Re: Sephardic shul

[Matthew Fields <fields...>]

A slight reordering for convenience...

In article <9301111110(dot)aa14240 (at) thama1(dot)apgea(dot)army(dot)mil> 
<jewish-music (at) israel(dot)nysernet(dot)org> writes:
>Could you translate a couple of those terms for us non-music specialists?
>(organum, firmus)
>This sounds kind of interesting.....
>mzk

>Matthew Fields writes:

>> Whoopsy, somebody said singing in fourths was from early Gregorian
>> chant.  Forgive me if I'm outa it, but isn't that already organum?

Organum: a series of historical methods in which groups of singers
decorated their chant melodies, first by singing it in parallel intervals,
then introducing contrary melodic motion to what they considered more
"consonant" (lower on the harmonic series) intervals at resting points, and
finally (in the 13-14th century) an elaborate system with a chant proceeding
very slowly in long notes while rapid decorative melodies circle around
transpositions of the melody...  It is a feature of these styles that
thirds and sixths are considered sharply dissonant and are rare features
in the early forms, although they become more common incidental occurences
later.  It is a feature of the contemporary theories of this kind of music
that a single melody is being heterophonically decorated, rather than
our later idea of several distinct melodies sounding.

Somebody out there forwarded to me a nifty 4-page historical "tour" of
the series of styles called organum.

Between the organum style and Renaissance style (the latter sounds
much more familiar to modern ears because it uses full 3-note triads
in the harmony) lies an intermediary style called Fauxbordon (task of
[selectively] being untrue) in which a melody {always from Gregorian
Chant} is imitated at the upper fourth, and also at the lower
third---but at resting points the upper two voices ascend a step while
the lowest voice descends a step, so whereas for most of each phrase
the singers are singing what we now would call parallel first-inversion
triads, at phrase endings they open up to open fifths and octaves.

>> Early Gregorian chant sounds a lot more like Torah trope to my ears.
   ^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ i.e. single line melodies, without any of these
decorative schemes, used mainly to emphasize important syllables and
rhetorical parts of the text by placing them on extreme notes while most
of the melody was repetitions of a central pitch.  The text was almost
invariably a standard liturgical text or a lesson from a scripture.
We have legible notational sources for standardized Gregorian chant dating
back about to the 7th century.

>> And of course, Jews may have participated in the organum trend, but I don't
>> know of any documentation of it except the after-the-fact bit of modern
>> shuls doing it.

Now, from this point on in my previous posting, I'm no longer talking about
medieval styles.

>> As folks mentioned here, Jews were pretty active in the
>> musical "renaissance" and "baroque" movements (a reference to the
>> New York Pro Musica Antiqua's records of Salomone Rossi goes here).

The MUSICAL renaissance movement is usually said to have started in
Burgandy, at the Flemish courts, around the turn of the 15th century.

Most folks cite the development of what we would now recognize as the modern
musical theater about 1590 by Jacobo Peri as the cutoff date for the shift
from renaissance to baroque ideals...but plans of intellectual wizardry,
like fugue and canon, date to the former.

Salomone Rossi was a contemporary of Monteverdi who wrote, among other things,
settings of psalms (in Ivrit) in the hyper-romantic style of his day, for use
in the synagogue.

>> But I don't know of any cantus firmus shabbat services (---but for
>> a proper fee I'd make one up!).

Ok, here's a $0.40 musicological term.  The cantus firmus mass, one of
the big intellectual ideas of the renaissance movement, started with a
preexisting tune, either a segment of Gregorian chant, or (especially
later and in places where church censorship was less strong) a popular
tune, possibly even one associated with quite baudy texts, which most
of the congregation was expected to know.  At each of several
(initially four) points in the church service, an important prayer
would be presented by having a choir of young men and boys sing it on
this preexisiting melody (the same melody all times in the same service)
accompanied by various freely-composed other melodies above and below it.
Again there was a great deal of experimentation with making the preexisting
known tune proceed more slowly than the rest of the tunes, in varying
proportions.  This plan was significant for all the rest of western music
history because it introduced the idea of "organicism", i.e. the idea that
large amounts of music can be unified over a long time by the inclusion
of a common melodic idea throughout---an "organic" seed of an idea
widely planted.

My "proposal" was only partly in jest.  As some of you out there know,
I've recently written a double fugue for trombones on two traditional
Jewish melodies, a high holiday Mi Khamokha tune and Khad Gadya.
Given a contract leading to well-rehearsed performance and proper compensation,
I'd undertake to write music for a service, starting e.g. with Ma Tovu,
using e.g. a reorchestration of this fugue as a sort of overture.

I hope that about covers this topic.

>> -Matt

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