I G N A Z I O M AC C H I A R E L L A ( E D )

MULTIPART
MUSIC
A S PEC IF IC MODE OF M USI CA L T HI NKI NG,
EXPR ES S IVE B E HAV I OUR A ND SOUND
 International Council for Traditional Music

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 I G N A Z I O M AC C H I A R E L L A ( E D )

MULTIPART
MUSIC a specific mode of musical thinking,
expressive behaviour and sound

Papers from the First Meeting of the ICTM Study Group on Multipart Music
(September 15 - 20, 2010; Cagliari – Sardinia)
Contents
Ignazio Macchiarella, Theorizing on multipart music making 7

Enrique Camara de Landa, Multipart music making between Spain and 23

Latin America: some considerations related to the theoretical proposals of
Ignazio Macchiarella

Historical Perspectives
Gerda Lechleitner & Nona Lomidze, Early sound documents of multipart 37
music. Concepts and historical context, analysis and interpretation

Susanne Ziegler, Multipart music practices in historical perspective. Recording 51

versus notation

Rossana Dalmonte, “As once and even more today: music has to be involved in 67
people and God”. Liszt’s sacred music for extra-liturgical occasions

Vasco Zara, Ad infinitum. Polyphonic practices and theological discussions in 77

Ars Nova’s time

Massimo Privitera, The polyphony as an emblem of concorde in early modern 95

Europe

Theory and Concepts

Hugo Ferran, The concepts of “part” and “multipart music” for the Maale of 105
southern Ethiopia

Žanna Pärtlas, Musical thinking and sonic realization in vocal heterophony. 129
The case of the wedding songs of the Russian-Belarusian borderland tradition

Jacques Bouët, Heterophony leads necessarily to a polyphony much less 143

rudimentary than the hocket. Listening to recordings of Macedo-Roumanian
(Gramoshtenes of Roumanian Dobrogea) and Xhosa (South Africa) plurivocal
songs

Joseph Jordania, Social factor in traditional polyphony. Definition, creation, 149

and performance

Making Multipart Musics: Case Studies

Mauro Balma, Styles of chant and styles of life. Synchronous changes in Cogne, 163
a village in the Western Alps (Italy)

Joško Ćaleta, Ojkanje, the (multipart) musical system of the Dalmatian 175
Hinterland. The social and emotional dimensions of the performance practices

Fulvia Caruso, Multipart singing in Latera: musical behaviour and sense of 187
belonging

4 MULTIPART MUSIC: A SPECIFIC MODE OF MUSICAL THINKING, EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR AND SOUND
Daiva Račiūnaitė-Vyčinienė, Specific features of performing Lithuanian 215
polyphonic songs. Sutartinės: singing as birdsong

Eno Koço, Styles of the iso-based multipart unaccompanied singing (IMUS) of 237
south Albania and north Epirus and among the Arbëresh of Italy

Giuseppe Massimo Rizzo, Sopila circular interactions 279

Girolamo Garofalo, Traces of ison and biphonies in the Byzantine chant of 301
Sicilian Arbëreshe

Joao de Carvalho, Triads, trials and triangles. Harmony singing, mobility 323
and social structure in Mozambique

Gerald Florian Messner, The reciprocity of multipart vocal traditions and 333
socio-cultural structures

Pyrenees an emerging field

Philippe Cauguilhem, The polyphonic performance of plainchant between 341
history and ethnomusicology

Jean Jacques Casteret, Western Pyrenean multipart. A trans-historical 347

approach
367
Jaume Ayats, The lyrical rhythm that orders the world. How the rhythmic built
the ritual space models in the religious chants of the Pyrenees
381
Jean-Christophe Maillard, Religious traditional multipart singing in the
central Pyrenees
393
Iris Gayete, Time logic of the “vespers” of the Pyrenees

Multipart Singing in Sardinia 403

Sebastiano Pilosu, Canto a tenore and “visibility” . Comparing two
communities, Orgosolo and Bortigali
415
Marco Lutzu, Rediscovering a multipart tradition. The case of Nughedu San
Nicolò
427
Roberto Milleddu, “Cal’est su giustu” (what’s the right thing?). Notes on
multipart singing in Bosa (Sardinia)
439
Paolo Bravi, The practice of ornamentation in the multipart vocal music of
southern Sardinia. A ‘bifocal’ perspective in ethnomusicological analysis
463
References

5 MULTIPART MUSIC: A SPECIFIC MODE OF MUSICAL THINKING, EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR AND SOUND
6 MULTIPART MUSIC: A SPECIFIC MODE OF MUSICAL THINKING, EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR AND SOUND
The polyphonic performance of plainchant, between history and
ethnomusicology

Philippe Canguilhem

Pyrenees an emerging field

341 MULTIPART MUSIC: A SPECIFIC MODE OF MUSICAL THINKING, EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR AND SOUND
342 MULTIPART MUSIC: A SPECIFIC MODE OF MUSICAL THINKING, EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR AND SOUND
The four following articles illustrate some current research that has been ongoing
since 2006, when Jaume Ayats discovered, while working in the Catalan Pyrenees,
that the polyphonic performance of Vespers on Sundays and feast days existed there at
least until the II Vatican council, and that the memory of this tradition was still alive
in some villages (Ayats-Martinez 2010 and Ayats-Costal-Gayete 2010). At the same
time, I was beginning to undertake research on historical faux-bourdon in France
after 1500, a topic that till then had never been considered worthwhile by the mu-
sicological community (Canguilhem 2007 and 2010). Our common wish towards
a better understanding of these musical phenomena in a triple perspective, histori-
cal, ethnomusicological, and practical, gave birth to the FABRICA project in 2008
(FAux-BouRdons, Improvisation et Contrepoint mentAl), which since then has been
sponsored by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
As a result, the project involves three different institutions: two Universities on both
sides of the Pyrenees (Université de Toulouse le Mirail and Universitat Auto-noma de
Barcelona) and an early music group of singers directed by Dominique Vellard (En-
semble Gilles Binchois). This unusual partnership between historical musicologists,
ethnomusicologists, and professional musicians would like to facilitate dialogue and
collaboration between people who often work on similar or related topics without
being able to find a space to exchange ideas, methods, or questions.
The project itself aims to investigate the issue of orality and literacy in musical crea-
tion, taking the various traditions of polyphonic performance of plainchant repertory
as a case study. As a matter of fact, we know that the majority of polyphonic music that
was heard in church from the Middle Ages to the end of the XVIIIth century (and even
later) was not sung through a composed score, but resulted from the arrangement of
plainchant according to a variety of modes. What gives the project its originality is
the fact that we are not confronted with a specific repertoire, but rather with a com-
mon practice, namely the various ways plainchant was performed in polyphony. This
practice is documented over a very large chrono-logical span, which started when the
first faux-bourdon practice was mentioned, towards the middle of the XVth century,
and which has lasted until now, with the present research on the Pyrenees singers,
who still remember the polyphony they used to regularly sing during Vespers some
fifty years ago.
As will be seen below, sacred polyphony in the Pyrenees differs from other similar
practices already studied in southern Europe (particularly those of the Mediterranean
islands) on some points. One of the most striking of these lies in its social aspect:
whereas in Corsica and Sardinia, this particular kind of multipart singing is closely
related to the world of confraternities, these are no longer active today on both sides
of the Pyrenees, although Jean-Jacques Castéret reminds us that they formed an im-
portant part of the social life of the Bigorre and Béarn provinces until the XIXth cen-
tury. Outside confraternities, multipart singing in Pyrenean churches was either left to
specialized singers (called cantadors in Catalan, or chantres in French) or to the whole
congregation, a practice that seems to have been proper to the northern (i.e. French)
part of the Pyrenees. In this latter case, even women could participate: this “chant de

343 MULTIPART MUSIC: A SPECIFIC MODE OF MUSICAL THINKING, EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR AND SOUND
fidèles” is investigated in Jean-Christophe Maillard’s study.
In his recent and important book, Xavier Bisaro (2010) has shown how the prac-
tice of singing plainchant in French rural churches has always been shared between
“chantres” and “fidèles”, although this division is not so easy to determine, and varies
considerably according to place and time. The Pyrenees situation in the XXth century
offers a fascinating case-study that awaits to be fully understood.
How do these social gatherings interact with the musical peculiarities of the reper-
toire? This issue is faced by Jaume Ayats, who tries to understand the relationship
between the way the cantadors sing the Latin psalms and the time logic of the Vespers
ritual. A comparison with, on the one hand, the rhythmic features of the chants sung
during the processions and on the other, the Catalan goigs that are related to dance,
leads him to conclude that a close connection can be found between the rhythmic or-
ganization of the music and its function in the ritual. Along the same line, Iris Gayete
takes into account the rhythmic complexity of the polyphony sung during Vespers:
her careful and detailed analysis of the psalmody helps us to understand how the can-
tadors negotiate the delicate act of singing unmeasured music together.
The last article, by Jean-Jacques Castéret, deals with the complex articulation of orality
and literacy which forms the defining characteristic of plainchant polyphonic perfor-
mance. As a matter of fact, the singers always use a book of plainchant, or at least a
Psalter upon which they perform: “faux-bourdon” is the easiest way of “singing upon
the book”, or “chanter sur le livre”, as this practice was called all over Europe from the
XVth up to the XIXth century. Sometimes, the books of plainchant do contain some
instructions or indications about the way polyphony can be performed. This short-
hand notation, vague and inaccurate by its very nature, requires much more than the
simple reading of the notes in order to be transformed into an articulated polyphonic
psalm or canticle for four voices, and is far from acquiring the status of a ‘score’.
This is where historical musicology meets ethnomusicology: religious multipart sing-
ing in the Pyrenees is historically documented by a handful of written sources of the
XIXth century, sources that can be analyzed and compared with what remains today
of the oral tradition. Among such sources, the Lourau manuscript, mixing pieces with
parallel fifths and octaves most probably sung by the whole congregation, and more
dialogic motets typical of the chantres, constitutes a fascinating document that tes-
tifies to the stability of musical practice in Béarn over a very long period. How did
the singers use the Lourau manuscript? Were they acquainted with musical literacy
enough to be able to read it at sight, or at least to learn the music directly from it? And
how did they articulate their oral experience, and what name would we give to their
improvisational practice with this written document? Some possible answers might
be found in the way Pyrenean singers react to this music today. But these questions,
as Karol Berger reminded us ten years ago, are not reserved to the singers that used
the Lourau manuscript and their descendants: they can also be asked to a much larger
group of musical situations that occur in Western music, be they considered ‘art music’
or ‘popular music’:

344 MULTIPART MUSIC: A SPECIFIC MODE OF MUSICAL THINKING, EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR AND SOUND
The development of modern European art music would be unthinkable without [a] partial
separation of composition and performance in the process of music-making and without the
survival of products of composition independent of performance. These are the defining fea-
tures that distinguish art music from popular music traditions […] We would get it all wrong,
however, if we insisted on too strict a separation of art and popular music. In particular, we
should not imagine that the emergence of art music led to a complete disappearance of popular
music. Rather, we should think of European music since the thirteenth century as involving a
complex interaction between the two, a precarious, highly unstable, ever-changing balancing
act. In other words, we should keep in mind that “art music” and “popular music” are no more
than heuristically useful ideal types and that much music-making in Europe mixed both types
in various proportions . (Berger 2000, p. 118)

This is not the least interest of the music of the cantadors and the “chant de fidèles”
that resounded until recently in the rural churches of the Pyrenees, which so effective-
ly embody this complex and “ever-changing balancing act”, allowing us to reconsider
these traditional categories of the musicological discipline.

345 MULTIPART MUSIC: A SPECIFIC MODE OF MUSICAL THINKING, EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR AND SOUND
346 MULTIPART MUSIC: A SPECIFIC MODE OF MUSICAL THINKING, EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR AND SOUND