jwilzewske: Pomerium: Carnatic Christmas?

CMT: Pomerium’s performance of Gregorian chant and monophonic devotional songs (cantiones) for the Christmas season is a wonderful “gallery”—it illustrates the progression from monophonic to polyphonic expressions by Medieval and Renaissance composers. It’s captivating to listen to—especially during the holiday season. More than this, it inspires my interest in history. To get to the polyphony produced in the Renaissance, you must roam through the church prior to the 17th-Century—monophonic chant. That’s part of what Pomerium’s performances and recordings evoke for me.

DSM: Are you thinking of these as independent works of art, or are you thinking of the earlier pieces as “origins” for the polyphonic elaborations of already well-known melodies and words?

CMT: The Renaissance elaborations are—who could deny it?—a progression. Even more so, given the cultural practices that motivated these pieces’ existence. You could say it’s similar to progress in Renaissance painting in these same centuries, as painting moved from stylized two-dimensional figures to three-dimensional representations. So here is Pomerium performing Renaissance pieces composed when it was widely accepted that music could be and should be representational—could represent specific ideas and emotional states. And here is Pomerium performing medieval chants and earlier Renaissance elaborations with sparse, non-representational, serial, rhythmic spell-casting.

DSM: The plainchant expert, Kenneth Levy, spent some of his career investigating the shift from an oral tradition to the written versions. In his book, Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians, Levy looked specifically at stages of the evolution and dissemination of plainchant. How many traditions of chant were there prior to the tenth century? Is one version more authentic than others? Levy discusses these topics, the origin of Latin neumes, the shifting relationships between memory and early notations—not only as a musicologist but as an historian. If Pomerium inspires the historian in you, you should get a copy of Levy’s cool book.

CMT: Gregorian Chant—I think of this music as intrinsically religious, don’t you? Admittedly, I grew up in the U.S., and so all of my reflexes are conditioned by western social patterns. But when I hear Gregorian Chant, all my associations for monks and monasteries in the middle ages are activated. It’s impossible for me to hear this music any other way. For me, ignoring the extramusical associations would interfere with the meaning.

DSM: I’m not sure about that. We can listen to that kind of music as abstract, and the music may be better without “the program”. Monteverdi, when he started composing in the “seconda prattica” style, said that music must serve to the words, not the other way around. So, to him, music must represent the feelings, movements and ideas implied by the lyrics.

CMT: Well, I can hardly but think that the monks themselves regarded Gregorian Chant as part of their devotions, not as a symbol that I as a cultural outsider take it to be. The old monks certainly didn’t know anything about the 20th century discipline of semiotics or linguistics.

DSM: Maybe so for the ancient monks, but the contemporary ones know very well about plainchant semiology! And those of us non-monks who like chant and who’ve read a little philosophy of language know about semiology—know what’s semiotically happening when we’re engaging with this music. As you know, the tradition of Gregorian chant declined by the 13th century and had almost disappeared when it was reconstructed in the 19th century. The church musicologists then valorized the oldest collections of chants. But it happens that those are written in neume signs, and not on the four or five lines of latter staff. So it was necessary to interpret and trans-literate the medieval neumes into the modern staff. And for this a whole science was constructed by Don Cardine, a late Benedictine expert in Gregorian chant. This reconstruction of Gregorian chant is quite a semiotic work of interpretation. Hermeneutics gone wild! There’s actually very little certainty about what notes the neumes actually represent. Neumes are glyphs, ideograms, diagrams, iconic signs—of the rhythmic flow of the Latin texts than melodic lines, but with the help of rules then-current in the prosodic theory of modal music, the monks were able to guess what the music should be, and that’s what we hear today in early music performances. Besides, if we think about the ancient work of writing music with neumes, devising those glyphs and so on, it’s clearly the practice of a musical semiotics.

CMT: I suppose that saying that Gregorian Chant signifies religion, or that western music is a symbol for western culture, is only true for people outside the system. For people inside the system, the signification is superfluous—it doesn’t have any point.

DSM: Well, I don't think so. The indexical reference of the kind you mention is important in India. Indian classical musicians are very conscious of their music and others’ music.

CMT: Yes—Indian carnatic music! A particular Raga may intrinsically mean “evening” to someone inside the relevant cultural system, but not at all to someone outside it. Meaning depends on who you are, and what your cultural background is. Semiotics experts are well aware of this relativity.

DSM: Yes, but this isn’t just a matter of “relativity”. Musical meaning arises in multifactorial networks of sound and action, inserted in the context of culture and expression. What makes sense when we learn that Raga Megh represents the rainy season in India is not that it’s some arbitrary symbol, but rather that that raga evolved in such a way as signifying a conflation of feeling, practices and ideas related to the experience of the monsoons in India—very important in Indian culture and literature. Rains in India are the end of dry Summer; rains means that planting will be possible; rains mean a time for leisure and celebrating. In the rainy season, there several popular festivals in India. Raga Megh implies all that.

CMT: All these ideas are accessible to the western listener as soon as she or he understands and has the aesthetic sensitivity to appreciate the music and the several layers of meaning. To learn and appreciate raga music in this way isn’t different than learning about Norse myths and the cultural motivations related to Wagner’s music. You agree that studying Wagner is not exceptional if you want to listen to his music, the same with Indian music, Gregorian chant, or any other musical culture?

DSM: Maybe the paradoxes also arise from trying to pretend that 20th century semiotics is part of traditional Indian culture. Or not understanding what someone from another culture really means?

CMT: Well, the negative syntax I find in the work of some modernist composers is emblematic of post-modern deconstruction. To me, 12-tone compositions read like Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida. And, surprisingly, some of those same feelings are evoked by medieval chant. The intertextuality of the words and the notes. How strange that we would both see parallels in Indian carnatic classical music and Gregorian Chant!

jwilzewske

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Pomerium: Carnatic Christmas?

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