(Fr.).
The reformed or newly composed chant of the 17th to 19th centuries in France, related to the Italian canto fratto. The decisive impetus came in the early 1630s from the Oratorians of the rue St Honoré, whose church was designated the royal chapel of the Louvre by Louis XIII, and whose superior conceived the idea of attracting the courtiers by introducing a new kind of chant combining features of the ecclesiastical and modern styles. This initiative resulted in the first collection of such chants – the Brevis psalmodiae ratio (Paris, 1634) by François Bourgoing, a member of the Oratory congregation. It was published with an approbation by Mersenne and contains new chants and simplified versions of known melodies; with rare exceptions, all the chants are syllabic. Resembling this work in its simplicity is Nivers’ Graduale romanum juxta missale, the most extensive collection of plain-chant musical, published by Ballard in 1658. Originally intended for use by Benedictine nuns, it was subsequently reprinted several times for Benedictine and Augustinian nuns. Both the gradual and the alleluia for any given liturgical day are composed in the same mode, probably to ease the transition between these two consecutive chants and to impose a general sense of modal and tonal order on the Mass Propers. In 1665 Ballard published a set of Leçons de Ténèbres en plein-chant musical composé dans le goût de M. Nivers (Nivers may have coined the term). Four years later, Henry Du Mont brought out Cinq messes en plain-chant (Paris, 1669), of which the Messe royale kept its popularity throughout France well into the 20th century.
The first theoretical formulations appeared in L’antiphonaire de Paris (1681) and in Nivers’ Dissertation sur le chant grégorien (Paris, 1683), although Nivers’ work is more useful for understanding his philosophy of editing traditional melodies (Graduale romanum, 1697) than for divining his style of chant composition. Superfluous neumes and note-shapes were eliminated and durations assigned to the remaining ones, false intervals and abuses of prosody, such as neumes on short syllables, were corrected, melismas eliminated, accidentals (including the sharp) introduced, and rules for ornamentation and tempo established; in short, everything possible was done to bring what were understood to be corrupt melodies into conformity with the rules of quantity, pronunciation, expression and good taste. New melodies were freely invented in the same vein. Nivers justified his changes by detailed criticism of traditional melodies, and his attitude was reflected over half a century later in the title of a Traité critique du plain-chant contenant les principes qui en montrent les défauts et qui peuvent conduire à le rendre meilleur (Paris, 1749) by Cousin de Contamine.
The opening phrases of two introits, Salve sancta parens and Nos autem, illustrate some of the more intriguing aspects of plain-chant musical. Ex.1a is a simplified version, stripped of all but structural notes, of the more elaborate ‘Gregorian’ melody in ex.1c; Nivers’ version in ex.1b retains much of the Gregorian melody, but a leading note has been added on the second syllable of ‘sancta’ and there are half the number of notes on the first syllable of ‘parens’. In ex.2a occasional structural notes are borrowed from the Gregorian melody in ex.2c, but the complete introit ends on d', thus transforming it into a mode 1 chant; Nivers’ version in ex.2b confines itself to mode 4, but it bears little resemblance to the Gregorian melody, and its continuation is replete with raised leading notes and melodic ornaments. Many of Nivers’ chants, in fact, are unlike any other known versions. Innovations were to continue into the 18th century, and in later neo-Gallican graduals, for example, both melody and text were abandoned.
The chant was accompanied by the organ in harmony (examples of such accompaniments survive in F-Pc Rés.476, c1690, printed in Livre d’orgue attribué à J.N. Geoffroy, ed. J. Bonfils, Paris, 1974; and F-V 1055 (60), compiled by Luc Marchand in 1772) or doubled by the serpent; it served as the melodic basis for organ versets with which it alternated (e.g. La messe de 2. classe in Livre d’orgue de Marguerite Thiery, ed. J. Bonfils, L’organiste liturgique, xxv, Paris, 1956, based on an original mass by Nivers). Chants were adapted and composed for the principal religious congregations, the tunes varying among places and dioceses. Nivers himself was charged with preparing Office collections for the Augustinians, Benedictines, and priests of the communities of St Sulpice and St Cyr. The French chants spread to dioceses in the southern Netherlands and Germany. As its popularity grew in the 18th century, the quality of plain-chant musical declined; by 1750 Léonard Poisson was complaining of ‘un plain-chant baroque’, and even Rousseau (Dictionnaire) preferred the traditional kind, in which he detected vestiges of the music of the Greeks. Nevertheless, the Méthode nouvelle pour apprendre parfaitement les règles du plain-chant (Poitiers, 1748) by F. de La Feillée went through edition after edition well into the 19th century, inspiring hostile polemics like that of D’Ortigue in his Dictionnaire (1853). The circle was closed when the new reformers, the Benedictines of Solesmes, with the zeal of a Viollet-le-Duc, ‘gregorianized’ original 17th-century chants by undoing the rhythm, removing accidentals and adding melismas.
See also Neo–gallican chant and Plainchant, §10(ii).
FasquelleE (‘Plain-chant (mesuré)’; M. Cocheril); MGG1 (‘Choralreform’; K.G. Fellerer)
J. d’Ortigue: Dictionnaire liturgique, historique et théorique de plain-chant et de musique d’église (Paris, 1853/R)
A. Gastoué: ‘Un coin de la musique d’église au XVIIe siècle: le chant des Oratoriens: Louis XIII maître de chapelle’, Variations sur la musique d’église (Paris, 1912), 62–72
A. Gastoué: ‘Le chant des Oratoriens: Louis XII maître de chapelle’, Tribune de Saint-Gervais, xix (1913), 121–6, 149–54
A. Gastoué: Musique et liturgie: le graduel et l’antiphonaire romains: histoire et description (Lyons, 1913/R)
K.G. Fellerer: ‘Zur Neukomposition und Vortrag des Gregorianischen Chorals im 18. Jahrhundert’, AcM, vi (1934), 145–52
C. Pineau: Le plain-chant musical en France au XVIIe siècle (n.p., 1955)
C. Pineau: ‘A propos d’une messe du quatrième ton d’Henry du Mont’, Musique sacrée, lxxxi (1963), 51–2
J.-Y. Hameline: ‘Les messes de Henry Du Mont’, Henry Du Mont à Versailles [programme booklet] (Versailles, 1992), 69–82; repr. in Le concert des muses: promenade musicale dans le baroque français, ed. J. Lionnet (Paris, 1997), 221–31
D. Launay: La musique religieuse en France du Concile de Trente à 1804 (Paris, 1993)
J. Duron, ed.: Plainchant et liturgie en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1997)
DAVID FULLER/ROBERT GALLAGHER