Efecto Raman

offertory Jubilate Deo, universa terra3_{to be a literal representation of}

the Psalmist’s injunction to sing joyfully by singing a jubilus, a nearly

wordless melisma.

This view of chant has recently come into question, and at that, the question is not entirely new. John Stevens, in a com-

pendious treatise, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song,

Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350, devotes an extended

discussion to text setting in Gregorian chant;4_{in summarizing his}

results, he says that he has rejected

relations between text and melody which seemed to rest upon a direct apprehension, a direct representa- tion or expression, of ideas in musical terms . . . . On the rare occasions when it (the music) responds at all to the detailed meaning, it responds to the sound of that meaning as realized in the sound of the words, whether the words are onomatopoeic or expressive of human emotion.5

He views the relation of word to music in all chant as indifferent, neutral, essentially no more engaged than in a psalm tone, and believes that

although certain aspects of the chant may properly be, and were, talked about in rhetorical terms, this central function of rhetoric (human persuasion), is . . . irrele- vant to its understanding.6

Moreover, he is convinced that in the case of formulaic chants, particularly graduals, tracts, and responsories, “there

3_{GT, pp. 227f.; LU, pp. 486f.}

4_{John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and}

Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Chapter 8, “Speech and Melody: Gregorian Chant,” pp. 268–307; for two other views, see Terence Bailey, “Word-Painting and the Romantic Interpretation of Chant,”

and Andrew Hughes, “Word Painting in a Twelfth-Century Office,” Beyond the

Moon: Festschrift Luther Dittmer, ed. Bryan Gillingham and Paul Merkley (Ottawa: The Institute of Medieval Music, 1990), pp. 1–15 and 16–27.

5_{Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages, p. 307.}

seems to be little point in attempting a detailed analysis,” since the formulaic system precludes attention to individual words. For him the better place to seek interesting text-music relations is in

the freely-composed chants.7

Stevens is actually somewhat moderate in his views; he

accepts, for example, the liquescent neumes of Passer invenit as

setting the sound of the text, the onomatopoeic element being

already present in the word turtur itself. He also accepts the

jubilus of Jubilate Deo as an “expression of human emotion.”8

Moreover, one must readily concede his objection to overly fanci- ful descriptions, such as Dom Gajard’s of the “jubilate” melisma, the phrase climbs by a succession of leaps, in the manner of a

mighty wave hurling itself into an attack on some cliff,9_{since God}

is not properly approached as “some cliff,” nor is singing joyfully easily compared to an attack.

In all of this Stevens is actually refining the position of Willi

Apel,10 _{whose view of the whole question is much less qualified}

and more negative. Although Apel’s comprehensive and funda- mental work is solidly founded upon the mainstream of European scholarship, he distances himself on this point from the views of Gevaert, Frere, Gérold, Johner, Wagner, and Ferretti:

I can only register my opposition against attempts to explain Gregorian chant as the result of mental processes so obviously indicative of nineteenth-cen- tury emotionalism, so obviously derived from an acquaintance with the art of Wagner and Brahms.l1

Apel provides reasoned refutations of several traditionally interpreted passages, and points out some fairly ambiguous places

7_{Ibid., p. 289.}

8_{Likewise Bailey (pp. 4f.) accepts this long melisma as a kind of general rhetor-}

ical emphasis, but rejects any text expression in Passer invenit (pp. 9–11).

9_{Quoted by Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages, p. 292.}

10_{Willi Apel, Gregorian Chant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958),}

pp. 301–304.

usually taken to be word-painting. One of his arguments is at first glance most convincing. It is a comparative argument for chants based upon melodic formulae: When the same melody sets a number of diverse texts, then the very adaptability of the melody precludes its being able to represent the text individually enough to be word-painting. His final example epitomizes his method,

using the antiphon Ascendo ad Patrem.12 _{This is one of the forty-}

nine antiphons classified by Gevaert as belonging to a formulaic

melody type (Thème 19).13_{In it the normal formula G b c d e d}14

is altered to include the high g: G b c d e g d; it is supposed that this alteration represents the idea of ascent in the text. In refuta- tion Apel shows that another antiphon of the same type (one not

included by Gevaert) has the same figure but speaks of descent.15

Both Stevens and Apel deny, in one way or another, the

unambiguous existence of word-painting in chant.16_{Their denial}

is based upon empirical argumentation: objective proof cannot be established for particular instances of putative word-painting, since in other instances the same word is set otherwise. Moreover, they both seem to assume that if word-painting is to be applicable to chant at all, it ought to be generally applicable—texts which mention ascent as a rule ought to be set to an ascending melody; for Stevens, the neutral quality of the melody on the word “Resurrexi” in the introit for Easter Sunday raises doubts about

any theory of word-painting.17

12_{LU, p. 845.}

13 _{Francois Auguste Gevaert, La Mélopée antique dans le chant de l’église latine}

(1895; Reprint, Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1967), pp. 297–301.

14_{Pitches are here designated according to the medieval gamut: Gamma (bot-}

tom of the bass clef) A-G, a-g, and aa-ee. Middle C is thus simply c.

15 _{Descendi in hortum, in Antiphonaire monastique, XIIe Siècle, Codex 601 de la}

Bibliothèque capitulaire de Lucques, Paléographie musicale, Vol. IX (Solesmes,

Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1906; reprint, Bern: Lang, 1974), p. 458; Apel, Gregorian

Chant, p. 304.

16_{Apel admits the possibility of literal representations of “high” and “low,” but}

he cannot determine whether these are accidental or intentional, citing exam- ples in which the similar words occur with opposite figures (pp. 303f.); Stevens is of the same mind concerning “ascent” and “descent” (p. 302).

The solution depends upon having a clear definition of “word- painting” and placing it in the context of the relation of text and melody. Word-painting is akin to rhetorical figures, embellish- ments used at certain points in a speech for certain effects, par- ticularly those rhetorical figures of thought usually translated as

“vivid description.” Quintilian, for example, describes enargeia

(and similarly evidentia, representatio, hypotyposis, diatyposis) as a

figure “by which a complete image of a thing is somehow painted

in words.”18 _{Now if the rhetorical figure is the use of words to}

“paint” a vivid picture, then in music its analogue is the use of tones to depict a vivid, concrete image, an image arising almost of necessity from the text, and this is what is generally meant by

word-painting.19

The analogy to oratory thus provides the critical distinction. The rules of grammar, which are structural and obligatory, apply to all of speech, while the rhetorical figures, which are embellish- ments and voluntary, to be chosen for the places where they are most effective, might occur only at a few particular points in a speech. Likewise for chant: Stevens is quite right to insist that the basic construction of Gregorian melodies is grammatical, that is, the smaller and larger grammatical elements of the texts are the

basis for corresponding smaller and larger musical phrases.20

18_{“Quo tota rerum imago quodammodo verbis depingitur;” Quintilian, Institutio}

oratoria, VIII, iii, 63 (Loeb Classical Library, 4 vols.; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966); vol. III, pp. 244–247.

19_{Thus the precise musical term might better have been the British term “tone-}

painting” (similar to the German Tonmalerei) , the commonly used “word-paint-

ing” being a term borrowed too literally from rhetoric, non mutatis mutandis.

20 _{Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages, pp. 283–286; Peter Wagner,}

Einführung in die gregorianischen Melodien, III: Gregorianische Formenlehre: Eine choralische Stilkunde (Leipzig, 1921; reprint: Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), pp. 281–294, gave a demonstration of that principle in relation to the bipartite

structure of psalm verses; Mathias Bielitz, Musik und Grammatik: Studien zur

mittelalterlichen Musiktheorie, Beiträge zur Musikforschung, Band 4 (Munich: Emil Katzbichler, 1977), Leo Treitler and Ritva Jonsson, “Medieval Music and

Language: A Reconsideration of the Relationship,” Studies in the History of

Music, Vol. 1: Music and Language (New York: Broude Brothers, 1983), pp. 1–23, and Calvin M. Bower, “The Grammatical Model of Musical