In one of my earlier posts on reading Gregorian chant I promised to discuss staves and clefs later on. They’re a little different in Gregorian.

Modern music notation uses five lines, like this:

Gregorian chant, in contrast, uses four lines:

The range of Gregorian chant doesn’t usually go beyond an octave, so you won’t see two sets of musical staves together, as in the first example.

Gregorian uses “moveable clefs”, that is, that Doh or C can start one of three lines and Fah or F can start on one of two.

The purpose of this is to permit melodies of different ranges to appear on the staff.

It’s important to note that in singing Gregorian chant, what we think of as “C” in modern terms, that is the middle C on a well-tuned piano with reference pitch to modern A=440, is not likely to be the case. Instead, “C” will be whatever the schola singers or the singing monk or nun finds is most natural and comfortable for their voice. All other notes will then be in relation to that note. (The same likewise for “F”).

So if you have a wire harp like mine, which is tuned to a pitch reference other than A=440, to prevent string breakage, then you’ll be playing Medieval sacred music which is not concert pitch. And that’s fine!

Next up we have the custos, or guide. This little flag that appears at the end of a section or phrase (there are no measures in Gregorian chant) indicates the upcoming note on the next stave.

In the example above, the note C is flagged as the next note one can expect after the change of clef.

It’s simply a courtesy to help prepare sightreaders for the music that lies ahead.

You can see the custos at the end of most of the staves in an illuminated manuscript page from the St. Gall codex below.

Source: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 357, p. 209 – Missal (https://www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/csg/0357)

Post feature image source: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 357, p. 17 – Missal (https://www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/csg/0357)

My preceding posts on reading Gregorian chant didn’t go into how to play it on the wire-strung harp.

Gregorian chant is a vocal music, not an instrumental one. So there’s a little bit of re-interpretation here. Wire harps, unlike nylon-strung Celtic harps, ring for quite a while after you pluck a string with your nails, unless you damp them immediately with your finger pads. This trait allows you to simulate some of the aspects of singing.

If you pluck a note on your wire harp and let it ring, consider it as a sung note. When you play the next one, it will blend in with the previously played note (unless damped), creating a vocal line that rises or falls, depending on the written melody.

Repeated notes in chant merit their own discussion.

Depending on the context, you can either choose to play these as one long sustained note and not pluck them rapidly three times…

Or.

You can play them with an alternating improvised counterpoint, as long as the notes you choose are appropriate to that mode (i.e. don’t play a Bb if the mode doesn’t call for one). Using the above example to illustrate this idea, the effect will have a rather Baroque feel, reminiscent of Vivaldi violin concertos: Ex. C, B, C, A, C, G then F, E, F, D, F, C, F.

When I play this latter style on my wire harp I tend to play the repeating note with one hand and the descending (or ascending) notes with the other. It’s especially easy on my little cross-strung wire harp Esabelle, because if I need the Bb it’s right there in the middle of the string course and at the top on the left side of the harp.

On the subject of wire harp damping:

I don’t tend to damp much either with the Baroque style of alternating notes… I just let them ring. Then I might lightly damp the last note and move on to the next set of neums. But I find that excessively heavy damping does not sound very good; it tends to cause an inappropriate abruptness which is not conducive to a meditative quality in church harp music. The only time I do some damping is if there are a fair amount of consecutive seconds which may clash, but even there it’s quite light and subtle. I’ve found a way of playing ornaments and graces quickly with some rapid fingerpad damping which does not draw overt attention to itself. The idea is to make the wire harp sound like it is singing and fading gracefully away in the church’s acoustic resonance space like an echoing cathedral pipe organ, not like it is abruptly starting and stopping. This latter style is more suitable for secular music.

Also I tend to touch the wires lightly on initial contact with my fingernails and not “dig” into them, so there is no harshness of tone, even at louder volumes. The idea is to play the room, much as the pipe organ does, and let that space resonate, even more so than my harp’s soundbox does. To accomplish this, I try to point my soundboard up at the church’s ceiling and back corner so that the sound waves coming off of my harp are reflected back into the sanctuary space. After some experimenting I can usually find the sweet spot and make the entire worship area easily resonate, along with the pipe organ.

My wire harps ideally, should sound sweet and angelic in church… singing as a heavenly chorus of angels. At no time should any of my harps sound strident, brash or hint at the worldly, pop culture of our times. The tonal ideal is to be transcendent, helping the congregation to pray and to seek unity with our Lord and Savior in His House.

Here is a very beautiful illuminated antiphonary from Bern, Switzerland, created in approx. 1485 to 1490 A.D.

Most of the square neums shown here are the single note punctum type but there are also several of the two and three note groups: podatus, clivis and torculus.

Source: Estavayer-le-Lac, Paroisse catholique Saint-Laurent, Volume I, f. 1r – Antiphonarium lausannense, pars hiemalis (vol. I) (https://www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/psle/0001a)

From the Liber Usualis, here is a chart showing us the correct interpretation of a podatus neum:

There are several of these in the illuminated manuscript above. Can you find them?

Here’s an up close of one:

This two-note neum can be found on the fourth stave directly below the ornamental initial. It would be read as D, G. (An in-depth tutorial post coming up on clefs soon!)

Here is the Liber Usualis conversion chart for the clivis:

This is another two-neum group but as you can see, it’s descending. It’s helpful to remember that the clivis descends like a staircase while the podatus ascends like a ladder.

What appears to be a neum in the upper left hand corner is actually a C clef. They look a bit like square note neums too but you can distinguish them by their location: at the very beginning of the staff, just like today’s clefs.

The clivis is below and to the right. Considering that the clef designates the top red line as C, you can easily figure out the clivis notes.  Here, they’re F, E.

Torculus neums are groups of three notes that are drawn as one graphic unit. They don’t have a triple time feel however; play (or sing) them in equal time, almost with a flowing feel.

This group of torculus neum notes appears in the middle of the second staff. The notes are read as A, B, A.

There are more complex neums to be explored in an upcoming post.

For now, here’s some background on the very beautiful illuminated manuscript that we used as our study piece for today:

This volume is part of an antiphonary in three volumes that was produced in duplicate for the liturgy of the Collegiate Church of St. Vincent in the city of Bern shortly after the college’s founding in the years 1484/85. The manuscript contains the entire winter portion of the Temporale, of the Sanctorale and of the Commune Sanctorum according to the liturgy of the Diocese of Lausanne.

The book decoration with miniatures for numerous initials is attributed to the Master of the breviary of Jost von Silenen, an itinerant artist who was active in Fribourg, Bern, Sion and later in Ivrea and Aosta. He got his name from a breviary in two volumes that was created around 1493 for the Bishop of Sion, Jost of Silenen (1482-1496).

(source: Estavayer-le-Lac, Paroisse catholique Saint-Laurent, Volume I, f. 1r – Antiphonarium lausannense, pars hiemalis (vol. I) (https://www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/psle/0001a)

About e-codices:

1934 Liber Usualis

Medieval chant neums look very different from today’s music notation… until you get to know them better and discover they’re what made the language of modern sheet music possible. They do however, have their own arcane code, which has been left by the wayside, perhaps in part because few today write anymore with quill pens and also that in typeset music outside of the Catholic Church, note heads have become standardized to a universally accepted roundish shape: (see below eighth note example)

The Roman Catholic Liber Usualis has a helpful chart in its introductory section (the 1934 edition is well over 1900 pages) showing the different types of Gregorian chant neums and their Latin names.

As you can see, the neums near the bottom of the chart are considerably more complex. These are compound neums; a grouping of notes and they have their own rules for reading them correctly. I’ll go into these in a later post. For now, trying to keep things (comparatively!) simple.

The first note at the very top, the punctum, is the note that you’ll see the most often in Gregorian chant and it corresponds with the eighth note above. The next one in the chart that follows, the virga, also corresponds with today’s eighth note.

The difference in their shape and meaning is probably best explained by starting with the Liber‘s chart below:

Initially they appear to have the same time values: what we understand today as an eighth. (Gregorian chant does not use metrical values such as 3/4 or 4/4 time in its notation system nor does it use the type of strict measures as in modern music scores).

Notice however, the small dashes above and below the neums. These are called episemas, a Greek word, meaning mark or sign. Their function is to express rhythm or pulse in chant (which does not have a beat as it is understood in today’s popular music).

It’s these small lines that help to give life and breath to Gregorian chant. They are actually, symbols of that essence: breathing in and out as one sings, speaks, chants, the rhythm of speech that found its way and blended into a cappella vocal music, here notated on a page. Over the past several centuries, entire volumes by scholarly monks and academic sacred music researchers on the topic of Gregorian chant rhythm have been written; so much so that there are entirely different schools of thought as to what constituted the pure, the original “Gregorian chant at the time of St. Gregory”.

The Liber goes on to explain the different types of episema on the next page: the vertical one, seen in the second column above, marks the beginning of a beat. The horizontal one, shown in the third column, indicates a slight lengthening of the note. One might say, hold the note just a touch longer or for mild emphasis. In the fourth column, the combined vertical and horizontal episema indicates both the beginning of a rhythmic group and a slight lengthening. This last marks the end of a melodic phrase, with the singing fading away.

In Gregorian chant, dots double the value of the note that precedes it, unlike modern music notation where a dot adds 1/2 the value of a note. For clarification, a dotted eighth note in today’s music would equal an eighth note plus a sixteenth note. In Gregorian chant, that eighth note would be doubled: it would become (theoretically) a quarter note. This is not absolute however, because Gregorian chant does not have a strict beat or rhythm that one would count: “one, two, three, four” and so on as in mensural music. But the neum is held proportionally longer in comparison to surrounding notes.

Knowing this is helpful when reading Gregorian chant and interpreting a vocal music as an instrumental piece. For example, you might not damp a string as quickly or you might let it ring a fraction of a second or two longer before moving on to the next notes. Or you might place a little more pressure on one string than another, letting that note play slightly louder than the others. Just slightly. There are many ways to bring sacred vocal music to life on wire harp!

In my next post, I’ll fill out the mysterious details of the Liber‘s neum chart a little bit more. There’s quite a bit to unpack, so it won’t all happen in one post.

More later!

Every Sunday for our service prelude I play the liturgically appropriate Gregorian chant for the day from the Roman Catholic Liber Usualis (this is a fairly conservative traditional New England Episcopal church). I also play another one for the Communion, sometimes with husband George accompanying on the pipe organ.

Usually I start out by playing just the melody as noted through once, then play it a second time adding a counterpoint. I should note that my favorite harp to do this on is my wire cross-strung harp Stoney End Esabelle… small, lightweight, very portable, extremely flexible and tonally a beautifully instrument. But given that Gregorian chant uses just one accidental: B flat, you can play these on your lever harp.

Modern typeset Gregorian chant. It was traditionally handwritten with ink quill pens in bound parchment illuminated manuscripts.

The square note neume notation is medieval; its origins date back to approximately 1200 A.D. Prior to that time, in various parts of Europe, chant notation tended to be staffless. Aquitanian notation, such as that seen in the sequences in the St. Gall codex (930-940 A.D), shows a series of stacked dots, dashes and curved lines.

Source: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 484, p. 11 + p. 12 – Tropary (https://www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/csg/0484)

This very early notation eventually evolved into the Gregorian neumes on a four line staff during the Middle Ages which are still used and typeset into today’s chant books.

My 1934 copy of the Liber Usualis has a couple of very helpful introductory sections at the front of the book; the first one is entitled, “Preface to the Vatican Edition of the Roman Chant” and this has a very useful chart identifying all of the neumes shapes and their names, among other basic concepts necessary to get started reading Gregorian chant.

The second, and considerably longer, tutorial piece is headed, “Rules for Interpretation”. This section is very detailed, with numerous illustrations from clefs to more complex phrases of music, and the corresponding interpretations for understanding them.

I’ll go through these sections here on my blog and try to demonstrate how to apply this vocal music to harp. Gregorian chant was and is intended to be sung… but that hasn’t stopped composers over the centuries from writing organ preludes and Communion pieces! There are thousands of Gregorian chants, by the way… the Liber Usualis is but one repository of them. The Catholic Church has authorized the publication of graduals containing many chants throughout the liturgical year. Also there are manuscripts available online - e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland – is one of many resources hosting sacred music manuscripts from the Middle Ages which are freely available for research and download.

Every now and then someone will ask me “how to play harp”. This is a really large part of what I do and it’s probably my strongest area as a harpist, because it was my undergraduate concentration when I was studying music. The other area is playing harp accompaniment on the hymns with the pipe organ and congregational singing. However, I’ve found over the years from Catholic friends and other harpists there’s a lot interest in Gregorian chant. I’ve also found that it’s very welcome in the Episcopal Church! (We have our shared traditions, apostolic succession, and other ancestral faith matters that I won’t go into here).

Please check back often as I continue to add new posts.

Soli Deo Gloria