I saw Sequentia and Dialogos present "Chant Wars" last weekend, by
which time the program had acquired the far more staid title of
"The Emperor's Cantors ? The Carolingian Globalization of Medieval
Plainchant". Despite the image conjured up by the first title,
Sequentia and Dialogos did not, alas, face each other across the
church altar, one representing Rome and the other the Carolingian
empire, and sing competing versions of a chant text.
It was, nevertheless, a fascinating program, with chant
interspersed with readings from surviving writings about the
confrontation between Roman and regional chant practices. There was
chant from Gaul and Rome, Alsace and Switzerland, and different use
of melody and mode. We heard various forms of monophonic melodic
chant, a couple truly florid, the notes and words coming so fast
that I was left breathless. Unexpectedly, as often as not, pieces
were not monophonic. In two or three pieces, there were two lines
running in parallel fourths; I'm far more used to the parallel
octaves and fifths of later church homophony. Some pieces had vocal
drones underneath the melody, sometimes joining a cantorial soloist
for brief phrases. And yet, ancient as the manuscripts may have
been, it was new music -- new in this millenium, at any rate, for
as the program said: "For many pieces in this program, ours are the
first known performances since the Middle Ages."
I think my favorite of the tales they recounted was the one in
which the Emperor Charlemagne, wanting the pure, proper Roman
singing in his empire, requested Pope Stephen to send him a dozen
monks who could teach this chant to the singers in his churches.
The monks (those "wily, virtuoso cantors of the Papal court"
mentioned in the original post), looking down on the Carolingians,
met secretly before they left and agreed to each teach different,
incorrect chanting, and went off to confound the foreigners by
causing many wrong methods of chant to take root. They were found
out before they could do much damage, fortunately, and sent back to
Rome where they were imprisoned or exiled. When Charlemagne asked
Stephen for a replacement set of monks, Stephen replied that he
could send them, but they'd probably do the same thing as the first
set. If the Emperor would instead secretly send a couple of his own
monks to Rome, they could be trained in proper chanting, then
return home and correctly train the Carolingian monks. This plan
succeeded admirably, and Roman chant spread through the empire.
In another cool recreation, Benjamin Bagby (director of Sequentia)
has been commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival to perform
Beowulf in its entirety (six hours) in 2006. He currently does a
performance version of the first quarter of that epic, and has a
website that will give
you an idea of what to expect... but unfortunately, I couldn't find
any specific details on the 2006 performance. There's time yet.
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