gregorian melodies never wear out
Monic Slingerland | 28 May 2010 | Trouw
Anthony Fiumara composed four hymns, specifically for the Gregorian Festival in Ravenstein. Ancient church music is the cradle of Western music. „It is a privilege that I am allowed to touch it.”
„Gregorian music”, composer Anthony Fiumara says, „is like truffle oil. One drop in a dish is immediately discernible”.
Over the past months, Fiumara has immersed himself in early vocal church music. The Dutch Gregorian Festival commissioned him to compose four Marian antiphons (chants) for vocals and strings.
On Sunday, the second day of the festival, the Marian chants will premiere. The small town of Ravenstein (on the river Maas) will be thronging with musicians, festival visitors, workshops, and concerts for the third time since 2006. This year the Dutch Gregorian Festival is dedicated to the Eastern influences on Western church music.
Gregorian music is as simple as can be. It is always in unison and without any instrumental accompaniment. In its purest form, it uses only male voices. For over 15 centuries, monks have been singing the Christian texts that are set to melodies without any major leaps, tranquil in nature. There is no real unit of measure or obvious rhythm. The melodies continue to flow and take their own course like rivulets in a gently rolling landscape. Fiumara: „Beauty comes no purer.”
The creators of the festival asked Fiumara to write a work for choir and string ensemble based on the four Marian antiphons that are part of the Gregorian repertoire.
Fiumara: „The melodies of the Marian antiphons are perfect, like all Gregorian melodies. They do not wear out, even though they are over a thousand years old. They evoke their own universe. I am not speaking as a musicologist. Time and again those melodies have an impact, they stir something up. One cannot help but be affected. Perhaps because as a Roman Catholic from Tilburg (in the Southern Netherlands) I grew up with this music.”
For his arrangement of one of the four Marian chants, Fiumara used a text by Geoffrey Chaucer, writer of the famous ’Canterbury Tales’. This 14th century Old English book is filled with stories that pilgrims tell each other. Fiumara chose one that features the Marian chant ’Alma redemptoris mater’.
The story from the ’Canterbury Tales’ is about a small boy who is murdered as he walks home from school. The dead child is left lying on the street. When his mother finds him, the boy starts to sing the Marian antiphon, ’Alma redemptoris mater’. He refers to Mary as the Welle (source) of Mercy.
These are the words that Fiumara has chosen as the title of his composition. In his study, the composer plays back a recording of a rehearsal for the piece ’Welle of Mercy’. Schola Maastricht, a Gregorian male-voice choir, sings the original Gregorian melody of 'Alma redemptoris mater'. The string orchestra Lundi Bleu plays long drawn out melodic lines as two tenors sing the story of the boy using Chaucer's words. However, the choir singers do not appear to pay any heed to either tenors or strings.
That is deliberate, Fiumara confirms. He produces the score. It requires the Schola to sing at its own pace and phrasing, independent of the strings and tenors. In this way, Fiumara allows the old and the new to coexist side by side in his ’Welle of Mercy’.
In the second part, ’Regina Caelis’, orchestra and singers also appear to be going their separate ways. Fiumara praises Schola Maastricht, the vocal group for which the work was written. „Before I started I went to hear them sing in order to get acquainted with who they are and what they are capable of. They are superb. Gregorian music is really ’their thing’”, says Fiumara. „I was keen to include the unison singing because they are so good at it.”
What Fiumara sets the string orchestra Lundi Bleu to do is almost the opposite of Gregorian chanting. The strings get to play polyphonically with a lot of pizzicato whereby the strings are plucked briskly. There are a great many rapid notes in marked contrast with the long, monophonic lines of the Gregorian singers. Lundi Bleu, an amateur orchestra that rehearses on Mondays (lundi), is based in Amsterdam.
As the singers from Maastricht and the strings from Amsterdam rehearse for the first time, Fiumara's music sounds sonorous and clear.
In his capacity of musicologist, Fiumara is specialised in Renaissance music. He fetches a suitcase, opens it. A wooden string instrument. „This is a vihuela. A Roman Catholic promotional instrument from 1540, a sort of hybrid between a lute and a violin.”
He explains that during this period, the mid 16th century, it became popular to strum the violin instead of using a bow. The same happened in respect to lutes used in Arabic music. „But the lute was a Moorish, not a catholic instrument. Subsequently a kind of catholic alternative was devised, the vihuela, which quickly became very fashionable. At the time, musicians would complain that every stable hand owned a vihuela.”
Fiumara discovered musicology in the basement of the Radboud University. He studied history in Nijmegen but subsequently switched to musicology. Over the past 10 years, he has focused on composing. His composition commissions are increasingly significant. He also wrote a piano concerto. Simultaneously, he remains active as a music reviewer for the national newspaper Trouw.
This is his first foray into Gregorian chanting, the oldest music in Europe, religious 'utility music'. „It is pervaded with a sense of infinity. In the Gregorian universe, time is eternal and everlasting. When you sing it, or listen, it feels as if a door opens to a room where the music has always been present. All we do is articulate the music. Like putting pegs on the clothesline of eternity”, as Fiumara says. „You never know whether the piece is actually finished. Only by the silence that follows.”
Gregorian plainsong is the birthplace of western music, the composer says. „A privilege that I am allowed to touch it.” (translation: Moze Jacobs)