Gregorian chant

The Roots

The restoration

As you may have guessed, the performance practice of Gregorian chant had fallen to a painfully low level by the middle of the 19th century. But then, finally, the silver lining appeared : in 1847, the manuscript H159 Montpellier was discovered at the University of Montpellier. It would be the start of a slow but steady recovery and restoration of this 1000 year-old music. The Montpellier manuscript had a double notation : neumes, of course, but also an indication of pitches, ranging from 'a' to 'p'. For the first time, musicologists were given a hint as to what those curious little signs (neumes) could mean.
In 1860, Dom Pothier and Dom Jausions, two enthusiastic monks of the Solesmes abbey, started a search for manuscripts throughout the continent, copying them with painstaking accuracy and patience. For some manuscripts, it took them up to five years to copy the signs they did not even understand at that time. Only with the full knowledge of neumes we possess nowadays can we assess the value of their labour ; after all, the smallest twist or angle has its importance. Towards the end of the century, Dom André Mocquereau took photographs of the manuscripts as well. In the end, his collection contained more than 600 manuscripts, taken from different codices. He soon noticed that antiphons had similar neumes in different manuscripts, even if those manuscripts came from distant sources. This proved that there had been considerable unity in the 9th century repertoire in Western Europe.

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In 1883, Dom Pothier publishes his Liber Gradualis, containing the chants for mass and based on the newly acquired knowledge. The most remarkable difference with the Pustet-edition is the way the notes are grouped, a technique Pothier had picked up from the manuscripts. His assistant, Dom Mocquereau (with whom he would have a flaming row a few years later) goes a step further. In January 1889, he starts publishing the series of manuscripts in the Paléographie Musicale. He mainly wants a more scientific and systematic approach, or in his own words : 'to use a scientific tank against Pustet'. And the use of military vocabulary clearly illustrates the situation : Pustet had been granted a papal monopoly to print church music and was obviously not inclined to hand it over to Solesmes just because some weird monks thought things should change. At least not without putting up a fierce battle. But Dom Mocquereau had been knick-named 'the lion' for good reason. He was a very determined and passionate character, prepared to fight for his ideas. And in 1904, he won. Pope Pius X finally declared the Pustet-edition to be outdated and asked Pothier and Mocquereau to prepare the Editio Vaticana, putting the newly acquired knowledge into practice. But the members of the commission soon started fighting among themselves about the way things would have to be done. Eventually, Dom Pothier prepared the editions of Kyriale and Graduale alone, away from Solesmes (he had left the abbey a few years before).

But Dom Mocquereau took his revenge. In 1908, he published his own edition of the Graduale Romanum with the publishing house Desclée in Doornik (Belgium). His edition was identical to the Vatican one, but Mocquereau had added rhythmical signs, the most (in)famous of which is no doubt the so-called ictus (the vertical accent sign or episema). The system would be the basis for the Mocquereau singing method, used by hundreds of thousands of people. Nobody seemed to care about the fact that this counting of notes resulted in performances opposite to what the structure of the words indicated. Even Mocquereau ignored the fact that the daily practice in Solesmes was all about paying attention the text and the word structure.