Solesmes.

A Benedictine abbey in the village of the same name between Le Mans and Angers. It was the centre of the revival of Gregorian chant in the 19th and 20th centuries. A priory existed at Solesmes from 1010 to 1791; in 1833 Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805–75) revived Benedictine life there. In 1901 political events obliged the monks to move to the Isle of Wight. They returned to Solesmes in 1922.

1. The revision of the liturgical books.

From the beginning of his time as abbot, Guéranger undertook the restoration of the Roman liturgy and of Gregorian chant, an integral part of it. Going against contemporary practice, whereby each note was heavily stressed and the melodies arbitrarily divided into bars, he succeeded in giving a totally unsuspected suppleness to the performance of Gregorian melodies. He was assisted by Canon Augustin Gontier (1802–81), who wrote a Méthode raisonnée de plain-chant (Le Mans, 1859). At an early stage Guéranger formulated the principle that later served as a basis for the reconstructions of melodies according to the manuscripts: ‘We have the Gregorian phrase in its pure state in a particular piece … when examples from several churches at some distance from one another share the same text’ (Institutions liturgiques, 1840, p.306). With Dom Paul Jausions (1834–70) and, later, Dom Joseph Pothier (1835–1923), he specified, as general principles, the necessity of referring to the manuscripts for melodic line and notation, and of good phrasing in performance. This gave rise to a memorandum which Pothier later expanded in his principal work Les mélodies grégoriennes (Tournai, 1880/R), a publication that was greeted enthusiastically at the Gregorian Congress in Arezzo in 1882 and was subsequently translated into German and Italian. In 1880 Dom André Mocquereau (1849–1930) joined the team and became its head when Pothier left Solesmes in 1893.

In 1883 Pothier brought out the first edition of the Liber gradualis (Tournai), which aroused strong opposition. By way of defending his teacher’s work, Mocquereau conceived the grandiose scheme of the series Paléographie Musicale (see §4 below), of which the second and third volumes proved the substantial unanimity of the manuscript readings and the vast gulf between them and Pustet’s edition (Graduale romanum, Regensburg, 1871), which at that time enjoyed the status of an official version. Some idea of this edition may be gained by comparing an extract from it with the restored version, the authenticity of which is assured by the St Gallen neumes accompanying it (see fig.1 and fig.2).

Pope Leo XIII had given encouragement to the work of Solesmes; Pius X, his successor, appointed a commission to edit and publish a new version, based on the manuscripts. This edition was subsequently declared official and obligatory. Many difficulties arose, however, which prevented the continued collaboration of Solesmes; almost the entire responsibility for the first volumes of the Vatican edition (Kyriale, 1905; Graduale, 1908; Officium pro defunctis, 1909; Antiphonale, 1912) fell subsequently upon the president of the commission, Pothier, who had become abbot of Ste Wandrille in 1898.

In 1913, however, Pius X requested that Solesmes edit the remaining books that had not been revised (Cantus passionis, 1916; In triduo sacro majoris hebdomadae, 1922). In 1934 the Antiphonale monasticum was published for the Benedictine Confederation. In 1948, Solesmes undertook a critical edition of the Roman Gradual; this work was to receive encouragement from the Second Vatican Council, and later the Libreria Editrice Vaticana accepted responsibility for its publication.

A scholarly journal, Revue grégorienne, was founded in 1911 and continued to appear until 1964.

2. The performing practice of Solesmes.

The long labours of the monks of Solesmes have always been essentially practical in their intention; the chant books have been improved from one edition to the next in order to enhance choral performance, to bring beauty into the services and to provide an authoritative model for singers of Gregorian chant as well as for the faithful. The latter concern has led to the clear setting out, in a number of works, of the principles for performance on the basis of the manuscripts and practical experience; these works mark the stages in the development of what has been called the ‘Solesmes school’.

In Les mélodies grégoriennes Pothier explained his conception of free Gregorian rhythm: this is ‘oratorical rhythm’ similar to that of speech, which achieves coherence through respect for the Latin words and their accentuation, and balance through the proportions existing between the various divisions. Pothier’s intuition was basically correct, but he lacked the deep knowledge of the sources which only time can bring.

Mocquereau aimed at greater precision. In his Nombre musical grégorien (i, 1908, Eng. trans., 1932; ii, 1927) he expounded a philosophical analysis of the rhythm, which led him to divide Gregorian melody into groups of two and three notes; these groups are in effect short bars of 2/8 and 3/8, to be reassembled by the singer to form the various parts of the piece. Mocquereau’s method was applied by the addition of rhythmic signs in the editions, where the so-called ictus shows the thesis (rhythmic fall) of the basic two- and three-note rhythms and, at the same time, the first note of the ‘bars’.

Dom Joseph Gajard, who became director of the choir of Solesmes in 1914, worked on the simplification of the Solesmes method of teaching in order to facilitate its propagation. In addition he applied the theory in a flexible way in the gramophone recordings made under his direction by the monks of Solesmes, first by HMV in 1930, and from 1953 by Decca.

3. Developments since 1950.

In 1952, research began to be based on a comparative and statistical method, and has been concerned with the two fields of composition and notation. Progress has been achieved in the study of early types of notation, their localization and their classification, and the true meaning of the neume and its rhythmic significance have re-emerged. The original differentiation in time value or duration between the various notes represented by the neumes can now be restored, not by means of some abstract, theoretical measure, but through the flexible durations of the syllables that make up the Latin words. In brief, Gregorian semiology has taken flight; it has shown the degree to which Gregorian rhythm is free and cannot be bound in any way to the concept of ‘measure’ (see E. Cardine: Is Gregorian Chant Measured Music?, Solesmes, 1964). Numerous semiological studies have appeared, for example, in the Etudes grégoriennes published since 1954.

In another direction, Dom Jean Claire, who succeeded Gajard in 1971, has been investigating the origins of Western modality. Several of his publications appeared (1962–4) in the Revue grégorienne, and another major study in Etudes grégoriennes.

Thanks to the accumulated documentation (about 900 manuscripts in photocopy or microfilm) and the research tools that have been forged over more than 100 years (in particular the comparative tables in which the manuscripts have been recopied by the monks), the scriptorium of Solesmes now attracts scholars from throughout the world. And the number of people who visit the abbey to hear the chant of the monks in their daily liturgical prayer is equal testimony of the continuing life of Solesmes.

4. Paléographie Musicale.

The series was begun in the late 1880s (the first volume was issued in 1889) by Mocquereau, basically in support of the theories of his teacher Pothier as expressed in the latter’s Liber gradualis and Mélodies grégoriennes. These two books advocated a version of the chant based on studies of the early sources, and were opposed to the melodies in the then standard Editio medicea. The purpose of Paléographie Musicale was to publish a number of important original sources in photographic facsimile, each facsimile preceded by a brief introduction outlining the history of the source and discussing the peculiarities of its notation. It was hoped that the accurate presentation of the actual sources (the first time photographs were used to reproduce musical notation) would prove the correctness of Pothier’s theories, and help realize the principal goal of the series: ‘to raise Gregorian chant from the abject state into which it has fallen, to pursue the work of its restoration until complete justice is done, and it has recovered its full ancient beauty which rendered it so proper for divine worship’ (1st ser., xi).

The battle against the Editio medicea was essentially won in 1903 when Pope Pius X issued his Motu proprio establishing the Editio vaticana according to the principles of the reformers; but controversies, particularly concerning performance, continued. Mocquereau and Pothier disagreed on the question of chant rhythm, and the introductions to several volumes of Paléographie Musicale are concerned with this. In fact, some introductions grew to almost unmanageable proportions. The introduction to volume vii, for instance, contains such a long discussion of the Latin tonic accent that the facsimile itself had to be relegated to the next volume. In 1900 Mocquereau established a second series which consisted of facsimiles with very little prefatory material, and in 1955 it was decided to curtail the introductions to the first series as well.

Mocquereau wrote many of the introductions. After his death in 1930, the editorship was taken up by Gajard. By 1992, 11 graduals, a cantatorium, a noted missal, four antiphoners, one volume of fragments and one each of sources of Ambrosian and Beneventan chant had been published, illustrating a number of different notations and traditions. Volumes ii and iii, on the other hand, were not devoted to a single manuscript, but rather to a single piece: the graduals of the type Justus ut palma. These volumes present more than 200 facsimiles of that melody.

PALÉOGRAPHIE MUSICALE

first series

Vol.

second series

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N. Rousseau: L’école grégorienne de Solesmes, 1833–1910 (Tournai, 1910)

E. Cardine: Semiologia gregoriana (Rome, 1968; Eng. trans., 1982); Fr. trans. in EG, xi (1970), 1–158, and also pubd separately (Solesmes, 1970)

P. Combe: Histoire de la restauration du chant grégorien d’après des documents inédits (Solesmes, 1969)

K. Bergeron: Decadent Enchantments: the Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley, 1998)

EUGÈNE CARDINE/DAVID HILEY (1–3), RICHARD SHERR (4)