September 2014 | Home / Special Feature / Musical Roots
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Random artists line up for this program: The Early Music Consort of London, The Dufay Collective, Syrian Orthodox Church, Anúna, Hilliard Ensemble, Al Andaluz Project, Schola Cantorum Coloniensis, Begoña Olavide.
Despite the fact that many often speak about how far music has progressed today, only a few feel like having equal discussion in how music was born. Early Music, in this case, is surely the least of majority’s concerns. Even so, the ‘ancient’ sound of Early Music is never really absence; in fact, this thousands-year-old music continues to be practiced today, as part of the rite of the Catholic Mass in all over the globe. This paradox may easily be referred to the ageless sound of Christian spirituality; but on the other hand, this may also lead to a point in history when Catholicism was used as a vehicle to shape one’s political supremacy over the others.
Early Music was began in Europe during the middle age period (around 5th to 12th Century) and lasted for seven centuries before the onset of the Renaissance period. Over the course of this period, the once persecuted Christian religion triggered a whole new religious culture within Europe, shortly after being engaged as the official religion of the Roman Empire (known as the Roman Catholicism). Its history traces back to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and a period of some decades after Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, when the bishops spread out across Europe to form a ‘katholikos’ (Greek for “universal”) church, with the bishops of Rome holding the supreme authority. While the Roman Empire swiftly saw its downfall as the political ruler of Europe, the Christian faithful remains. In result, the Church not only became the new unifying force in religious and political life of Europe, but also given birth to the new form of sacred music (and arts), known today as the Early Music.
Music played a vital role in binding the faithful. The Church’s emphasis on music’s pastoral role prompted acts to create new and more direct means of engaging each congregation whose spread all over Europe. Combining a form of prayer with various oral traditions, they manifested the ‘syllabic’ chants (one note per syllable) and ‘melismatic’ chants (a passage of several notes sung to one syllable of text), which became the feature most common to Early Music. Both were generally done in monophonic nature and with approaches such as ‘responsorial’ (emphasizes the “response” between a soloist and the choir) and ‘antiphonal’ (performed in alternation, with one half of the choir answering the other half). However, there is another key element in Early Music which often forgotten or even dismissed by many. It is the role of ‘intonation’ within each of the spoken word. This is the element that gave freedom to many localities in expressing and developing its own rhythm, melody, and sound, from one region’s liturgy to another. Some of them are the ‘Ambrosian chant’ in Milan; ‘Gaelic chant’ in regions with shared Celtic culture as Great Britain, France, and Spain; ‘Mozarabic chant’ also in Spain with the strong influence of Arabic culture; and ‘Orthodox chant’ used in regions that hold Orthodox churches such as in Syria, Greece, and Russia.
Even so, most of those chants were later endangered by Rome’s political move to regain its power over Europe. Utilizing the established Christianity among the Europeans and control over the newly emerged printing technology, the Roman authority was massively imposing a universal liturgy throughout Christendom based solely on the Roman liturgy. Despite the people resistances (particularly in Spain), most of the localized chants apparently had gone extinct by the end of the 13th century, leaving alone the new standardized and more systematic chant, combined from the Ambrosian and Gaelic. The resulting chant eventually became known as the Gregorian chant—the one we still be hearing today in Catholic masses around the world. Nevertheless, it thus had enormous influence on the development of the art and culture of the Western world through the Middle Ages. (AA)
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