Chanting

My music history class this semester is on Western Music from Middle Ages. What this really means is church music from the Middle Ages since little else from that time period has survived. So much was transmitted orally before the advent of the printing press. It was the monks and Charlemagne who are responsible for what we know of most music of the time.

Anyway, what that really means in concrete terms is that we spend a lot of time in class sight singing (sight reading with voice) chants from the liturgy of the time. Today was all about tropes, which are basically embellishments to standard chants.

One of the issues in early music notation is that they didn't change the note lengths or put in bar lines. So you'd have these long series of quarter notes, and you wouldn't necessarily know what to emphasize. In class today, we took one of these, broke into groups, and created our own editorial markings. You start by sight singing the notes -- all in quarters. As you sing, you can hear a tonal center emerge -- the note the music tends to drift back to as a "home base". When you start putting in bar lines, you begin to notice patterns, series of note intervals that are repeated. Then you have a choice: do you keep the patterns together, as an echo of each other, or do you break them up to create variety?

In the early Middle Ages, monks had to memorize these. Without words, all the repetition made that a daunting task. Notker was a monk who lived in the monastery at St. Gall. In about 880, he started adding text to the melody as a mneumonic device. He got the idea from another monk visiting the monastery, but Notker's manuscripts are the ones that survive today. It's because of him that we have a sense how the monks may have broken up the melodies, phrasing them and making them musical.

It's so neat to me to think about a time when we didn't have written music. What would you do to create a musical notation if you didn't have one? How would you denote pitch? Rhythm? Dynamics? You could add in other things that we don't typically notate today, like tone color or other items from technique.

In today's world, we still think about how to notate things, particularly in avant-garde music that pushes the boundaries of what we think of as "typical" sound. I wonder what people will think of our music 1200 years from now. Will they have a good idea based on the markings and recordings we're leaving behind?

~Hope