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General Information
Music that is used as a functional part of corporate Christian worship can properly be called church music. It varies greatly among religious groups by reason of differences in tradition, dogma, taste, financial support, and degrees of musical skill.
The music of the early church was intended for unison chorus (Plainsong), but the general acceptance of Polyphony in the Middle Ages moved the performance of part-music into the choir, which further benefited by the addition of instruments to the performing combination. In later years, such widely different sects as the Russian Orthodox and the Disciples of Christ have stressed choral music but have forbidden the use of instruments in their worship. Christian Science traditionally employs only a solo singer. Most denominations have depended on choirs, paid or volunteer, to supply the bulk of their vocal music, generally with Organ accompaniment. The organ has been an important feature of church music because it satisfies the need for variety in supporting choral music without imposing the burden and expense of an instrumental ensemble; it is also a satisfactory instrument for leading congregational singing.
There has been a centuries-long debate on the propriety of the popular idiom in church. Borrowing from secular sources in order to "intoxicate the ear" was deplored in the 14th century by Pope John XXII, and the matter has never since been settled satisfactorily. The Cantus Firmi of the Renaissance were often taken from Chansons. Luther adapted secular tunes to the needs of his Chorales, and, since the middle of the 20th century, folk and popular idioms have again been incorporated into the music of the church.
Elwyn A. Wienandt
Bibliography:
Davidson, A. T., Church Music (1952); Douglas,
W., Church Music in History and Practice, rev. by L.
Ellinwood (1962); Ellinwood, L., The History of American
Church Music (1953); Fellerer, K. G., The History of
Catholic Church Music (1961); Routley, Erik, Twentieth
Century Church Music (1964); Stevens, Denis, Tudor Church
Music (1955); Wienandt, Elwyn A., Choral Music of the
Church (1965; repr. 1979) and Opinions on Church Music (1974).
Under the reign of a Byzantine pope, Vitalian (657 - 672), the liturgy and chant of Rome underwent a thorough reformation, the fruits of which were designed for the exclusive use of the papal court. It was this chant that Charlemagne, some 150 years later, spread throughout the Frankish Empire as a part of his attempts at political unification. Vitalian (or Carolingian) chant, although highly ornamented, was characterized by great clarity of melodic line. As befitted the accentual patterns of the free prose texts, the chant melodies were written in a free rhythm using notes of long and short duration in proportion of two to one.
Largely because of the rise of Polyphony, by the 11th century the subtleties of Vitalian chant were quite lost. All notes were given the same basic duration, and thus rhythm was no longer proportional but equalist (hence the term cantus planus or plainsong), and ornamentation gradually disappeared.
Beginning in the 12th century the melodic notes themselves were tampered with, and by the early 16th century the melodies had been ruthlessly truncated.
Various attempts were made in the 11th and 12th centuries to discover methods of notating melodies exactly: in some manuscripts alphabetical letters indicating precise pitches were written above the text's syllables; more often, in so - called diastematic notation, simplified neumes were written on from one to four pitch lines.
During the last hundred years, monks of the French Abbey of Solesmes have compared the melodic configurations in 9th and 10th century neumatic manuscripts with the same melodies in lettered and diastematic notation. They restored and corrected the notes of the melodies; however, they retained the equalist rhythm of the 11th and succeeding centuries, the neumatic rhythmic indications merely as nuances. Such students of chant as Peter Wagner have lamented the loss of a proportional rhythm, pointing out the consistent unsuitability of melodies to texts when the melodies are understood in equalist terms. The Dutch musicologist Jan Vollaerts (1901 - 56), relying heavily on MS Laon 239, developed a system for the proportional interpretation of neumes, thus clearing the way for a complete reconstruction of Vitalian chant; although further clarification and correction are needed, his theories, more than those of any other, point in the correct direction.
The proper parts of the mass sung by the schola include: (1) the introit antiphon, or processional entrance song, which announces the feast being celebrated that day; (2) the gradual, a response to the Old Testament prophetical reading; (3) the alleluia, a response to the New Testament lesson and introduction to the reading of the Gospel; (4) the offertory, a processional piece in modified responsory form having from two to four highly ornate solo verses; and (5) the Communion antiphon. During the time commemorating Christ's resurrection, the gradual is replaced by an alleluia; in times of penance or mourning, the alleluia is replaced by a tract (verses of a psalm); on certain feasts a Sequence is sung. The ordinary parts of the mass sung by the congregation include the petition Kyrie eleison, the Credo or statement of beliefs, the Sanctus, the Pater noster (The Lord's Prayer), the petition Agnus Dei, and the hymn of praise Gloria in excelsis.
The office, or "canonical hours," is a set of 8 prayer hours that are spread throughout the day from before sunrise to nightfall. It consists of the singing of psalms, each preceded and followed by an antiphon proper to the feast or day, with hymns and orations. The 2 main hours are lauds (6 AM) and vespers (6 PM); the nocturnal hour of matins includes sung prophecies and lessons, with proper responsories.
R John Blackley
Bibliography
W Apel, Gregorian Chant (1958); D Conomos, Byzantine
Hymnology and Byzantine Chant (1984); D G Murray, Gregorian Chant
According to the Manuscripts (1963); R / B C Pugsley, The Sound
Eternal (1987); J Rayburn, Gregorian Chant (1964); Solesmes, ed.,
Paleographie musicale (1889), M S Einsiedeln 121 (1894), and vol.
10, M S Laon 239 (1909); S J P van Dijk, "The Old - Roman Rite,"
Studia patristica 80 (1962), "Papal Schola versus Charlemagne," in
Organicae Voces (1963), and "The Urban and Papal Rites in Seventh
and Eighth Century Rome," Sacris erudiri 12 (1961); J W A Vollaerts,
Rhythmic Proportions in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Chant (1960);
P Wagner, Introduction to the Gregorian Melodies: A Handbook of
Plainsong (1910); E Werner, The Sacred Bridge (1959).
The words chorus and choir--both derived from the ancient Greek choros, meaning a band of dancers and singers--are commonly understood to mean a large group of singers who combine their voices (with or without instrumental accompaniment) in several "parts," or independent melodic lines. This definition, however, is very elastic. The most common type of choral ensemble today performs music in 4 parts, each assigned to a different voice range: soprano (high female), alto (low female), tenor (high male), and bass (low male). The abbreviation "SATB" refers to this type of "mixed" chorus, and to the music composed for it. There are many other common types: women's chorus (two soprano parts and two alto, of SSAA), men's chorus (TTBB), and double chorus (two distinct SATB groups), to name a few. Many choral works are in more or less than 4 parts, from as few as one ("monophonic," all singers singing the same melody) to as many as several dozen (as in the 40-part motet Spen in alium, by Thomas Tallis, or certain 20th-century works). Furthermore, there is no agreement as to the minimum number of singers in a "chorus." It has been suggested, for example, that certain choral works by composers such as Heinrich Schutz and J. S. Bach were originally performed with just one singer to a part. The more usual term for such a small group, however, would be not "chorus" but "vocal ensemble."
The distinction (unique to English) between choir and chorus is fairly clear: a choir generally sings sacred or art music of earlier centuries (as in "madrigal choir"), while a chorus is associated with concert works, opera, musical theater, and popular entertainment. Among other names for vocal groups, glee club usually refers to a school chorus; a chorale of singers is a concert chorus; and the meaning of consort, properly an instrumental group that plays 17th- or 18th-century music, is sometimes extended to include singers.
As an underground sect of Judaism, the early Christian church inherited the anitphonal style but not the splendor of Jewish public worship. Soon after the Roman emperor Constantine the Great officially sanctioned Christianity in 313, the first schola cantorum (literally "choir school," as well as the performing group from such a school) was founded in Rome by Pope Sylvester I. Schools of this type joined with monasteries (notably those of the order founded by Saint Benedict in the early 6th century) to develop the art of choral singing. (Secular vocal music of this time was usually performed by solo singers, not choruses.)
In early medieval choirs, a small number of men, or men and boys, sang Plainsong, a metrically free, monophonic setting of liturgical text. Until the 8th century, when reliable musical notation was invented, plainsong melodies were passed down orally from generation to generation. Gregorian Chant, an outgrowth of the liturgical reforms of Pope Gregory I (reigned 590-604), became the dominant form of plainsong by the 10th century, and has remained in use ever since.
By this time, the term Motet had come to mean a polyphonic vocal setting of any sacred Latin text except sections of the Mass. Between about 1450 and 1600, the motet and Mass developed into elaborate compositions with three to six melodic lines, as in the works of John Dunstable, Josquin Des Prez, and Palestrena. Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli added to the splendor of Venice with works in eight parts or even more, performed by multiple choirs. In the Church of England, which separated from the Roman Catholic church in 1534, a motet on an English text became known as an anthem (which is still the English and American term for a choral piece sung during worship).
As compositions in many parts appeared, choirs began to take their modern form: ensembles of singers divided into groups according to the range of their voices. The exclusion of women from liturgical roles extended to the choir as well; high voice parts were sung by boys, falsetto singers, or (in Roman Catholic countries after about 1570) Castrato. In England particularly, the training of boy singers for cathedral choirs became a well-established tradition that continues today. As the Middle Ages came to a close, the average size of a choir began to increase gradually; the Sistine Choir in Rome, for example, grew from 18 singers in 1450 to 32 in 1625.
For centuries, instrumentalists had had the option of playing along on one or the other of the choir parts, but now composers such as Monteverdi and Alessandro Scarlatti were giving them their own "obbligato" (that is, not to be omitted) parts.
Whether composed for a prince's birthday or a Sunday on the liturgical calendar, the Cantata included such operatic elements as arias, recitatives (a kind of sung-spoken narration), and often choruses, but with a text more likely to be meditative or celebratory than dramatic.
The Reformation, with its doctrine of "the priesthood of all believers," brought new ideas about church music. Calvinist congregations made their own music by singing psalms in unison, shunning anything that smacked of performance, even accompaniment on the organ. Martin Luther favored congregational singing too, but he kept choirs for their inspirational value. The cantatas of composers such as J. S. Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann incorporate the old German Chorales (hymn tunes) that Luther had collected.
Choral music is also the ideal medium for nationalistic sentiments; in times of war the tide of patriotic choruses reaches flood stage. On the other hand, 20th-century works such as Arnold Schoenberg's Gurrelieder and Benjamin Britten's War Requiem match the power of choral utterance with a text of protest and social idealism.
The strong choral traditions of the United States arrived with European immigrants, spread through music programs in the public schools, and were transformed by Afro-American church music, which contributed rhythmic complexity and a call-and- response style of composition. Professional choruses explore not only older classical repertory but new works that contain every innovation found in new instrumental music: the tone clusters and vocal slides of Krzysztof Penderecki, the aleatory (chance) techniques of John Cage and Lukas Foss, and the minimalist pattern-music of Philip Glass.
David Wright
Bibliography:
Heffernan, C. W., Choral Music: Technique
and Artistry (1982); Kjelson, L., and McCray, J., The
Singer's Manual of Choral Music Literature (1973);
Robinson, R., Choral Music (1978); Wienandt, E., Choral
Music of the Church (1965; repr. 1980); Young, P. M.,
The Choral Tradition, rev. ed. (1981).
plainsong
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