European Union preserving Gregorian chant

Europe’s Catholic heritage is far from being “totally ignored” by the EU. The EU funds and coordinates countless scholarly and archaeological projects aimed at researching and preserving the literary, cultural and material remnants of Europe’s long history under the Catholic Church. Just as it does the same for other remnants of other cultures such as the Greeks, Romans, pagans, Byzantines, Protestants, Muslims, Jews etc.

Also, “Gregorian Chant” no longer exists, and hasn’t for several centuries. All we have is fragmentary documentary evidence that does not permit a "faithful" recreation. There are a lot of aspects which we don’t, can’t and will never know, especially in terms of performance. Any modern performance of Gregorian Chant requires a lot of creative filling in of huge gaps and interpretation of cryptic manuscripts on the music theory of chant.

Kudos to Solesmes for their remarkable scholarship and hard work in rediscovering, collecting, publishing and interpreting the documents they did. It was quite a remarkable feat at the time. However, I think they were misguided, at least until recently, in presenting their performance as “authentic” and “authoritative”, rather than a springboard for further scholars and performers to build upon.

A lot of this had to do with the Romantic Era assumptions their day, and the time pressure they were under in their rivalry with Cecilians. They either didn’t bother filling a lot of the gaps, or filled them with a musical techniques native to the nineteenth century that would have been out of place in the Middle Ages. Their lack of dynamism is particularly jarring, as is the odd throbbing beat that I find distracting. They never even bothered exploring organum and heterophony.

Thanks to their hard work, though, the stage was set for historically informed performers like Konrad Ruhland, and Marcel Peres and his Ensemble Organum, among many others, religious and secular. We are living in an age where research on early music, including chant, is exploding, as are the number of historically informed performers. The EU project is one of many initiatives in this regard.

A lot of their works are readily available. With a few keystrokes, anyone with an internet connection can access more early music than anyone in the Middle Ages, or, for that matter, anyone thirty years ago, could ever imagine.