The Spirit of Gregorian
Donovan, Vincent C
THE SPIRIT OF GREGORIAN By VINCENT C. DONOVAN NO MUSICIAN questions the authority of Mr. Ernest Bloch in modern music. It is of interest, therefore, that Mr. Bloch should have said, a few years...
...Res non verba" was the motto of that...
...Achille Bragers at the organ...
...For practically half a century, with the aid of his Benedictine brethren at Solesmes, he labored patiently and with scientific scrupulosity at digging out from hundreds of manuscripts the lost tradition of Gregorian art...
...I hope for much from these instructions...
...An announcement from the Victor Company says negotiations for this epoch-making work are under way...
...In 1919 the writer spent several memorable months at the feet of this saintly monk...
...Bloch should have said, a few years ago, to the writer: "Gregorian chant is the basis of all our music, and probably the greatest, the most "modern," the most beautiful music ever written...
...The Church recognizes the human need of appealing to the senses...
...They awakened emotions of warm devotion and tears which benefited me...
...Ward, with Mr...
...The whole Ordinary of the Mass, as sung by celebrant and choir, is included...
...She aims to stimulate action...
...But only desire can enkindle that...
...The dignity and chastity of the diatonic scales, which constitute its tonality, purify the senses while stimulating them, and in this purging there is peace, not the restlessness of modern chromatics...
...They are necessary means, but they are not to be rested in as ends, because they are able to grasp only the present, concrete fact, and not the intangible, universal idea which facts embody...
...Dom Mocquereau agreed with the writer that the realization of the Church's command that her liturgical music be restored to popular use depended in large measure on the cooperation of the faithful in the United States...
...It is of great moment, then, that, almost on the occasion of the silver jubilee of Pius X's Motu Proprio, and the death of Dom Mocquereau there should be released by the Victor Talking Machine Company, a set of two records made by the Pius X Choir under the direction of Mrs...
...This good lady has taken our method, assimilated it and exposed it to the little ones with an admirable art...
...Through its beautiful recording Dom Mocquereau's principles which were those of the golden era of the chant, become living realities...
...This is largely because the chant melody naturally achieves what Wagner sought in his music-dramas, as told us by Mr...
...It convinces because its principle is that of the Paleographie of which we might say it is an epitome...
...The dynamics clarify this idea by delicate nuances of the crescendo and decrescendo, the billowy flow lifting up in perfect symmetry, on graduated planes of emphasis, the phrases which express the idea...
...And desire is generated by thought...
...Its tonality, melodic line, rhythm and dynamics emphasize the intangibility of the idea they aim to supplement and clarify by appealing to the emotions, yet lifting us above them...
...It is to be hoped that these records of the chant, so true in rendition and so marvelous in reproduction, will be secured, studied and absorbed by hierarchy, clergy, religious choirs, schools and the laity at large...
...Their rhythm is the rhythm of that speech, and makes palpable the sea-like flow of the melodies, uniting the melodic elements into intelligible words and phrases, and so emphasizing the textual idea...
...These voices forced an entrance into my ear, and with them the truth into my heart...
...Music, through the medium of Gregorian chant, thus becomes truly the language of the soul...
...A year later they met at the International Gregorian Congress in New York City...
...under the immediate direction of Mrs...
...It is the authoritative work, on Gregorian chant...
...One realizes on hearing it the truth of the statement that "what we cannot say, we sing...
...Not only with his keen, honest mind but also with a heart fired by faith and love, Dom Moc-quereau found the key to the Gregorian hieroglyphics, and reinterpreted for us the Church's own song, as it was in its pristine beauty after Gregory the Great's compilation...
...I am giving her daily lessons in Gregorian chant, and she assists at all the Offices assiduously...
...The whole nature of Gregorian chant proves this...
...Song says so much more than mere words...
...The same equanimity is felt in the chant's melodic line, which progresses steadily by means of small intervals rather than by the nervous leaps of the moderns...
...The secrets of Gregorian art he has left us in a two-volume work of fascinating clarity, Le Nombre Musical...
...It is eternally young, because it was written by inward necessity...
...Ward is here...
...The purity and smoothness of melodic line, enhanced by a lovely tone, the rhythmic sweep of phrase, the delicate nuance of the dynamics are thrillingly recorded...
...In years past an occasional record of the chant had been made by other choirs, but the renditions were more or less arbitrary, and the recording was not what it is today...
...When she leaves Quarr she will be well grounded in both the practice and the theory...
...The melody, rhythm and dynamics flow from the idea because they spring from the word expressing it, and do for the text what faith does for reason-carries it beyond its own limitations...
...For these records should hasten the day when the new barbarians are converted from their vulgarity to beauty...
...It is the glory of Dom Andre Mocquereau, O. S. B., recently deceased at his abbey of Saint Peter, Solesmes, France, to have restored this lost beauty to the Church and society at large...
...In listening one realizes why the Church has been so rigorous and steadfast in her age-long legislation regarding liturgical music...
...But human nature is so constituted that, as scientists tell us, "the presence in the consciousness of appropriate feelings is indispensable to mental assimilation...
...Eusebius said: "We sing God's praises with living psaltery, inspired cithara and spiritual songs...
...The Pius X School was delighted to accept the Victor Company's invitation to make these recordings of the chant because the need for a model had been felt in the schools and among the earnest students of liturgical music...
...Above all float the words of the text-a body glorified, clarified and interpreted by the soul the chant breathes into it...
...Ward then went to Europe to absorb the teaching of the Gregorian master...
...but her purpose in this is not so much the stimulation of the emotions as their regulation...
...The Cum Jubilo Mass, its various parts dating from the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, is sung by the Pius X Choir, trained by Mother Stevens and Mrs...
...He was intrigued, therefore, at learning of the work and aim of Mrs...
...For more pleasant and dear to God than any instrument is the harmony of the whole Christian people, when in all the churches of Christ we sing psalms and hymns with harmonious minds and well-tuned hearts...
...The Gregorian melodies accentuate the natural inflections of the voice in oratoric speech...
...A further step in this direction will be the proposed recording of the Mass and Vespers as sung by the monks of Solesmes themselves...
...Henderson, "The interpretation of text by sung tones . . . using the music just as he would the inflections of the voice in speaking to bring out the meaning of the sentences...
...The next year he wrote me: "Mrs...
...The Paleographie Musicale is the result of this scientific research, and one of the greatest achievements in the modern field of research...
...Ward and the Pius X School of Liturgical Music endowed by her...
...Several months later he wrote regarding Gregorian courses one of his brethren was giving in this country: "But what is most encouraging for the future in America is the Gregorian chant which Mrs...
...So the Church with her deep insight and her burning zeal, uses as an integral part of her worship the most emotional, yet most intangible, of the arts to generate an idea, thus through beauty to impel society to truth and goodness...
...Ward...
...Dom Mocquereau lived to see that hope more than realized...
...it contains the ideas which are to instruct, persuade and transform man...
...It will stay young and new, when our so-called 'modern music' will have become obsolete...
...And one cannot help but appreciate the following words of Saint Augustine: "How I have wept at the hymns and songs, deeply moved by the voices of your sweet-sounding church music...
...Ward (and Dom Mocquereau himself...
...Now, however, students of music, apostles of the liturgy, and lovers of the beautiful in general have authentic renditions...
...Justine Ward has for several months been preparing here for the children...
...This is why the Church stresses the importance of the liturgical text...
...the facts of the Gregorian composers, not the preconceived theories of modernists limited in their knowledge by their own self-sufficiency, give us definitely the principles of intelligent interpretation of liturgical chant...
...Perhaps then the day will not be far off when the liturgical ideal will be realized in the twentieth as in the ninth century, and we shall hear a male chancel choir alternating with the congregation in the musical idiom of the Church...
...His authoritative approval was more than once, in writing and in person given to the work of the Pius X School at Sacred Heart College...
...It is ethereal because it does not use sound for sound's sake, but for sense's sake...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 25
