This post is the third in an occasional (i.e., about one post every year or two) series on historical aural skills. I assume here that the reader is familiar with the idea of the hexachord, or six-note scale for solmization, and the idea that hexachords can begin on both C and G in chant. See Part 1 and Part 2 for a refresher on the basic method. I also recently discussed the topic on a recent episode the Square Notes podcast.
SINCE I FIRST ADDRESSED THIS TOPIC on this blog, I’ve developed what was an experimental class on the subject into a year-long course that I now consider my best contribution yet to the teaching of Historical Performance (HP) at Juilliard. The guiding principle of the HP movement is that trying to approach old music in the same way that its composers did offers modern performers insight on how to present that music more effectively now. Over the last several decades, researchers have applied that principle to things like instrument construction, string material, pitch, articulation through string-bowing and wind-tonguing, fingering, rhythmic alteration, ornamentation, etc. This effort has borne enormous fruit, as the countless fans of HP can attest. More recently, researchers have been extending this idea to aspects of music more removed from practical considerations of performance, such as music theory. From this point of view, it’s all well and good to study old music, but if this music predates (often by centuries) things like the use of roman numerals to label harmonies, then we probably need a better theoretical language to describe this music, perhaps one that people at the same time would have used. My solfège class offers that: a historicist way to thinking about scales and intervals for people who want to sing and play old music with understanding.
Is Historicism Opposed to Presentism? • This historicist approach (let’s think about music using the same technical language as its composer) is often in tension with a more timeless approach that sees theoretical concepts articulated by Rameau and Schenker as applicable to the whole Western canon and beyond. Certainly, music theory does, in some sense, describe timeless truths inherent in foundational acoustical facts like the harmonic series. In other words, we ought not just assume that all modern theory is presentist and therefore invalid as a way to think about older music. As we think about old music like Gregorian chant and renaissance polyphony, it’s often helpful to navigate between both of these theoretical frameworks depending on what we are trying to convey to our choir at a particular moment.
Six Notes or Seven? • This brings us to the question of when to use six-note or seven-note solfège. Since the full octave-spanning scale (Do re mi fa sol la ti do) is based on the timeless truth of octave equivalence, doesn’t it make sense to use it with chant and classical polyphony? Often the answer is yes. I frequently use the seven-note scale with my children’s schola. But we should resist the temptation to think of the six note scale (Ut re mi fa sol la) as making singing unnecessarily complicated (because to sing the octave major scale described above, you have to sing Ut re mi fa sol re mi fa), an idea common to many solfège reformers over the centuries. Instead, the historicist approach often leads to better insight into old music, because the syllables themselves had distinct characters. For users of the older system, thinking about how each pitch relates to the nearest half step (and the character that this relationship imparts) was more important than having only one syllable per pitch class.
The Character of the Notes • According to many early writers, the position of notes within the scale had implications for how the note feels both to singer and the listener. A note with a diatonic half step above it (that is, mi or la in the old system) has a certain tension or hardness that makes itself felt when either sung or heard in the context of diatonic music, while a note with a diatonic semitone below (that is, ut or fa in the old system) has a feeling of restfulness and repose. Re and sol are more neutral. Here is a diagram from Martin Agricola illustrating the idea:
The top row of the diagram translates to “Ut and fa are called soft, since they make a soft sound.” The other rows are similar. If you know how to sing the old-style solfeggio, you have a built in character (out of three possible options: hard, soft, or medium) for each note of the chant, based on where that note is in relation to the nearest half step. To know how to solfège something is, in fact, to make an analysis of the character of the notes, which leads naturally to an interpretation based on that character. This was considered important enough to be one of the first things taught to children when learning chant, and it applied to many other types of music as well, including both choral polyphony and instrumental music.
Resonances with Modern Chant Scholarship • In a recent post, Jeff took a rather dim view of chant scholarship, citing the lack of substance in a lot of recent work. I’m a little more optimistic than he is about such scholarship, but it is true that some books make more substantial arguments than others, and these are often the ones that are most controversial or based least on settled and received methods. I would say the most substantial piece of chant theory of that type in the last fifty years is probably the theory of the “mother modes,” often described in English as the “archaic modes,” as put forward by Dom Jean Claire. This is something I should probably post about more, since I’m interested in it and not a lot has been written about it in English in recent years. You can read more about it in the books on mode by Daniel Saulnier.
Very briefly, the theory suggests that before there were our familiar eight modes that have both finals and tenors (reciting tones), there were simpler modal structures where the melody gathers around a single note, which serves as both the final and the reciting tone. Claire identifies three such modes, which he calls the mode of do, the mode of re, and the mode of mi. Claire’s theory works well with the old system, since the crucial thing is where these melodic structures happen relative to the semitone. In fact, Claire and Saulnier suggest that there is a strong force of “attraction” that tends to pull mi up to fa as melodies spread through time and geographic regions. This resonates perfectly with the idea of the inherent character of mi and fa: namely, that mi strives upward while fa is a relative point of repose. A perfect example of a chant that follows this model is the offertory chant from last week in the new rite, which you can see here. In this chant, every word and melodic gesture gathers around fa, which serves as both the reciting tone and the final. This illustrates Claire’s mode of do; of course, in our syllable-character theor do/ut and fa share the characteristic of softness. Note also the absence of mi in this chant, which lends this melody a rather drama-free quality from the syllable-character perspective.
I would describe these features like this: this chant is particularly restful and internal in its character, because the sixth mode carries the ethos of devotion but also because the chant lacks the syllable mi, so that there is never a strong sense of motion or directionality to any of the notes but rather a groundedness on F fa. Claire and Saulnier would point to the archaic mode of do and the pentatonic substrate. Even though my language is historicist and theirs is modern, we are identifying the same features and making similar points about them. Indeed, I suspect that further immersion in the six-note way of thinking would resolve and clarify some of these different ways of thinking: perhaps the reason the sixth mode illustrates devotion is precisely because it is centered on the relatively soft and stable fa. Mode and modal ethos could just be patterns superimposed on something even more basic: the diatonic scale itself.
Solmization in Action • Let’s bring some of these points together with an illustration, the communion antiphon for today, Ash Wednesday. Here is the melody with the solmization written in (the letters in place of the text stand for the syllables of the solmization):
I won’t get into the details here of why all these syllables are the way they are. There are only a few rules guiding the choices.
- Mutate onto re going up and la going down (when moving stepwise).
- Leaps are treated as though you were filling in by step.
- Do not mutate unless you have to, but if you do, mutate as soon as possible.
- b-flat is fa as an upper neighbor to a la. In other words, it’s borrowed from a hexachord/scale that starts on F, even though the normal scales used start on C and G.
You can verify for yourself that I followed all those rules here. While some of them seem counterintuitive, I have come to see their wisdom after a few years of teaching this subject regularly.
I recommend singing through this chant with the syllables provided while thinking of each mutation as moving you between two spheres of influence within the space of tones. The lower hexachord is centered around E-F as mi and fa, while the upper hexachord is centered around b-c as mi and fa. See the previous post in this series for a reminder of how to simultaneously physicalize the solfège by using the joints of your fingers. This melody comes in two phrases, as indicated by the full barline. The first phrase divides into three sections or incises (marked by the quarter barlines). In the first section, we start with the hard E mi, which gets its active character by being so close to the soft F fa, toward which it strives upward. Instead of obeying this attraction, the melody springs immediately to the upper scale and approaches the c fa, which is stable note that acts as a recitation tone. This rising melody is a common third-mode intonation formula. The dual-scale approach to the solfège of this melody as a mutation makes musical sense, as it draws the singer’s attention to the important notes (E mi and c fa) while shifting between these two gravitational poles of the way these notes interact with their closest neighbors. In the second section, there is an interplay of b mi and c fa that gives the melody a sense drama and action. Try singing this section while keeping the Agricola’s hard-mi/soft-fa distinction in mind. In other words, solfège can suggest an interpretation. On the last note, we mutate down again, entering the gravitational field of the E-F pair. This prepares us for the following third section. In this section, b fa replaces b mi as the top note, providing a softening effect As Saulnier teaches, b is the least stable part of the scale and comes in two flavors depending on whether it acts as a neighbor to A or to c. The hexachord method expresses this idea by saying that there is b fa (a soft upper neighbor to a la) and b mi (a hard lower neighbor to c fa). Note that the hard/soft distinction lives on in our own English words for accidental signs. Did you ever wonder why we call them sharp and flat? It is a direct descendent of the old hard/soft distinction, which lives on now mostly unconsciously in our modern languages.
The third-mode cadence that concludes the section illustrates how the hexachord theory intersects with the idea of mode. The melody moves from F to E at the point in the phrase when we are drawing to a close, but the idea of coming to a rest is in direct opposition to the character of these notes, which move from soft to hard. I would suggest that this opposition, a cadence that comes to rest while hardening rather than softening, is part of what gives modes 3 and 4 their unique character.
The second phrase is in two sections. in the first, we immediately launch back to the upper hexachord and briefly touch the c fa. It is indeed rather musical and nice to sing this note softly as suggested by Agricola’s distinction. After that we leap down to the lower hexachord again, with a softening cadence moving from E mi to F fa. The last section is entirely in the lower hexachord, and replicates the hardening cadence that also ended the first phrase.
Conclusion: Where to Find out More • In the last few paragraphs, I’ve attempted to set down a bunch of small impressions I experience as I sing this chant. Notice that this analysis does not require any kind of word painting or other vague notions of melody. It all depends on the character of the syllables built into the solfège system that was standard for this kind of music for many centuries, and it also provides glimmers of a rationale for the idea of modal ethos. It’s hardly a polished or elegant analysis, but it is based on something real, tangible, and historical. And I cannot state enough how widespread this way of thinking was. J.S. Bach was a proponent of this six-note system, as was Salieri, who was Schubert’s teacher. Countless singers of chant and polyphony for centuries would have thought about solfège in this way. In future posts, I’d like to talk about how the method works with sixteenth-century polyphony, and indeed with tonal music from the classical era.
If you want to learn more but aren’t ready to come for a complete course of study in Historical Performance at Juilliard, I’m going to be offering some classes on this topic this summer. One is at a few breakout sessions at the CMAA Colloquium in June. Another is as a week-long graduate level course at the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music. I encourage you to look into all of the really interesting course offerings. For my part, I’m excited to share how I think the historical way of thinking about solfège, which is so easy to gloss over, actually comes with a great deal of musical insight for those willing to be fully immersed in it.
