THERE WAS A BRIEF period in my education when I thought I would specialize in medieval music, it was a hot topic in the 60s and early 70s. But it was extremely frustrating, not merely because so many of the essential details of the music, especially what we called "performance practice" was simply not available in the primary documentation but because it was and, from what I now gather from afar, still is extremely political and ideological. Given I was a keyboard player and organs with Pythagorean tuning with medieval registration were non-existent in my area, it was extremely impractical. I decided to specialize in music closer to our time for which such details were available in far more cases, in many cases in performances by composer-performers that you could actually hear.
I join those who believe that most if not all of the medieval "performance practice" was a lot more individual and localized and varied than used to be imagined by "early music" specialists. And it's clear that much of it depended on improvisation, one of the greatest evidences of that was Guillaume de Machaut saying he didn't want people to improvise on his music. Such practices would mostly never be written down, many of the musicians didn't use notation which is why we have texts of so many songs without much if any musical notation to tell us how they were performed. The reported accompaniments of them, on vielle, rebec, harp, etc. is almost entirely undocumented, more about that in a minute.
What I'm doing here, what I'm hoping might inspire, a new chant practice is definitely not intended to be an exercise in neo-medieval romance. If you want that you can either profitably do that by starting or joining a Gregorian Chant choir or destructively do it by joining up with the "trad" Catholic cult.
But when the topic is chant, the habit of thought goes to the medieval. So I'll say a few words and give you a few better words from some credible experts, such as those are at any given time.
I don't know how the current medieval music scene lies, I don't much read about it or listen to much of it anymore There is just so much music you can consume, you can't speed listen to music.
I can say that one of the best resources I bought and have about that is the now quarter of a century old A Performers Guide To Medieval Music compiled by Ross Duffin. The best of the articles in it are probably still good practical as well as informed advice based, when possible, in contemporary documentation. It has outlasted most of the 19th and 20th century books on the topic which I've read, those by Willi Apel notably excepted from that obsolescence.
Looking at it again after many years, Benjamin Bagby's article "Imagining the Early Medieval Harp" is both honest about the impossibility of knowing if you are playing music that would have been played by a genuine medieval harpist though I think the clues we have and which he mentions can indicate if you're at least pointed in the right direction with that. His source of inspiration in the description and recorded African practice of playing the Mbira, the procedure of which matches the contemporary descriptions of medieval harp playing and the small range of the instrument, strikes me as inspired.
The other articles dealing with specific instruments and kinds of instruments are good too. Almost as useful is the article Improvisation and Accompaniment before 1300 by Margriet Tindemans is very useful. I especially like her General Rules,
1. Keep it simple, 2. Be deliberate, make choices before you play. 3. Do not try to be overly creative. . . The perfect melody will come when you least expect it and 4. Practice since most musical training nowadays concerns itself primarily with what is written music and instruction, it may take a little while to learn to keep track of what you are playing in your head instead of on paper, and make up new things while you are playing.
That last one is a description of good ear training based musicianship and the act of composition in which what is in your mind or under your hands should come before you start writing it down.
I'll give you the introduction to her Exercises, too.
1. Learn your modes [she refers to another chapter in the books which gives a better explanation of the modes than you'll find in most places] Be very aware of the species of fifth and the species of fourth in each mode.
I'll break in here and say I think this is best considered an aspect of ear training and coordinating habits gained from that with your voice or hands, if you're playing an instrument. As a thing you can articulate in words, it's not much more useful than the ink on the page is to you when the moment of performance is at hand. "Awareness" here is more a matter of practiced expectation and habit - though I will remind you that much of superior music making is a matter of breaking those. Gary Burton's 2010 lecture on playing jazz at his level, talking about how you have to have the physical feel of the harmonies because you can't think of those fast enough is about exactly what I mean.
2. Familiarize yourself with as many vocal models as you can find, especially monophonic songs of all kinds. In the chapter on medieval fiddle you will find a more detailed listing of various repertoires and styles.
Keep in mind she's trying to recreate the conditions for improvising on that repertoire. For the purposes of a new chant, it's at least unnecessary though it might be helpful if you handle it the right way. I would implore you to not try to imitate it.
3. Advises you to learn the different forms of medieval music, I'll just say that if you're interested you should look at how Gregorian and other chant was used liturgically and personally. And that is too big a topic to really go into.
4. Look at and try to learn different languages. Even if you do not speak or understand them much information can be gathered from the sounds How do they sound different one from the other, a dhow could you imitate these differences on your instrument?
Of course, interested in both new local and international chant practices, I'd encourage people to write chants in their own languages and to write it in the only current, ideologically, politically and economically neutral language, Esperanto. I can point out that's something I agree with Lou Harrison about, he advised in his Music Primer:
TO AVOID THE MONSTROSITIES that might be done to your vocal works in translations, make one version yourself directly in the international language endorsed by UNESCO - Esperanto. This language is particularly musical anyway, more so, I think than the majority of ethnic tongues . . .
That's good advice IF the text you've set is something that can be recreated by you in Esperanto which is far more flexible in word order and other aspects of the language than, for example, English or French are. Though for Scriptural and certainly liturgical texts I think it would be best to rewrite the music according to the necessities of the text in whatever language instead of making a version of the same composition.
5. Look at texts, learn about poetic and other forms, learn about poetic devices such as rhyme, form, alliteration etc. [The necessity of this in effectively setting texts is rather obvious though what that means in how you actually set the text is, as I indicated yesterday, undefinable. I can guess that if you try doing it you will get caught up in a net of complexity that will inhibit you. Consider how many great folk songs, spirituals etc. were created probably without any of these being taken into account. At this point I would ignore those unless you notice them. NEVER ALLOW ANYTHING TO INHIBIT YOUR ATTEMPTS AT COMPOSITION. There's plenty of time to revise or withdraw or not to publish. ]
6. Playing an instrument was considered a science as well as a craft; to be versatile you have to do it enough. Make up short patterns and repeat them on each degree of the mode you have chosen. Then repeat the same pattern backwards in mirror (inversion) and backwards at the same time again on each degree.
She then give a number of such pattern exercises which are certainly more relevant to playing an instrument than they are to composing chants. I will be giving you a very large number of patterns with suggestions of how you might use them to increase your musicianship, any of which you might use this way but that's for next time.
Before I finish this post, I will be giving you much of what William Mahrt, the very experienced director of a Gregorian Chant choir director said in his article in the book in another post. Till then I'll give you this link to an episode of Ross Duffin's old radio program in which he discussed the rhythm of Gregorian Chant with William Mahrt calling your attention to the extremely useful transcript of the show to the right of the screen. I especially found what he said about the practice of the choir at Einsiedeln, in which most notes are more or less the same length except for some which, at appropriate points in the text are about twice as long to be extremely helpful. After puzzling over the written instructions of those who promote the famous Solesmes rhythmic practice and after a half a century not being able to really make heads nor tails of it, I think the Einsiedlen practice is far more valuable and doable and a better way to sing the texts.
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