(from Gk. cheir: ‘hand’).
The doctrine of hand signs: a form of conducting whereby the leading musician indicates melodic curves and ornaments by means of a system of spatial signs.
5. Byzantine and Western chant.
EDITH GERSON-KIWI/DAVID HILEY
The practice of cheironomy can be detected in several basic forms:
(i) as hand movements made in the air to guide a musical performance;
(ii) as the transformation of these into a neumatic notation: many of the written symbols are recognizable as stylized graphs of the outlines of such movements;
(iii) as the conversion of the conducting hand into a kind of reading-board (such as the Guidonian Hand: see Solmization, §I) by using the single ends and joints of the fingers as the sites of pitches. In the Western medieval system these pitches were presented as isolated notes of a measured acoustical ratio, in contrast to the fluctuating intonation of the singing voice. Moreover, these exact and instrumentally conceived pitches by then formed part of a modal unit such as the Hexachord, and could thus be assigned places within the measured space of the palm of the hand;
(iv) as the more recent didactic method of Tonic Sol-fa combining the two ancient methods: the Guidonian syllables together with the visible hand signs now representing the intervals contained within an octave. This was a conscious retreat from staff notation, for the benefit of the singer and the training of his aural sensitivity. It became manifest in John Curwen’s ‘interpreting notation’ (since 1841), stressing the interrelationship of sounds within a given key and towards its key-note, irrespective of its absolute pitch. The most striking single item in this 19th-century method is the resumption of the Egyptian style of cheironomic hand signs to be mastered by the modern cheironomist-conductor;
(v) as the present-day renewal of hand-conducting in the teaching of Gregorian chant, now based on the reading of printed music (see the work of A. Mocquereau).
This article will concentrate entirely on (i). There is ample evidence of the practice of cheironomy in ancient Pharaonic Egypt from the fourth dynasty (2723–2563 bce) onwards, and lasting through many later periods; certain remnants of it are still practised today. There are also indications that cheironomic systems were used in many ancient civilizations including those of Greece, China, India, Israel and Mesopotamia.
Knowledge of the Egyptian art of cheironomy is based mainly on the detailed research done by H. Hickmann. According to him in ancient Egypt cheironomy was not a conductor’s art but an educational system of melodic graphs indicated by hand signs – a musical science that was rooted in earlier myths and that had evolved over centuries of artistic growth. Hickmann’s shrewd attempts at deciphering the ‘writing in the air’ brought to light some of the ‘speaking’ messages depicted on tombs of antiquity. There is a wealth of iconographical documentation for cheironomy whose signs are clearly distinct (see fig.1). Some questions, however, remain unanswered. For instance, it is not yet known whether the hand signs of the cheironomists are meant to indicate single intervals or melodic formulae comprising a group of notes. Of particular interest is the cheironomic guidance of instrumentalists – a branch not known to have existed in other cheironomic traditions of antiquity.
Hickmann’s method of decipherment is based not only on the interpretation of hieroglyphic symbols and the realistic designs on murals and bas-reliefs, but also on present-day ethnomusicological observation of living musicians in their own environment. Cheironomy is still practised by some Coptic and Egyptian cantors who also act as teachers and professional cheironomists. Their hand movements reveal a remarkable similarity to those of antiquity. Their finger and arm movements have been recorded on film, and a basic repertory of melodic and rhythmic signs has thus been reconstructed. Comparison of these with all the available representations of such gestures in ancient Egypt has enabled the meanings of some of the movements to be identified.
Of the rhythmic signs, a stroke on the thigh apparently signifies a downbeat or thesis; the pressing of fingers against thumb signifies the weak parts of the measure, as also practised in ancient magical counting rhymes. Melodic signs were probably based on two principal hand positions, representing the melodic centre and its dominant note by keeping the rounded index finger on the thumb, or by stretching the hand vertically. The position of the upper or lower octave seems to have been given by lifting the elbow into the air or by supporting the elbow on the knee. Even if a final version of all the interrelated movements of fingers and hand has not yet been established, the solution of this mystery of musical instruction and guidance in the ancient world is now much closer.
A subject closely connected with the system of cheironomy is the ancient polyphony documented, among other places, on the relief at Ptahhotep’s tomb at Saqqara, where there is an illustration of two cheironomists guiding a harpist simultaneously with different hand symbols. These hand symbols, here interpreted as tonic and dominant, suggest a kind of instrumental drone style – a musical form still alive in the rural parts of Egypt and Sudan.
The guild of cheironomists in Pharaonic Egypt had its own divinity who, according to legend, created the living world with a swing of his arm. Arm and hand (see fig.2), therefore, became the exclusive symbols of music and musicians. Little hands made of wood or ivory have been found in tombs, and were until recently believed to have been tokens given to deceased musicians. Yet according to Hickmann’s conclusions they are not to be considered merely as ornaments, but as real musical instruments of the clapper type. Unfortunately they have not, so far, been found in the tomb of a professional musician.
Cheironomy seems to be deeply rooted in Egyptian musical performance. From the historical evidence so far assembled, it appears that the system has never died out, and has even survived through Greek, Roman and early Christian periods. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that it is still practised in Egypt today, mainly in the teaching of the chant repertory of the Coptic Church (fig.3). The series of hand symbols used by Coptic cantors reveals that not only the principles of cheironomy but also the actual hand movements have been preserved over millennia.
Gestures indicating the division of rhythmic cycles are used in the Hindustani and Karnatak traditions of South Asia. The current system of claps, waves and finger counts denoting the various beats and structures of the tāla (from Sanskrit: ‘flat surface’, ‘palm’) derive from the complex historical tāla described in the Nātyaśātra and Dattilam (see India, §III, 4(i–ii)).
Cheironomy also occurs in South Asian Hindu ritual. Movement, gesture and posture are important elements of Vedic ritual, often corresponding to changes in chant. One notable example is that of the soma sacrifice (for a full description, see W. Caland and V. Henry: L’agnistoma: description complète de la forme normale du sacrifice de soma dans la culte védique, Paris, 1906). The song-manuals (gāna), which aid the practice of sāmavedic chant, give indications of gestures that act as mnemonics (see B. Varadarajan: ‘Music in the Sama Veda’, Journal of the Music Academy, lviii, 1987, 169–80; see India, §I, 2).
In addition to the Egyptian, Indian and East Asian traditions of cheironomy there is an equally strong tradition of hand signs in Jewish synagogue music. A tradition of hand signs is continuously documented in ancient Israel from at least the middle of the 3rd millenium bce onwards. The Talmudic treatise Berakhot 62a states that the right hand was to be kept clean and holy for signalling the melodic intonations of the Bible. Continuing this line, a legitimate successor to these earlier spatial movements can be seen in the system of biblical accents (te’amim) as added to the Hebrew texts by the Tiberian School of Masoretes in the 9th century ce. Clearly this is a series of written symbols based on the original gestures of the hand delineated in the air by the teachers.
As in the Egyptian and Hindu traditions, this practice has survived in the Israeli tradition from Jewish antiquity until the present. The art of cheironomy continues in use today in varying degrees and forms by many Jewish communities such as those of the Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia or Morocco, whether in the country of their origin or following their return to Israel since 1948. In order fully to understand the roots of this ancient custom, the original meaning of ‘cheironomy’ as an art of bodily gesticulation, not confined to hands and arms as suggested by the Greek name, should be considered. The term was itself probably coined by taking the most striking part for the whole. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that in the Jewish tradition the head and the back as well as the hand are employed in spatial writing. Their respective functions are clearly defined. Of the three, the hand is the proper didactic medium for elementary teaching in religious schools (heder). It should be noted that the cantillation of the Bible (Te‘amei ha-migra) is not an independent piece of music, but a structural recitative, the main task of which is to emphasize the syntax of the individual sentences, especially to mark separation between each of them by means of an idiomatic melisma or thematic flourish (see Jewish music, §II). Small children learn first how to chant the syntactical motifs and how to string them together according to the ever-changing structures of the prose texts. Only when the melodic outlines are fully memorized is the holy text interpolated, at a second stage of learning. Here then is the place of the didactic hand-‘waving’ and ‘gesturing’ (Gk. neuma) used by the teacher to indicate the general outlines of melody, and – even more so – its continuous flow and its animated spirituality (Gk. pneuma: ‘spirit’). In Morocco, as in Egypt, the cheironomist–teacher even uses both hands simultaneously or in alternation to enable him to signal an almost complete series of accents. This practice should be a warning against the interpretation of Pharaonic paintings showing a cheironomist employing both hands in different positions as evidence of early polyphony.
The back is used mainly as a mnemonic aid for lay readers during the public reading of the Pentateuch. This reading is performed from handwritten scrolls in which no punctuation, no vocalization and no accents (neumes) are given. Hence the old custom whereby a bystander (supporter or prompter) assists the lay reader, using his back as a kind of writing-board and impressing on it the neumatic symbols. This strange custom of hand signs through direct physical contact is limited to the use of only seven signs and may be observed in the Tunisian liturgy of the Isle of Djerba as in the Egyptian one of Old Cairo. Of all the cheironomic traditions investigated so far in Jewish liturgy, the one originating from the community of Old Cairo seems the richest in spatial design and symbols, and the nearest to the ancient Pharaonic style of conducting note symbols in the air. In Europe the system of hand signs had been used mostly by Spanish and Italian cantors. The two hand positions shown in fig.4 in the tradition of the Italian congregation in Rome represent two different disjunctive neumes, the paseq (a dividing-line) and the tevir (a short interruption). There is one manual position that has remained alive through the millennia without a break or change of meaning: the hand covering the ear of a musician. In this case no technicality of intonation, interval or motif is intended, but rather the status of the musician as a professional singer. In addition, its purpose is to convey his prominence among the musicians as the most exalted personality, gifted with an inspired and ecstatic disposition. Today, as in Pharaonic times, great singers from Morocco to Persia and Kurdistan will enter a state of meditation by putting their left hand over their ear (often also pressing the thumb against the throat), thereby intimating a change of personality through change of their vocal resonance or timbre.
The third means of ‘writing in the air’ uses head movements. This custom is known from Morocco and, in a more elaborate form, from the Yemen. The reader accompanies his own chanting by vigorous turns and shakings of the head, mainly indicating the strongest punctuating melodic formulae, those attached to the full stop and comma. In the Yemenite tradition the movements are concentrated in four groups, each one represented by one motif; in addition, the right hand continuously draws the sequence of accents on the table or in the air. Observing the Yemenite reader one is amazed by the speed with which the singing and the cheironomic signalling proceed in coordination, the latter being not so much prescriptive as following after the chant.
Some preliminary documentary films of cheironomy in Jewish chant traditions have been made at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and are being analysed in special research projects by S. Levin, M. Morag and A. Laufer.
Manual signs symbolizing the combination of melodic motifs according to the syntactical division of sentences are, of course, much older than the more rational forms of the written neumes. The calligraphic forms of Jewish accents preserve not only the outlines of the hand signs in a kind of stereotyped symbolic form, but also another of their characteristics, namely the comparative freedom of performance. The single sign hardly ever corresponds to a single note but to a complete organism of notes, that is, to an elaborate melodic motif; these motifs are never themselves defined sequentially note for note. This means that internally the aggregate of notes remains fluctuating and loose while their character as a group remains constant. This is a melodic phenomenon that is closely bound to the basic mentality of oral traditions in music, in which the melodic memory takes the place of the visible graphic symbol. Yet the Jewish singer, while working his way through the masses of stored melodic elements, keeps the mnemonic process in an equilibrium by, on the one hand, following the mainstream of constant characters and, on the other, leaving room for variants to fill in the open spaces.
Nearly all ancient oral traditions provide striking manifestations of the dual characteristics of endless variety within a fixed framework. In this sense, cheironomic gestures were never meant to function as a rational musical notation, and their air-drawn curves are no more than casual landmarks given to the expert singer, who of course knows the general direction of his chant, especially if it is connected with a running prose text of greater dimensions (such as that of the Bible stories). It also implies the purely vocal character of the cheironomic art together with its later transformation into written symbols. Thus the art of cheironomy may rightly be considered the main source for some, though not all, of the neumatic notations of the Middle Ages. The individual names of single neumes, particularly in the Syriac, Samaritan or Jewish-Aramaic traditions, are vivid reminders of their true origin: for instance, zaqef (‘upright’, i.e. the stretching of a word, and, therefore, a momentary interruption of the recitation), for which the corresponding cheironomic movement is the raising of the index finger; and nagda (also legarmeih, or pisqa or revi‘a), a trill-like ornament whose corresponding cheironomic sign is a trembling hand movement.
Another indication of the strong links between the reading and the cheironomic signs is the fact that the reader, chanting the Hebrew Bible (ba‘al qore), was aided by a supporter (somekh) who was the exact counterpart of the ancient Pharaonic cheironomist, facing the musician and directing his performance. The reading of the Hebrew Bible has always been steeped in melodic recitation: in fact, by law it could not be read without the melodic framework (Talmud Bab., Megilla 32a). This melodic recitation is, by its very nature, not a song or a spoken recitation but a chanting style or cantillation that may move between the extremes of pure logogenic speech-melody and the pathogenic or halleluiatic style. The cheironomic tradition was not generally used for the 24 books of the holy scripture but was applied exclusively to the Pentateuch. As already mentioned, only the latter was read in public from the scrolls, in which the punctuation, the vowels and the neumatic accents are not added to the holy text. Thus the reader had to memorize the whole sequence of cantillation, and it was here more than anywhere else that he was dependent on the helping hand of the cheironomist standing by.
Besides the early source in the talmudic treatise of Berakhot (which has frequently been discussed by theologians, grammarians and musicologists: see Werner, p.124), there is additional literary evidence from the Middle Ages. Among others, there was the talmudic scholar Rashi (11th century) who stated in his commentary to the above source that he had observed Bible readers from Palestine performing the hand signs during cantillation. The medieval traveller Petachyah of Regensburg reported in his travel diary (c1187) that he saw this tradition still practised when he visited the Jews of Iraq. The practice was also mentioned as a living one in the basic treatise on Hebrew syntax Diqduqei ha-te‘amim (10th century). Indirect evidence of the living tradition of cheironomy may be present in the many local variants of performance of the written neumatic symbols developed from the hand signs. Although it is tempting to emphasize the close affinity of Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, Hebrew, Byzantine and Western systems of accents, there are certain basic differences between them, not only in design but also in their different historic evolution. Of all the neumatic systems, only the Roman one reached the state of rational and independent legibility through diastematic design and final supersession by staff notation.
Although cheironomy, in a general sense of conducting, is known in both Eastern and Western Christian chant performance, no precise cheironomic system in which particular gestures indicate specific melodic progressions appears to have existed during the Middle Ages or later. (Illustrations such as those discussed by Huglo, 1963, cannot be interpreted as evidence of such a system; see Hucke, 1979.) Although some theoretical treatises contain references to conducting and, occasionally, eye-witness accounts of the practice, such material tends to make the absence of detailed evidence even more obvious.
Regarding Byzantine practice, the treatise of Nicolas Mesarites (12th century) is often quoted; this work contains a description of novice choirboys being helped by gestures to hold the line, keep in time and in tune. Two further sources, however, are not Byzantine but were written by Western Christians: in the 12th-century manuscript I-MC 318 a monk of Monte Cassino gives an account of a conductor (whom he calls ‘chironomica’) directing the singing in a Greek monastery in South Italy; in his Euchologium graecorum (Paris, 1647) the Dominican J. Goar describes a performance he had heard in the East in 1631 in which the singing was led by a ‘cantus moderator’. The only Byzantine music treatise to make a direct connection between cheironomy and the signs of Byzantine neumatic notation is that of Michael Blemmides (ed. Tardo, 1938, pp.245–7). The theory that the neumes of Western Latin chant notation derive from cheironomic gestures, though attractive and plausible, has even less basis in contemporary accounts.
MGG2 (‘Handzeichen’, E. Hickmann and C. Thorau)
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O. Fleischer: Neumenstudien, i (Leipzig, 1895)
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R. Haas: Aufführungspraxis der Musik, HMw (1931)
C. Sachs: The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York, 1943), 71–102, esp. 78–9
MGG2 (‘Ägypten’, E. Hickmann)
RiemannL 12
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H. Hickmann: ‘La musique polyphonique dans l’Egypte ancienne’, Bulletin de l’Institut d’Egypte, xxxiv (1952), 229–44
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