On many occasions, I've had to defend medieval music as a topic on which time is well spent
in music history curricula. Even beloved colleagues in performance have
questioned the necessity of learning ‘dead’ repertoire that most of their
students will never perform or interact with in a meaningful way. This is especially true of
chant, that dustiest of dusty repertoires, inhabitant of music history's
grungiest dustbins.
These are legitimate
questions, but they ignore the value of muddling about in the monophonic, and
more importantly, in a tradition that is primarily oral—a far cry from the land
of "deified composers" and "fetishized scores" that James
Parakilas so aptly identifies in his essay, "Texts, Contexts, and
Non-Texts in Music History Pedagogy." The question of what you can say or
write about a single line of music is not inconsequential. It is hard, as my
students quickly discover. Stripping away several centuries of musical
knowledge is no easy task and requires a type of historical imagination with
which they seldom engage. It is easy enough to picture Schubert at the piano
during one of his famous soirées, making music with his friends, embodying the
spirit of Romantic community, blissfully unaware that his music will be deployed
on the battleground of style periods a century later. Somewhat less inspiring
to the typical undergraduate is the anonymous-faced monk, cloistered away in
the scriptorium, copying tunes that are but one version of a song born long
before that moment.
But those monks are not so
far removed from the beatified Mahler symphony as one might think. The copying
down of those neumes led to various notational systems, including that of Guido
d’Arezzo, who is responsible--at least in part--for “one of the simplest but
most radical breakthroughs in the history of writing music,” as Tom Kelly reminds
us. At this juncture, notation became not just a simple mnemonic device, but
“made it possible to sing a song you have never heard before” (Kelly, 62). That
distinction is a game-changer, and hardly something to be glossed over. Moreover,
as David Hiley muses in his primer on Gregorian chant, pitch-accurate notation
likely reflects the surge in new music in the eleventh century, when “many new
melodies of non-traditional melodic character were composed” (Hiley, 200). The real take-away here is that history
repeats itself and what is distant and dusty is also a mirror for our own
times. Without early notation might we imagine a Chopin-less world, a
Beethoven-less world…the entirety of the Western canon at whose altar we
worship having never been? Would music have ceased to exist? No, of course
not--and that is exactly the point. The graphic notation of Morton Feldman,
Earle Brown, and others, is the progeny of that new music of the eleventh
century. (For a convincing argument for the direct influence of neumatic
notation on Earle Brown’s work, see Alden, below). I don’t make claims of
evolutionary progress here, but to deny the significance of early music and
notation is akin to denying a relationship between primates and homo sapiens. Chant is usually the first repertoire to be
sent to the firing squad of curricular decision-making, ironically defended by shaky
Darwineqsque arguments of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Shall
we also remove “H. erectus” from our study of human development? After all,
anatomy and science focus on Homo sapiens.
(For that matter, does that make the recent discovery of the species Homo naledi irrelevant?)
But perhaps the historical
argument is shouting into an abyss—if one is not convinced of history’s import
in the first place, a distinction between notated v. orally transmitted music
is probably not crucial. But what should
be crucial to performers--and here is where the argument might be more relevant
even to those who eschew history--is that much of the essence of chant as a practice is the basis for the music of
modern times. There seems to be an increasing acceptance of
"improvisation" as a valued contribution from the jazz world (Yale
notwithstanding, as Alex Ross reports), yet chant, which one could argue constitutes
improvisation before improvising was cool, is rarely mentioned in the same
context. Improvisation isn’t a new idea—it was there first before the systems and
the rules. How much less daunting might it be to understand that fact before
dropping students into Lydian chromatic theory, chord structures, or a Schenkerian
Ursatz? If we subscribe to a
chronological approach to teaching music history (as most departments still
do), why not get students saturated in the ability to understand that modern
performance—a composite of artistic expression, deportment, and polish—grew out
of an innate expression of human culture? In this way, chant is of cosmogonic
importance in understanding music that was not conceived or learned originally by
score. Why not steep ourselves in
repertoire that was improvised, not “performed,” and that was “composed,” but
not fixed?
In my medieval music course
(and I am fortunate to teach at a place with a five-semester undergraduate music history sequence), I ask my students
to listen to a monophonic Alleluia, and then ask the intentionally vague
question, "what can you tell me about this?" The initial response is
"not much," but when pressed, out come timid comments about contour,
key v. mode, speech-rhythms, melismas, text, and plentiful other observations
and contextual hypotheses that seem to rise out of the anxiety of having
nowhere to run. When faced with the absence of dense polyphony, augmented
chords to identify, and instrumentation to critique, there is an invitation to
investigate context, to understand that chant is part of a family of musical
traditions--most of them popular--where authorship is ambiguous at best, and
there are blurred lines between intertextuality, plagiarism, and musical
borrowing. As Parakilas observes, one need look no further than a radio station
to see this legacy play out in our urban soundscapes.
I’d like to return briefly to
my embedded quip above about recent events at Yale and decisions about jazz in
the curriculum. While I don’t wish to focus upon the place of jazz in music
curricula, conductor Michael Lewanski’s thoughts on the matter are relevant to
this discussion. He offered the following in a profoundly good essay:
“The notion of “training people in
the Western canon and in new music” is flawed, first of all, because it assumes
that the Western canon is a fixed, reified thing that doesn’t change, and,
secondly, that new music is separate from it (whatever “it” is).”
Like jazz, medieval music is also increasingly getting short
shrift despite its inarguable connection to the so-called “canon.” In fact,
Lewanski’s entire article about jazz and new music parallels the argument that
I am making. He continues:
“To pretend that these [canonical]
pieces are deserving of being played because there is something
inherently, unquestionably cool about them is
the problem. The reason they are important is the opposite: it is because
they have a reception history, a tradition of people thinking about, feeling,
playing, interrogating, fighting, reacting against them; and we are among those
people.”
[Incidentally, Lewanski’s
postscript addressing canons and performing musicians is also a worthwhile
read. ]
Curricular priorities are based on a lot of
assumptions, some of which are so deeply embedded in institutional tradition
that all the backhoes of practical evidence to the contrary can’t dislodge
them. That said, it is time for a different discussion about “relevance” when
it comes to history. And here I deliberately leave off “music” because this is
ultimately not a discussion about chant and its importance. Instead, it is a
plea for understanding and internalizing a truth that “old” and “new” are no
longer terms to mark relative moments in time, but instead qualitative and
often dismissive words that do art a terrible injustice. If we can recapture
the newness of what is “old,” and the timelessness of what is “new,” I think
that makes us better students, better educators, and dare I say it—better homo sapiens.
WORKS CITED
Alden,
Jane. “From Neume to Folio: Medieval
Influences on Earle Brown’s Graphic Notation.” Contemporary Music Review 26:3 (2007): 315-332.
Hiley,
David. Gregorian Chant. Cambridge
Introductions to Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Kelly,
Thomas Forrest. Capturing Music: The
Story of Notation. New York: W.W.
Norton, 2015.
Lewanski,
Michael. “Education, Jazz, Canons.” August 30, 2015.
http://www.michaellewanski.com/blog/2015/8/30/education-jazz-canons (Accessed August 31, 2015)
Lewanski,
Michael. “Education, Jazz, Canons: A Theoretical and Practical Postscript.”
September 7, 2015.
http://www.michaellewanski.com/blog/2015/9/7/education-jazz-canons-a-theoretical-and-practical-postscript (Accessed Sept 13, 2015)
Parakilas, James.
“Texts, Contexts, and Non-Texts in Music History Pedagogy.” In Vitalizing Music History Teaching,
45-58. Edited by James R. Briscoe.
Monographs and Bibliographies in American Music, No. 20. New York:
Pendragon Press, 2010.
Ross, Alex. “God and Jazz at Yale.” August 29, 2015. http://www.therestisnoise.com/2015/08/god-and-jazz-at-yale.html
(Accessed August 31, 2015)
"Statue of Guido of
Arezzo". Licensed under Public Domain via Commons -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Statue_of_Guido_of_Arezzo.jpg#/media/File:Statue_of_Guido_of_Arezzo.jpg
Yong, Ed. “6 Tiny Cavers, 15 Odd Skeletons, and 1 Amazing
New Species of Ancient Human” The Atlantic.
Sept 10, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/homo-naledi-rising-star-cave-hominin/404362/
(Accessed
Sept 13, 2015)
With many thanks to those who read this post in draft form!
