S I MENTIONED in my previous post, I’ve been thinking about the modes lately. It’s not a topic that one can ever exhaust. Lately my thoughts have been mostly pedagogical. The basic framework (eight modes based on final and range) is something that you can teach in a day, but you can easily spend a lifetime working out all the details in actual music.
JMJ • With that in mind, today’s introit (for the feast of the Holy Family) illustrates some of the difficulties with modal classification and Gregorian chant. Here is the antiphon.
Textbook quintus laetus • This is undoubtedly in the fifth mode. You can determine as much by the final (F) and the range (F-e). Going a little deeper, we have phrase endings on the pitches F and a, while c is treated as a reciting tone. This is the kind of fuzzy statement that we theory teachers tend to throw around; what do I mean? If you squint you can kind of see how often c is repeated. (One of my clever graduate students refers to the reciting tone as the “mode of the mode.”) Getting a little more concrete and thinking in terms of cantorial ornamentation and melodic development in an oral tradition, you can easily imagine the first “Deus,” “inhabitare,” “facit,” “unanimes,” and “ipse” as ornaments of a recitation on the pitch c. Likewise, “loco,” “domo,” and “virtutem” all trace similar descents down from c to another pitch, usually a.
In an ideal world, our exploration of this chant would end with this textbook demonstration. Perhaps we could proceed to an assessment of the joyful ethos of the fifth mode and a reflection on the selection of this chant for the feast, which domesticates the rather grand opening psalm verse by connecting God’s “holy place” with the Holy Family. The home we are to imagine all living in is that of the carpenter Joseph and his family.
St. Chrodegang Would Like a Word • The manuscript tradition won’t let us rest there, though. For if you are reading from the Graduale Triplex or another source reproducing the neumes of St. Gall or Laon, you will notice that the psalm verse that follows is not the fifth tone but the seventh:
At that point, the neumes no longer match what is shown on the staff notation. In the Graduel neumé, Dom Cardine had already made note of this discrepancy:
Notes that Aren’t Real • To his catalog of versions using the seventh tone, we might add some other manuscripts (SG 374 and 376, the Beneventan sources I-Bv 39 and 40). According to these sources, it seems that we should end the antiphon, and then beginning on the same note, sing the seventh introit psalm tone. Of course, doing so will require an E-flat, which is not a note in the Guidonian gamut! It would require us to venture off the familiar path of our hand and into the realm of music ficta, something like the medieval equivalent of imaginary numbers.
What’s an Editor to Do? • Now, there are a few different ways to handle this issue:
-
- Change the psalm verse to the fifth introit psalm tone to match the mode of the antiphon. This is the solution of the Vatican edition, and it is probably what you sang today if you sang this chant. There’s certainly a manuscript tradition for this, even if it is less venerable than for the others.
- Sing the antiphon in mode 5 and mentally adjust to reimagine the final as G for the psalm verse. When you get to the end of the verse, you will have ended on G, which you then reimagine as F and proceed to the repetition of the antiphon. This seems like the most likely medieval solution. In the Dijon/Montpelier tonary/antiphoner (the Rosetta-stone-like manuscript that has gone by a bunch of different names), the ending of the antiphon is notated exactly a step higher so that the chant ends on G, even though it’s in the section of the manuscript dedicated to mode-5 introits.
For those of you who know GABC, you can practically read straight from this notation, although you have to remember that the letters i and j are the same for this scribe. Note that from the second note of “plebis” we are a step higher, so that the antiphon ends on G. - Just embrace the E-flat for the psalm verse, as in my hypothetical version above.
- Renotate the entire antiphon as though it is in the seventh mode so that it flows directly into the seventh tone for the psalm verse. If you are going to keep the melodic intervals correct, this will involve both c-sharp and f-sharp.
As a performer and teacher, I think the list above is in my own order of preference. But suppose you want to sing the correct psalm tone shown in those early manuscripts. Options 2–4 all achieve more or less this end, but they do so in very different ways. Option 2 seems to have been anciently popular, but it is thoroughly unmodern and prone to all kinds of misunderstandings, although these could be mitigated by the use of a custos or the like. The idea of partial transposition to solve weird tonal discrepancies is a rich topic. But the Graduale novum adopts the fourth solution. Do you see why?
The logic here is that the introit psalm tone, which we can easily read from the early sources showing the seventh tone, must dictate what the mode of the introit is, since in some way, the whole point of a modal classification scheme is that it helps us pair up antiphons with psalm tones.
Consequences of Letting Tone mean Mode • While I see the logic of this editorial choice and can even get on board as a performance matter, I think it is bad as modal pedagogy. One thing I definitely want to teach my students is that the fifth scale degree in mode 5, c, is not categorically equivalent with the fifth scale degree in any other mode, even if you use sharps and flats to keep the intervals the same, because I believe the modes have a real character and existence that cannot be mapped entirely onto a scale and transposed at will. The ascent a–b–c within mode 5 is not the same as the ascent b–c-sharp–d within mode 7, even though the intervals are the same, because the modal context is different.1
I suggest in short, that in spite of the mode 7 label, this antiphon is in mode 5, even when sung with the seventh psalm tone, and it would be preferable for our editions to reflect that fact.
Another weakness of this editorial approach is that it requires all kinds of fanciful neumes. For instance, the strophicus group on “inhabiTAre” is now on the pitch d, but such neumes really only happen on c and F. In a broader sense, the point of the Graduale novum is that it corrects melodic errors of the Vatican edition. Take a look at the fourth note of “sancto” for the only example I see in this chant. Perhaps it is nice to change this one note, but in another sense, this is the only note left unchanged by this edition, since every other note of the antiphon has been moved up a step, in spite of a long manuscript tradition showing this melody notated at the pitch where the Vatican edition puts it.
You are What you Read • I hope you see how the modal theories we adopt ends up having consequences in performance. For the editors of the Novum, the commitment to the earliest manuscripts as a source for melodic restitution led to the adoption of the sharps and a clear adoption of tone-mode equivalence. For the editors of the Vatican edition, it is rather the early sources that are the outlier, since the mode of the antiphon suggests which tone is correct for the psalm verse. By all means, sing from the Graduale novum, but know that the editorial choices of all editions must necessarily simplify a complicated modal reality.
1 To put it perhaps even more radically, as a musician I do not think that F major and G major are in any sense equivalent, even though they are both examples of the major scale comprised of the same intervals. And this has nothing to do with pitch (I don’t have perfect pitch, which is fortunate given how much I transpose and play/sing at different pitch levels), since the pitch G in some places in Europe in the seventeenth century was equivalent in terms of frequency with the pitch F in other places at the same time. I might not be able to hear the difference between F major and G major as a listener, but I would bet that the composer/player/singer/improviser thinks about them differently.
