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Millennium of Music
March 2007 Schedule
What is Gregorian Chant?--As we have done in the past, we spend some weeks looking at a key topic in early music. This month, a series on what Gregorian Chant actually is--almost everything we assume we know about it is in fact incorrect (or at least incomplete), and we will spend some weeks getting to the actual truth. This is (amazingly)only possible because of a series of studies and recordings made in the last few years.
Our guide will be long-time Millennium guest and chant expert, Fr. Jerome Weber, early music critic of Fanfare magazine.
#07-11: 03/05/07 -- The Liturgy in Rome--Because of its centrality and continuity, the early liturgy of the Roman Christians is perhaps the earliest we can reconstruct-- we'll hear some examples.
#07-12: 03/12/07 -- Cantilena Metensis--Metz was the capital city of the Frankish kingdom, and the ancestor of the Carolingians was St. Arnulf, who became Bishop there after the death of his wife, and whose son married the daughter of Pepin I. It was the firs place Roman cantors taught Frankish cantors, and we hear an extremely rare reconstruction of this early liturgy (what we call "Gregorian Chant" was perhaps first called "Messine," from Metz).
#07-13: 03/19/07 --The Gallican Liturgy--If the work that was done in the courts of Pepin II and his son Charlemagne was a vast editorial process collecting chant from different churches, one thriving musical style was in the neighborhood chapel--this week, we hear the liturgy of the Gauls.
07-14: 03/26/07 --The Editors in Solesmes--So, Franks in the centuries after Charlemagne introduced new hymns, new Ordinaries, sequences, tropes, organum, and rhythm became strict rather than free, with melismas being eliminated because the slower singing made them interminable, and the musical accents were shifted to word accents. By the 1614 Medici edition these changes were codified--How did a group of Benedictine scholar/monks beginning in the 1833 help reconstruct what the earlier chant sounded like?
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