Liber usualis
The search for choral music appropriate to the Advent and Christmas season takes one down many a highway and byway. High roads and low roads. One popular, well-trodden road is music based upon Gregorian chant.
I always love to sing music based upon, or resembling, medieval plainsong. It is the oldest music we sing, and some of the best; its beauty has kept it current for a very long time. And I often begin concerts with chant— it provides a basis from which the rest of the music, and the choir’s vocalism, grows.
Our upcoming concert begins with O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, a well-known hymn which is actually not plainsong, but based on plainsong style. The melody is first documented in 16th century France, the Latin text in 18th century Germany. The words are based upon the O Antiphons, a collection of verses originating in monastic life in the 8th or 9th century. Seven days before Christmas Eve monasteries would sing the O antiphons in anticipation of Christmas Eve. Alice Parker, the arranger, uses almost nothing outside of the original materials. I have a set of octavos I have saved from when I sang many of Ms. Parker’s arrangements with Robert Shaw— and I have frequently written, in the margins, “quasi Gregorian,” his favorite way of telling us to eliminate personal characteristics of our voices, in favor of the selfless ideal he valued in chant.
Franz Biebl's Ave Maria is a setting of the Angelus Prayer, which dates back to 13th century Italy. The text consists of three repetitions of the Ave Maria, each preceded by verses from Luke 1:26–38, which describe the angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she would conceive a child to be born the Son of God. The music of these narrative sections, although composed by Biebl himself, is consciously modeled on plainsong style; Chorale sings it as chant, with a solo opening followed by all the male voices, singing with a somewhat free, chant-like inflection of the text. The setting of the Ave Maria, in contrast, is purest German romanticism. The justaposition works well, and contributes greatly to the esteem in which this motet is held by modern audiences.
Drop Down Ye Heavens From Above is Judith Weir’s reworking of portions of the plainsong text and melody Rorate caeli desuper. In her notes attached to the Novello description of the work, Weir writes “[T]he music has a plainsong-like shape (although not based on any real plainsong).” A close look at the Rorate chant in the Liber Usualis, however, indicates that she quotes the music of the plainsong antiphon at both the opening and the close of her motet, setting a direct English translation of the appropriate Latin text. The material between these two statements makes use of words and music drawn from the original chant, artfully manipulated and reordered by the composer. The resulting whole is a synthesis of original chant material and the composer’s imagination.
Liber usualis
Drop Down, Ye Heavens, From Above, by Judith Weir
Singing plainsong, and music derived from plainsong, is not only artistically gratifying; it teaches a choir to sing with a flexible line, to pronounce text meaningfully, and to devote themselves to a clean, pure section sound. These style characteristics are invaluable, as an ensemble moves into the music of succeeding centuries.