seen in all the song books, whether Greek or Latin, of the middle ages. "It is certain that in the time of Charlemagne, who reigned in 750, the Roman song was written with the above-mentioned notes, and not with the letters prescribed by St. Gregory; for the monk Engolesma informs us, that the French singers had not the talent to express the 'tremulas' 'vinnulas.' See Gerbert, 'de Cantu et Musica Sacrâ, vol. ii. p. 60.' "Enquiry into the possibility of reading the notation of the song of the six sequences, Rythms or plaints, of Petrus Abelardus, No. 288. of the Library of the Vatican. "It is a very remarkable thing, deserving a careful investigation, that a book which could not have been written before the twelfth century, since it contains the poem of a writer who died in 1142, should present the same barbarous manner of expressing the musical notation of the poem, which was in use before the time of Guido Aretinus, i.e. before (1000) without lines, or letters, clef or colour. My opinion on this subject, after the best investigation I have been able to make with my limited knowledge, is as follows: "After rejecting the Latin letters which St. Gregory substituted for the letters of the Greek alphabet, by which the sounds of the musical scale were indicated, and by substituting signs, called notes, which signs did not mark the respective distance of one note from another, * it necessarily came to pass, that in the course of years, the traditional memory of the different parts of the song that used to be preserved by the above-mentioned mode of notation, with the letters of the alphabet was partly obliterated, so that no certainty could be said to exist, and each master of a choir, taught his singers the song of any particular composition, according to his own manner of interpreting it. Hence, perpetual disputes between master and master, between master and pupils, and even among the pupils themselves, one with another, until there might be said to be fully as many modes of execution as there were singers. However, it was impossible that a confusion so great, so worthy of the barbarity of the times, could continue, and various attempts were made to remedy it. Hucbald, monk, about the end of the ninth century, invented new signs, by which the seven sounds of the scale, comprising the two semitones, might be expressed with certainty and precision, by means of their different position. Oddo, Abbot of Clugny, seeing that the notation of Hucbald did not come to be generally adopted, gave himself great pains to obtain the readoption of the Roman letters of St. Gregory, and in the preface to his Dialogue on Music, he informs us, that according to the method then in vogue of writing musical notes,t no singers could hope to succeed in learning to sing by themselves any musical composition, even after fifty years' study and practice. On this account he caused his monks to be all taught the ancient method of using letters, which did but require a few days' study, or at the most a week.‡ "It was in the eleventh century, that the invention of the monk Guido Aretimus was generally adopted. This writer, in several of his works, attacks the method of writing music then followed. A method, says he, which will not enable a singer, even after a hundred years' study, to sing the smallest antiphon by himself. Cantores etsi centum annos in canendi studio perseverant, nunquam tamen vel minimam antiphonam valent efferre. (In prologo micrologi.) "Hence he says, 'Cantorum rusticorum multitudo plurima Donec frustra vivit, mirâ laborat insania,' &c. * That is to say, they go up and down just the same, although the interval they express is sometimes a tone, sometimes a half tone, &c. † Those with neither letters, or clefs, or lines. † Antiphonas non audientes ab aliquo per se discebant. Intuitu et ex improviso, quidquid per musicam descriptum erat sine vitio decantabant quod hactenus communes cantores nunquam facere potuerant, dum plures eorum 50 jam annis in canendi usu ac studio inutiliter permanserunt. "And elsewhere he exclaims :* Who is there who does not deplore the existence of so much confusion in the Church, that we should be found disputing with each other when we ought to be singing the divine office. Scarce any two are found to agree, the master and the pupils disagree, the result of all which is, that there are as many Antiphonaries in each church as there are masters. So that we no longer hear of the Antiphonary of Gregory, but that of Leo, Albert, or any other, and as it is already very difficult to learn one, it is certainly impossible to learn a great many.t "On account of this confusion, which necessarily resulted from the barbarous method of writing in notation, without any mark for high or low, tone or semitone, Guido proposed to abandon this manner, and still maintaining the signs which custom had introduced, he brought in the use of lines, on and between which, he placed the notes, and thus determined the respective distance of the notes in the high and low parts of the melody; next, by placing the Roman letters of St. Gregory at the beginning of each line, (clefs) he determined the place of the semitone, and obtained in this manner, that even children were able to learn to sing correctly without the aid of a master.§ "This invention of Guido was soon adopted at Rome, after the trial which the Pontiff John XIX. was pleased to make of it. The rest of Italy soon followed the example of Rome, in adopting the method of Guido, and the masters saw their pupils make so much * Quis non defleat, quod tam gravis error est in Ecclesia, ut quando divinum officium celebremus, sæpe non Deum laudemus, sed inter nos certare videamur, vix denique unus concordat alteri, non magistro discipulus, non discipulus condiscipulis, unde effectum est, ut non jam unum aut saltem duo, sed tam multa sint Antiphonaria, quam multi sunt per singulas ecclesias magistri, vulgoque jam dicitur, Antiphonarium, non Gregorii, sed Leonis, Alberti, aut cujuscunque alterius, cumque unum discere sit valde difficile, de multis non sit dubium quin sit impossibile, (de ignoto cantu.) † Because so much had to be learned and retained by heart. † Spissæ ducuntur lineæ, et quidam ordines vocum in ipsis fiunt lineis quidam vero, inter lineas et in medio intervallo et spatio linearum. ¿Etiam pueruli sine magistro recte possunt cantare. Pontifex nostrum revolvens antiphonarium, prefixasque ruminans regulas, non prius destitit aut de loco in quo sedebat abscessit, donec unum versiculum inauditum sibi voti compos ediseeret, ut quod vix credibat in aliis, tam subito in se cognosceret. (Guido Epistola ad fratrem Mim.) |