At 5:52 PM -0600 10/7/09, Bruce Petherick wrote:
I am glad we now have this as an off-topic mail! My point is that many, many people hear chant as relating to an underlying harmony, or tonality (A new composition student last weekend was the latest personal experience of this phenomena). I am not saying this is correct at all, but only pointing out that to contemporary ears, there is a harmonic content to the chant (I suppose that same could be said of any piece for monophonic solo instrument).
You are certainly correct that one can infer a harmonic "music of the spheres" in most monophonic music, and church organists have been realizing implied (or imposed!) harmonies on chant for centuries. But as a performer who has studied musicology, I always look for the composer's intentions or ideas or expectations or whatever you want to call them, in the music of ANY century, difficult and problematical as that may be. We shouldn't forget that even the system of the 8 medieval modes was an artificial construct, invented when working church musicians felt the need to classify and organize a millennium's worth of sacred chant, and that even they, who sang chant every day, couldn't cram every existing tune into their system. But the modes were NEVER hidebound rules for composition, and if you'd like to hear just what monophonic chant was capable of just try on Hildegard for size! Her music blows the day-to-day chants out of the water!!
But my primary reason for rejecting that particular argument is that while we can hear, or imagine, or create harmonic contexts for monophonic chant, we inevitably do so using our own harmonic vocabulary, and that vocabulary was centuries in the future for the medieval church musicians. (It's like my mom and her generation's belief that if Bach had had a modern piano he would OF COURSE have preferred it to a harpsichord. The point is that he didn't, and he couldn't.)
Now the historical argument (which will never be totally finished) is in which period we historically have "clear harmonic changes". I am of the musicological party that doesn't think that Palestrina has "harmonic changes" but has polyphonic tonality. YMMV.
I'm afraid we may be on opposite sides on this question, and I'm not sure what "polyphonic tonality" is. Harmony exists (even if I claim it does NOT in monophonic music!) from the moment music in more than one part started to be sung and/or played. It is intervalic harmony of course, rather than chordal or functional harmony, but analyzing Palestrina (or Josquin, for an even better example) in terms of Renaissance theory rather than common practice theory is just as illuminating and just as necessary for a performer. And it started, as far as the written evidence tells us, in the mid-9th century Frankish Empire of Charlemagne, and is described in the Musica enchiriadis and the Scholia enchiriadis not just as a good new idea but as something that people were already doing.
So it seems to me that our disagreement hangs on a rather simple thing: a definition of what constitutes "harmony," because "harmonic changes," clear or not, depend on that definition. My working definition is that harmony exists as soon as more than one part sounds simultaneously, which carries it through the long period of pre-Common-Practice music. If you only accept Common Practice functional harmony as really being harmony, then of course you can dismiss all those centuries when functional harmony did NOT exist and music was understood as the combining of independent but complementary individual melodic lines.
Good to share ideas with you, and if we're too far off topic, someone please just let us know.
John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[email protected]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
