One of the purposes of this blog is to give some insight into the musical choices for Mass and Vespers at the Cathedral. It's a huge topic and is therefore something I'll dip into over a period of time, but as the new church's year begins tomorrow with the First Sunday of Advent this seemed an ideal place to begin.
The basic building block for any choral service at the cathedral is plainsong - plainchant or gregorian chant if you prefer - and you will have noticed that it provides the musical continuity between the diverse polyphonic items sung by the choir. Thus a service containing Haydn and Elgar or Palestrina and Maxwell-Davies is drawn into a single musical thread by the plainsong which intersperses these items.
When he is inducted, each chorister is presented with a Graduale Romanum, the book which contains all of the plainsong to be sung at Masses throughout the year and which (if he takes care of it!) he will keep for the rest of his life.
Is it like a hymn book? Not really. Everything is in Latin and is written in a different style of musical notation, using staves with four lines and square notes (neums) with very few stems. The chants are not hymns - in the Catholic tradition hymns are sung as part of the Divine Office, e.g. at Lauds and Vespers - the chant in the Graduale comprises both the Proper and the Ordinary of the Mass. In other words, these chants are the Mass, not extraneous texts to be inserted into it at whim.
How do we know what to sing? It's sometimes suggested that I pick any bits of chant I like, rather like selecting a hymn such as Guide me O thou great redeemer and hoping that it fits the theme of the day. In fact the opposite is the case. Each piece of chant (and there are over 800 pages of music) is carefully codified to be sung at a particular part of the Mass at a particular point in the church's year. I spend many hours each term planning the chant for the services, reading carefully the directions in the Graduale to be sure I have made the correct selection. At times like Advent and Epiphany it's particularly complicated.
I'd like to single out one particularly beautiful piece of chant for tomorrow, the Gradual: the chant sung between the first and second readings. Graduals tend to be the most ornate and beautiful of any in the whole corpus of plainsong. Each has two sections, usually a lower opening followed by a higher verse, though most Sundays we normally have time only for the opening section. The second section of tomorrow's gradual, sung by the boys, soars up to the highest note we sing (in chant) all year, setting the text from Psalm 24: Show me your ways O Lord, and teach me your paths. This is a repeat of the text heard in the introit at the start of Mass - it's as though the text is being given special emphasis by repetition coupled with the daringly high tessitura.
A rather prosaic performance of it can be found here. We'll sing it a whole tone higher, hopefully with better tuning, and in the best Italian tradition we'll also linger longer on the highest notes. I suppose one could say that's an application of Puccini performance practice to gregorian chant - hopefully somebody somewhere has written a dissertation on the validity of this approach!
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