Performance Practice and the Politics of Transcribing Byzantine Chant1
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Performance Practice and the Politics of Transcribing Byzantine Chant1 Alexander Lingas2 Transcriptions of Byzantine chants into staff notation, despite their proven utility,3 have been generating controversy ever since the first Western European attempts to apprehend the intervallic and rhythmic information conveyed by medieval Byzantine neumes.4 These early efforts not only sparked debates among Western academics as to whose interpretation was more correct, but also provoked a strongly negative reaction from certain Greek scholars and cantors who saw all of the transcriptions as musically alien to the received tradition of Byzantine chanting. By the mid-1920s, Western musicologists and Greek traditionalists had each achieved a modicum of internal consensus, leaving the two sides arrayed against each other over issues of tuning, rhythm, chromaticism, and ornamentation. These positions hardened in the next decade as the debates became focused on the transcriptions issued by the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (MMB) of Copenhagen, the organisation founded in 1931 by Carsten Høeg, H.J.W. Tillyard and Egon Wellesz to co-ordinate Western musicological study of Byzantine chant. Although the MMB suspended its Transcripta series in 1958, transcriptions into staff-notation have continued until the present day to serve as the moment of truth for illustrating divergent theories about the interpretation of Byzantine neumes. The ability of staff notation to function in such a decisive manner is, of course, partially predicated on the assumption that it is what Greek scholars would call a “hyper-analytical” and Westerners would call a “super-prescriptive” form of musical notation.5 In other words, a Byzantine melody written in Western score, in contrast to a transmission in Byzantine neumes of any period, is assumed to be a relatively complete representation of its realisation in sound. Yet, as the recent revival of Early Music has forcefully reminded Western musicians, such assumptions are a relatively recent development, for staff notation, like its Byzantine counterpart, has only gradually progressed toward greater precision. In general, the earlier the repertory, the more its realisation was dependent on a body of unwritten conventions known collectively as “performance (or performing) practice.”6 If the ratios of written to unwritten knowledge required at the opposite ends of this musical spectrum have long been obvious – the earliest staffless neumes of West and East require singers already familiar with 1 The author would like to thank Lycourgos Angelopoulos and Ioannis Arvanitis for sharing pre-publication copies of forthcoming articles. Research for this paper was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and grants from the Philoptochos and Church Music Federation of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of San Francisco. 2 Assistant Professor, Arizona State University School of Music Fellow, European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford 3 In addition to facilitating the dissemination of information to non-specialists, transcriptions have been a particularly useful tool for the comparative study of Byzantine melodies because a “graphic” notation plotting a melody on a staff is arguably better suited visually to the task of comparison than a “digital” notation listing the succession of intervals with a single line of neumes. This distinction between the two types of notation comes from Kenneth Levy, “Byzantine Rite, Music of the” in ed. Stanley Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 3, p. 554. 4 For a survey of studies by Western scholars, see Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed., Oxford 1961, p. 2-3, 11-18. Markos Dragoumis discusses the little-known but arguably more successful efforts by a Constantinopolitan cantor at the turn of the present century in Markos Vasileiou, A Pioneer of Byzantine Musicology, chap. in Christian Hannick, ed., Rhythm in Byzantine Chant: Acta of the congress held at Hernen Castle in November 1986, Hernen 1991, p. 45–53. 5 On the relationship between original sources, scholarly editions and their realisation in sound in Western music, see Howard Mayer Brown, “Performing Practice”, in ed. Stanley Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 14, London 1980, 370–93; and idem, “Editing,” in The New Grove, vol. 5, p. 839-48. Two noteworthy discussions of the difficulties faced by interpreters of medieval music are by Margaret Bent, Editing Early Music: The Dilemma of Translation, in Early Music 22, 1994, 373–92; and Leo Treitler, Cantus planus binatim in Italy and the Question of Oral and Written Transmission in General, in Cesare Corsi and Perluigi Petrobelli, eds., Le polifonie primitive in Friuli e in Europa: Atti del congresso internazionale Cividale di Friuli, 22– 24 Agosto 1980, Rome 1989, p. 145–56. 6 Brown, “Performing Practice”, p. 370–71. Alexander Lingas – Performance Practice and the Politics of Transcribing Byzantine Chant 57 the melody in question, whilst the highly annotated scores of certain twentieth-century composers have pushed performers toward the standards of mechanical reproduction – it is important to note that the extent to which pre-twentieth-century scores were conceived with reference to conventions that later disappeared from the collective consciousness of Western art music has become apparent only in the wake of the Early Music revival. Whether or not one agrees with those musicologists and performers who have embarked on a quest for “authenticity” that the recovery of this missing knowledge is obligatory, cognisance of its absence has, as Donald J. Grout once observed, “given everybody a bad conscience.”7 To give but one example, a violinist aspiring to give a ’historically informed’ performance of a Baroque sonata should know that the melody shown in Example 1A might reasonably have elicited something like Example 1B from his or her eighteenth- century forebear.8 Example 1. Corelli, Sonatas for Violin Op. 5, No. 3, opening of the first movement Adagio Ï Ï a) ¡ c ú Ï. Ï Ï. Ï Ï ä J Ï Ï ä J Ï Ï Ï ú ¢& J J + + Ï. Ï Ï Ï b) ¡ c ú Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï. Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï ä J ¢& Ï+ + ¡ ÏÏ Ï ÏÏÏÏ Ï.ÏÏ. ÏÏÏ Ï Ï & Ï Ï Ï ¨ÏÏ Ï ÏÏ Ï. Ï ú ¢ Despite striking parallels between the problems faced by devotees of Western Early Music and medieval Byzantine chant over the interpretation of their respective musical texts, the latter have largely refrained from the intense self-examination that now so noisily engages the former.9 If the relative lack of such a discourse in the field of Byzantine musicology is not overly surprising – its practitioners in Anglo- American academia have been accused repeatedly of undue remoteness from actual musical experience10 – the questions avoided remain no less pressing. The remainder of this paper will therefore be devoted to re- 7 On Historical Authenticity in the Performance of Old Music, in Essays on Music in Honour of Archibald Thompson Davison, Cambridge, Mass., 1957, 342; quoted in Richard Taruskin, The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past, in Nicholas Kenyon, ed., Authenticity and Early Music, Oxford 1988, 144. 8 Example 1 shows the opening of the Third Sonata in C Major from Arcangelo Corelli’s opus 5, (Rome, 1700) with the ornaments ascribed to the composer in Estienne Roger’s Amsterdam edition of 1712 as presented in F. Chrysander, ed., Les oeuvres de Arcangelo Corelli, vol. 13, Bergedorf near Hamburg, 1890. The authenticity of these ornaments and a variety of later approaches to ornamenting these sonatas are discussed in Neal Zaslaw, Ornaments for Corelli’s Violin Sonatas, op. 5, in Early Music 24 1996, 95–115. 9 Whilst several studies featuring detailed analyses of performance practice and/or contemporary non-philological methodologies have recently appeared, these works focus primarily on repertories situated beyond the geographic or chronological boundaries of the Byzantine Empire. They include Lycourgos Angelopoulos, ‘H shmasía têß Éreunaß kaì didaskalíaß toû Símwnoß Kará, ªß pròß tçn ™pisëmansh kài katagrafç têß ™nérgeiaß tôn shmeíwn têß xeironomíaß (proforokêß ¢rmhneíaß têß graptêß parádoshß), a communication presented to the Musicological Symposium held in Delphi 4–7 September 1986, later published separately in a bilingual (Greek/French) edition with audiocassette supplement as Lycourgos Ant. Angelopoulos, L’importance de l’étude et de l’enseignement de Simon Karas sur l’indication et l’inventaire des signes de la chironomie (geste manuel), (Interpretation orale de la tradition écrite), Communication faite au colloque de musicologie de Delphes, 4–7 Septembre 1986, Athens 1998; Ioannis Arvanitis, A Way to the Transcription of Byzantine Chant by Means of Written and Oral Tradition, in ed. C. Troelsgård, Byzantine Chant: Tradition and Reform, Acts of a Meeting held at the Danish Institute at Athens, Monographs of the Danish Institute at Athens 2, Aarhus, 1997, 123–41; Peter Jeffery, Re-Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant, Chicago and London, 1992, 123–41; Ioannis Zannos, Ichos und Makam: Vergleichende Untersuchungen zum Tonsystem der griechisch-orthodoxen Kirchenmusik und der türkischen Kunstmusik, Bonn, 1994; and idem, “Ornamentation, improvisation and composition in the oral tradition of Greek Orthodox church music at Constantinople,” in Christian Meyer, ed., Aspects de la musique liturgique au Moyen Age, Rencontres à Royaumont series Paris, 1991,