Chanting tunes

Dr Francis Roads has written an article on Joseph Key's chanting tunes. An extract:

"The chanting tune was developed as means of enabling local quires to sing prose psalms and canticles. The Anglican psalm chant was the usual manner in which prose psalms were rendered in the cathedral style. But Anglican psalm chanting is an art, which entails the ability of singers to fit phrases of several, sometimes many, syllables to a single note in the manner of speech rhythms, and then to change notes together at the right instant. Then as now many local quires found this art beyond them. The metrical psalms developed as one means of solving this problem, and proved a popular option. But chanting tunes remained an alternative."

We had a chat about these the other evening, and I'm just getting around to reading the article myself and looking up the form in Temperley.

Chanting tunes are a way of singing prose psalms and canticles to metered music -- unlike Anglican chant, the words aren't sung in natural rhythm on a single reciting note. Instead, each word is assigned a note value within the melody. The tenor and alto alternate singing verses of the psalm, the basses sing throughout, and the sopranos tend not to have much to do until the doxology. Like other music of its period it would likely have been accompanied by whatever instruments were available. Having sung with musicians who are not singers or even wind players, I wonder whether the challenges of getting a number of amateur instrumentalists to accompany chanting with a freer rhythm was another factor contributing to the need for regular, metrical music. This would especially apply if there were few enough resources that the person directing the music also had to sing or play.

I think there are some advantages and disadvantages to this method of chanting psalms. The first thing is that it will require rather more paper than either Anglican prose chants pointed for singing, or metrical psalms in Common Metre. But there is an advantage too -- with flexibility of word placement but metrical music it should be possible to make sure the emphases stay on the right syllables, which is not easy in Anglican chant.

A second disadvantage is one that applies also to other chant forms: the longer psalms and canticles may get tedious with so much repetition of the same melodic material. In Anglican chant this is sometimes worked around by not only the alternation of the cantoris and decani sections (which is echoed in chanting tunes by the alternation of alto and tenor) but by dramatic treatment of the text, easier in a free rhythm, and by creative registration on the accompanying organ (if any). Having all the music written out without any specified variations might make people less likely to experiment with such variations; but in the hands of a sensitive and competent director, even a small group should be able to give an effective performance.

One of the things Francis mentioned was the adaptation of chanting tunes to the resources available today. This is definitely an area of interest for me -- this evening at St Andrew's I had three choir members turn up for rehearsal, and I consider myself fortunate on Sunday mornings when there are twice as many as that. With three, I would need to adapt the tenor and alto parts to be sung by all, and play the bassline on the organ; with six, if the two gentlemen turn up, it should be possible to alternate the ladies and mens voices. Since I'm using an organ all the possibilities for creative registration are there; and this style of chanting is going to be much easier to learn and to direct than the more fluid Anglican chant.

I guess my next steps in exploring the possibilities of chanting tunes for modern liturgy are to visit the British Library to look at some more examples, and to try my hand at writing some -- perhaps using the Common Worship psalter, which aims to retain some of the feel of the Coverdale psalter used in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer but uses somewhat less archaic language.

I will sing praises

I've been incubating a project. It isn't done yet -- won't be for a while -- but I think it's time to start writing about it.

I have developed something of an interest in the psalms. Partly to encourage their use in (Christian) liturgy, and partly to indulge in my passion for learning more about them, I want to run a series of workshops. The idea would be to look at the psalms in what we understand of their original context, and then go on a sort of meandering path through liturgical history, examining how they would have been sung, chanted or said in various situations, and why. I'd like to draw on what we do know about the Hebrew chanting/singing of psalms in Temple times... and of course Gregorian chant will feature, and Anglican chant, as well as the West Gallery metrical psalmody which I have grown to love so much through my singing and playing in the London Gallery Quire. Gelineau's translations of the psalms into French will feature, and the Grail responsorial versions and their offspring. I'd also like to look at other English vernacular psalmody in Christian worship in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a view to finding, disseminating, developing or creating resources for using the psalms in worship in situations where existing musical traditions are inappropriate or inaccessible.

Ideally I'd like each of the workshops to include some listening, some teaching, and some audience participation. With Gregorian chant, for example, I could sing some chants, or have another performer or even a choir sing them. Then I would talk about the history of Gregorian chant, the issues around singing in Latin as opposed to Hebrew, the use of the psalms in monastic worship, and the problems inherent for us when we try to use Gregorian tunes meant for Latin to sing in English with its very different word stress and vowels. I could highlight resources for further study and discuss in which situations Gregorian chant -- in Hebrew or in English -- may enhance worship, and in which it might be inappropriate. And then we could try some ourselves, myself and everyone there who is interested in trying... I could do a five-minute crash-course in chant notation for anyone who wants to have a go at reading it, but would provide modern notation as well for those that want it. We'd start with something we heard earlier so it wouldn't be completely unfamiliar, and take things gently, seeing how far we get, just to get an idea of what it feels like. I'll have to adapt this part of the workshop quite heavily to the capabilities of those attending, but I think that my topic is narrow enough that most people who are interested will have enough interest in music and singing to be able to cope with simpler chants in unison.

Obviously, I cannot hope to present a complete treatment of the topic of musical aspects of psalmody in the four to six workshops which would make this a manageable project, and there are considerable barriers to accurate performance of the earliest sung and chanted psalmody and copyright issues with the most recent publications of music for psalms. However, even with light academic content, I want to be able to answer people's questions or refer them to appropriate resources for learning more. This means I have spent the last several weeks reading quite a lot, and e-mailing various people about the project and getting, in return, varying degrees of delightful encouragement and support, and an even longer reading list! I'm now at the point where I'm feeling rather overwhelmed by the number of books still on the "to read" list, and I need to start getting some rough outlines written down so that I can read more purposefully and begin to think seriously about selection of the music.

I'll try to blog about some other things, too, once in a while, so it isn't just all psalmody, all the time.