#shorts #gregorianchant

An excerpt of the haunting Easter Sunday Gradual, Haec Dies, performed by @jasongutekunst

Forget chant as you knew it! (Or if you love that style, kindly put a pin it for now.)

Many of us, even those who study and perform the genre, have learned a narrow definition of what constitutes "Gregorian chant." Often this sounds rhythmically anemic, ever acapella, and sung by ecclesiasts in pursuit of some kind of mortify-the-flesh penitentialism.

Hark! This performance throws all that out the window and strives to breathe LIFE back into these chants, by delving back into the often obscure, but MUCH older neumes [cf. notes] from St. Gall & Laon (9th - 11th centuries) as contained in the Graduale Triplex.

To return to contemporary chant, often called 'plainchant', while often stylized as ancient, it is actually a more modern descendent of older performance traditions (Celtic, Gallican, etc.) as denoted by the various systems of neumes. I prefer to recognize the hierophanic in each of these traditions as contiguous rather than in competition.



Check out the full version of Haec Dies, and more at www.youtube.com/@jasongoodcraft, available now!

Sources:

Abbey of Solesmes. "Graduale Triplex." (1974).

Cardine, Dom. Eugene. "Gregorian Semiology." (1982).

Hiley, David. "Western Plainchant: A Handbook." (1993).

Jeffries, Peter. "Reenvisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the
Study of Gregorian Chant." (1992).

свернуть