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Twenty years ago, I had the opportunity to conduct a week-long interview with Dom Cardine’s former boss.
“Nothing so arouses the soul, gives it wing, sets it free from the earth, releases it from the prison of the body, teaches it to love wisdom, and to condemn all the things of this life, as concordant melody and sacred song composed in rhythm.” —St. John Chrysostom
A proposal: if we are going to study something as important and mysterious as Gregorian chant, we ought to be able to perform it convincingly in several different ways.
Dom Mocquereau’s editions are a compromise between tradition and paleography. This explains his sometimes surprising semiological conclusions.
Years ago, I struggled with being a “people pleaser.” (That means saying whatever will please the person standing in front of you.)
I don’t think our readers are interested in what we say about Gregorian rhythm—they’re interested only in what we can demonstrate.
“Perhaps surprisingly, not one word of three syllables in the ancient Easter sequence ‘Laudes Salvatori voce’ is sung to the rhythm of a dactyl.” —Alasdair Codona
Let there be no mistake about it: Dom Mocquereau (illicitly) added the “salicus” in hundreds of places where the official edition has none.
The beginnings of a response to mensuralism from the classic Solesmes point of view.
Fascinating details from never-before-seen letters recently discovered in southern France!
… including a deliciously dazzling discovery you won’t want to miss!
There’s nothing necessarily authentic about the “authentic” rhythm.
The incomparable Andrew Hinkley kindly set it to plainchant notation.
You look upon these thousands of manuscripts in much the same way that I view the plainsong editions of Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers.
A brief historical survey of free rhythm in plainchant, as practiced from the modern monastic foundation of Solesmes (1833) to the present.
