At least in Western culture, the idea is as old as the organ itself.
The pipe organ was introduced into the Western Church at some point after about 750 when the Byzantine Emperor Constantine V presented a small instrument to Pépin le Bref, King of the Franks. Pépin’s son, Charlemagne, eventually acquired that or a similar instrument and placed it in the original Carolingian octagon of what is now the Cathedral in Aachen, Germany.
What to do with such a device? As had been the case anciently, the organ was well suited for festive events – the Roman arena, in places of meeting and enjoyment in Persia and Syria, and throughout Byzantium. It would have been inevitable that a pipe organ standing in a Christian church would thus find its role in ritual, but it did so through a key concept. Recalling that the Church recognized that liturgical texts were the exclusive domain of the Sacred Ministers – priests, deacons, subdeacons, lectors- even the singing of a schola or a choir only “stood in.” Roman Catholics of a certain age may recall the vestigial evidence at High Mass before 1965 at which priests would recite soto voce even the texts of the Mass Ordinary simultaneously being sung by a choir. Speech (especially that of a veteran cleric!) moves far quicker than song. Thus would congregations witness celebrants returning to their
sedillae while the choir soldiered on to its final cadence still minutes away! Those who contended that fancy music in church was mere entertainment had a point.
If voices could then “borrow” these liturgical texts from the “official utterance” by a cleric, it would have been but a short jump to have early instrumental music coupled to this “entertainment.” Instruments, particularly the organ, could do what voices could not in evolving and more complex musical structures. They could sustain tone theoretically endlessly and relieve singers. So, a practice dubbed alternatim grew wherein instrumental versets punctuated strains of chant usually with organ iterations of the melody devoid of text. No matter. The celebrant had already recited these, and all was canonically legal. Pope Pius X’s 1903 Moto proprio on church music specifically outlawed the practice (with varying success as alternatim persists in some important centers. Anyone who has heard a glorious Te Deum or Magnificat at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris would attest to the thrill of hearing the Grand Orgue at the building’s west end “declaim” the text between verses by the maitrise a city block away).
Also note that this original correlation of organ and voices fulfilled a different purpose than that which was ascribed to the organ in the Reformed churches: that of introducing hymn tunes to be sung by a congregation. In both cases, the organ fulfilled the role of amplifying the principal sung music, but the liturgical imperatives differed.
In the century or so leading to the present, organ music based upon chant sources has fallen into three predominant categories: 1.) works specifically notated or improvised to support the practice of alternatim (including nearly all the early sources from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance comprising brief interludes taking no longer than the singing of the chant tune); 2.) works intended for liturgical performance in a more modern context (as mass suites for “organ masses,” that were Low Masses during which organists played extended
movements as Entrances, Offertories, Communions, and Postludes, an idiom that flourished until about 1965 with signal contributions from the French composers like Langlais, Tournemire, and Litaize, and the improvisors led by Cochereau); 3.) larger concert works founded on Gregorian melodies.
Some works simply blur the edges. These seven contributions to the chant-based organ literature in this book might lend themselves to a more present-day liturgical sensibility, that is, pieces that behave as organ voluntaries (and especially if played on the days or feasts from which the chant sources are taken). While the attribution to feast and day are clearly indicated with each piece, the impulse behind this music was also to engage the sense of the original and not only its melodic contours or harmonic connotations (and that is a rich cornucopia when marrying the modalism of the melodies with expanded harmonic languages). As a compositional abstraction, each work also endeavors to capture the impression of text, color, and even surroundings.
Consider the triple Alleluia chanted after the Epistle of the Easter Vigil. The structural treatment here follows the custom established with the restoration of the Easter Vigil in 1954 in which the tune is intoned by celebrant or deacon three times, each a step higher in pitch, and repeated by the schola, all prior to a formulaic chanting of Psalm 118. The more modern official source in the Graduale Romanum simplifies the ritual by eliminating the reintonations up a step and their repetition. Streamlined? Yes. Dramatic? Not quite as much. Ironically, those places that adhere to the singing of this triple Alleluia all seem to draw back to the original practice. Great ideas are slow to die.
In the case of the Regina coeli, from night prayer in Eastertide and as the devotional prayer supplanting the Angellus in the same season, might one concede that this lovely melody warrants a dance-like treatment? Why not? Among the most joyful texts tying together the Resurrection with the joys of Mary, Queen of Heaven, it is a paean of happiness, of rejoicing with Mary. Does that not, along with the major mode of the melody, deserve a dance?
And, in the case of the Kyrie Lux et Origo from the chant mass most associated with Easter, does a thick and rich polyphonic texture alternating with the powerful yet distant sonority of a smothered full Swell not evoke the authority of the chant melody, its fullness, its muscularity? No retiring and pious chant this, but rather a big proclamation so appropriate for that morning that the tomb was found empty. In the case of the In paradisum, no doubt one of the sublime moments of the Requiem, the point is to recreate the foundations of the chant as a processional of the soul to Heaven just as the body is taken to a burial place: a tenderly graphic portrayal of the sundering of humanness itself at the moment of death. Of all the pieces here, this chant remains most plainly set against a quasi-impressionist harmonic basis.
Such is the point. Each of these essays on chant themes is only an attempt to pictorialize the text, the event, the setting. The performer, and for that matter the listener, is invited to experience the colors of the stained glass, the expert voices of the schola, and the smell of the incense!
A note on performance: registration in these works is essential and part of their structure. They have been deliberately cast as playable on a two-manual instrument with the most ordinary of tonal resources. Expansion of those parameters for those fortunate enough to perform at larger instruments is not only possible, but welcome. Substitution of sonority, however, is better to be contemplated oh so carefully lest the indispensable roots of the works change.
~ Haig Mardirosian