The Listening Cap

The worship rituals of the Divine Office came together earlier than the Mass. The Office was outlined in book The Rule of St. Benedict (ca. 530-560) and became the standard form of monastic worship during the Carolingian period around the 8th-9th centuries. Other names for the Office include the Liturgy of the Hours, the Breviary, or canonical hours.

The Office consists of a series of eight services celebrated daily at specific times:

The most important of these 8 services liturgically and musically were and are Matins (after midnight and usually about 3 a.m., originally called Vigils), Lauds (sunrise), and Vespers (twilight). As part of the Office, each week the practitioners sing through all 150 psalms over the course of the week. These psalms remain the same each week, but they are always paired with antiphons whose texts vary according to the church calendar. The psalms are analogous to the Mass Ordinary (the fixed part of the Mass), while the antiphons function like the Mass Proper to commemorate an event or person particular to the day or week of the liturgical calendar.

Psalms were sung with very simple recitation formulas that were essentially intoned speech with brief musical motives to mark the ends of phrases, sentences, or the reading itself. The use of music here is not for self-expression, but to accomplish several functions:

To heighten speech with music, i.e. to transcend the everyday worldly quality of speech and give speech an aura of sanctity through song

To enhance memory of the text

To project the text farther through the resonant acoustics of singing (remember these are being sung in the halls of monasteries where the reverberant acoustics would have been an important part of the sonic experience of singing the Office)

The recitation formulas used for singing psalms were called psalm tones, and these formulas could be adapted to fit any psalm. The singing focuses on the reciting tone of the mode; see here for a score example, Dixit Dominus:

Before and after singing each psalm, the monks would sing the antiphon. Here is a recording featuring the antiphon Tecum principium, which would have been paired with the first psalm sung at Vespers on Christmas Day (in this case that would be Dixit Dominus). The antiphon text heralds the birth of Jesus. Antiphons were simple and short, typically with syllabic text setting.

Listen to select Gregorian chants for the Mass for Christmas Day below. I will be including recordings of the two of the Christmas Mass Proper chants (the Introit and the Gradual for Christmas Day) along with five chant settings of the Mass Ordinary texts (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei).

The service begins with the Introit, which on Christmas Day would be “Puer natus est nobis.” As you can hear, this chant is a responsorial chant, which means that it features alternation between soloist and the choir. In the music in the video, notice that the asterisks in the text are performance markings that indicate when the soloist’s section ends and the choir is to begin singing. The soloist sings at the beginning of the Introit and enters again at the psalm text (marked by Ps.).

To see the translation of the text for “Puer natus est nobis,” go to http://www.toddtarantino.com/hum/puernatusest.html

After the Introit, the first part of the Mass Ordinary (the Kyrie) is sung. The text of the Kyrie is Greek and is the only non-Latin text in the Mass. It is a plea for mercy. The text is simple and in three parts, the first and last of which repeat. Typically, each line of the text is sung three times. The repetitious occurrence of the number three is a symbolic evocation of the Holy Trinity.

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. (Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.)

Immediately following the Kyrie’s plea for mercy is the praise of God in the Gloria. Whereas the Kyrie chants tend to be melismatic (containing passages with more than six notes per syllable) because the text is so short, the Gloria chants tend to be either syllabic (1-2 notes per syllable) or neumatic (3-6 notes for syllable) because the text is significantly longer.

The Introit, Kyrie, and Gloria all belong to the first of the Mass’s three sections. The first section provides Introductory prayers, while the second section is the Liturgy of the Word. This section culminates in the Credo, the statement of faith and belief. Before we get to the Credo (part of the Mass Ordinary) several sections of the Mass Proper are sung. During the Mass for Christmas Day, one of the sections is the Gradual “Viderunt omnes.” This particular Christmas Day gradual chant became the source material for numerous polyphonic organum settings and motets. Like the Kyrie above, it is a responsorial chant and a melismatic one. The melismatic setting emphasizes the elaborate beauty that is fitting for a service as important as Christmas Day. The text is:

Viderunt omnes fines terræ salutare Dei nostri. Jubilate Deo, omnis terra. Notum fecit Dominus salutare suum; ante conspectum gentium revelavit justitiam suam.

All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God. Rejoice in the Lord, all lands. The Lord has made known his salvation; in the sight of the nations he has revealed his righteousness.

In the Mass for Christmas Day, the Gradual is followed by the Alleluia (another Mass Proper chant), the Gospel reading, the sermon, and then the third Mass Ordinary chant text, the Credo, which summarizes the central doctrines of the Catholic Church. By far the longest Mass Ordinary text, music the Credo is typically syllabic and relatively simple. A translation of the text can be found here.

After the Credo is sung, the final section of the Mass commences, the Liturgy of the Eucharist. This section begins with a Mass Proper chant, the Offertory, and culminates in the rite of Communion. During this section of the Mass, two Mass Ordinary chants are sung in succession before Communion, the Sanctus and Agnus Dei. These two chant texts represent a kind of mirror image of the first two Mass Ordinary texts and create a symmetry to the service.

Kyrie (plea for mercy)

Gloria (glorification of God)

Credo (statement of faith and doctrine)

Sanctus (glorification of God)

Agnus Dei (plea for mercy)

The Mass is a symbolic reenactment of the Last Supper, centering around the act of Communion. Since the Middle Ages, the Mass has consisted of a combination of texts that are always included in virtually every service and texts that vary depending on the day in the liturgical calendar year. The texts that are sung in every service are called the Mass Ordinary, while the texts that change from service to service are called the Mass Proper. The Mass Ordinary texts are:

Kyrie

Gloria

Credo

Sanctus

Agnus Dei

Sometimes the text of the “Ite, missa est” is also included as the last part of the Mass Ordinary, but these five texts are the core of the Mass Ordinary. Those in charge of planning Mass services had to include these texts in every service but they had a variety of musical settings to choose from; in the Middle Ages, there were an array of chants for each of these texts, and a service organizer might choose certain chants based on criteria like their mode, their length, or elaborateness.

One way to remember the order of the Mass Ordinary movements is through this mnemonic:

KING [Kyrie]

GEORGE [Gloria]

CAN’T [Credo]

SING [Sanctus]

ALTO [Agnus Dei]

The Mass Ordinary sections came together and became standard over four to five centuries, with the Credo being added last in 1041. Little documentation of the early origins of the order of the Mass exists, but the general outline of the mass (without most of the Ordinary and Proper chants) seems to have been practiced already by the fifth century.

The Mass Ordinary texts were always sung, but the Mass Proper texts included some that were sung and others that were spoken. The texts that were always sung were the Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory, and Communion. The chants that were used for the Mass Proper texts were always derived from psalm-singing, and these chants tended to feature passages of decorated recitation, i.e. where the melodic line centers around a single note and embellishes that note with melodic motives or simpler gestures like neighbor notes.

Here is a chart showing the order of the Mass (the asterisks denote the sections that were sung):

In a world where the vast majority of people were illiterate and did not use clocks or calendars to measure time, the church calendar helped to mark the passing of the weeks and months of the year. For this reason alone the church or liturgical calendar served an essential purpose in the daily lives of everyone in Christendom.

The liturgical calendar divides the year into seven periods and begins with Advent, then Christmas Time, followed by Ordinary Time, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and Ordinary Time. Throughout the year, there are important feast days that would often be occasions for more elaborate chants than on lesser important days of the liturgical calendary

In terms of performance practice for chants of the mass, there are three main types of chant.

Antiphonal chants features two choirs that sing back and forth,

Responsorial chants feature alternation between a soloist and the full choir

Direct chants involve only the the entire choir singing together

As for text setting, there are also three types of ways to match words to notes (many things in the Middle Ages come in threes...)

Syllabic, only 1-2 notes per syllable of the chant text

Neumatic, no more than 3-6 notes per syllable of the chant text

Melismatic, the most elaborate where the chant contains passages of more than six notes for a single syllable of the text

Amen to this, and any form of music pedagogy should include and embrace this perspective. To quote the author’s conclusion to her companion opinion piece:

Every spring I teach the first course in the Music History sequence for music majors (which covers about 800 to 1750). Though we cover the eight medieval modes and how to analyze monodic chant, time constraints prohibit adequate discussion of modality when we get to the Renaissance, especially because modal theories became so complex during that period. As we move through the Renaissance and seventeenth century repertoire, students regularly ask “when we will get to tonal music?” with a kind of “are we there yet?” urgency. This is because they do not have the tools to understand how modal polyphony works, and I haven’t worked out a good way to provide those tools in this particular course.

Enter the brilliant folks at EarlyMusicSources.com who have put together a lucidly informative, well-researched, and even entertaining video on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century modes (as part of their fantastic channel and web resources). This video offers a way to help students understand how modes work in Renaissance and seventeenth-century polyphony and why the subject is so complicated. It also helps to illuminate why the major-minor system became a preferable alternative to the increasingly contradictory systems of modal theory. To help turn the video into a pedagogical tool that can be used as an out-of-class assignment, I have created a worksheet of possible questions that teachers can give to students to answer as they watch the video. This worksheet is available here, and if you are an instructor who could benefit from this resource, feel free to use any questions from it (though I would be grateful for acknowledgment of the source). The video is below:

Recent discussions in the School of Music have touched on the question of the effect of sight on music listening. We just had music theorist Elizabeth West Marvin visiting from Eastman School of Music, and one of the topics she discussed was the impact of following a score on listening to music. It is my understanding (second-hand, because I was teaching during her talks) that she advocates listening to a piece of music first before working with the score and analyzing it. I am a fan of that approach, and fully agree that treating the aural experience of the music as secondary to the visual experience of the score cannot help but impact the way one hears the music. Because of time considerations, I do not always approach the music that way when we discuss it class, but I will have to continue thinking about ways to ensure that students listen to the music first before listening with score.

This general topic of vision and music listening got me interested into what research has been done, and led to the discovery that research on the eye’s role in musical listening and response has blossomed in recent years. The use of eye-tracking technology in particular has become a new frontier in music cognition research.

As even a cursory exploration shows, researchers are increasingly looking at the eyes as a window into understanding musical expression. One common avenue of inquiry is the tracking of eye movement and pupil dilation to measure emotional response to music (see for example, this 2015 study and this 2016 study). In August 2017, a two-day conference on music and eye-tracking research convened in Frankfurt, Germany, and the conference literature noted that “During the last few years there seems to be growing enthusiasm to apply eye-tracking methodology to capture the full complexity of musical processing, extending to music perception, cognition, learning, skill-acquisition, expertise, performance, social interactions, rhythmic entrainment, emotion processing, induced states of altered awareness, and cross-modal interactions between the auditory, visual, or motoric systems, to name just a few examples.”

Creators of musical performance interfaces that incorporate eye movement have been working on this for longer. Some of the more well-known examples include innovations designed by Tod Machover and co. at the MIT Media Lab, the EyeHarp project based in Barcelona, and EyeMusic, a design out of the University of Oregon.

Meanwhile, some research is examining how musicians use vision in performance. For example, see (below) the March 2017 video featuring Daniel Beliavsky and his students playing with eye-tracking headsets.

Of course, the fascination with the relationship between visual perception and musical perception goes back to antiquity. With technological and scientific advances in our understanding of the brain, it will be interesting to see how insights about the connection between vision and music will impact music pedagogy in the coming decades.

Last year, in order to help my music majors in the first course of the music history sequence (dawn of time to 1750ish), I used TimelineJS to create online multimedia timelines for the listening lists for each exam. These place each piece in the listening list on a timeline, and students can listen to a recording of each piece while reading the key information about it, culled from the textbook and anthology. One benefit of the timelines is that they give students a better sense of how the pieces are situated chronologically in relation to each other. As a student, I always found the timelines in the old versions of the Grout music history textbook useful, but the latest iterations of the textbook seem to have omitted those timelines in favor of overlapping, more limited timelines in each chapter (which are less useful, and students generally agreed).

I got a lot of feedback from students that these timelines are good study resources, and the grades seemed to reflect that feedback. It was my sense that the students used these timelines as their primary resource for listening to the music (with the expectation that they were listening with score). So here is a link to the timeline I created for the last exam of the semester, covering music from 1600-1750. I will post the other timelines later, once I’ve had a chance to tweak them a bit (an example image from the Renaissance timeline is below).

Spotify’s recent efforts to analyze listener behavior have produced a torrent of data, and they raise questions about how that data can and should be used. Some findings are more interesting than others, and one has to consider that this research is driven by economic motives, primarily the desire “to create a level of ad personalization that is quite unprecedented,” as Adam Bly, Spotify’s VP of data, explains. So the questions of privacy raised by the methods and objectives of this research are real and not to be taken lightly.

Having said that, I wonder about the possible pros and cons of using findings from this research as resources in the classroom. For example, the categories of streaming habits that Spotify has identified through its analysis of user data could be useful as conversation starters in discussions about music listening with students. These categories are: Discovery (the measure of how much people seek out unfamiliar music), Diversity (the range of music that people listen to), and Tilt (how actively people curate their streaming experience). See these categories explained in additional (both interesting and absurd) detail on the Spotify page “Understanding People Through Music.” Since musicians often take listening for granted, considering these categories might encourage students to think critically about their own listening habits, and ways in which they can listen to music in different ways.

See this great, short clip featuring Bob Hiltermann (of the deaf rock band Beethoven’s Nightmare) and C. J. Jones (comedian, musician, all-around performer) discussing how they perceive, play, and enjoy music. These two were among the featured performers in the award-winning 2010 documentary See What I’m Saying. This clip appears in the 2009 documentary The Heart is a Drum Machine.

If you haven’t seen Evelyn Glennie’s remarkable TED talk from about ten years ago, here it is. If you don’t know her, Glennie has trailblazed a career both as a solo percussionist and as a musician with severe hearing loss. You don’t need to know that she has developed a keen sense of embodied hearing attuned to fine musical vibrations in order to appreciate her brilliant musicianship. However, her experience with musical hearing can teach anyone who assumes listening happens only through the ear.

See my earlier related post, see Glennie’s Hearing Essay on her website, and check out the excellent documentary Touch the Sound that features Glennie. Here is her TED talk below; you can watch from about 6:50 to see the segment where she begins to talk about her personal experience with musical listening and dealing with a music education system that initially would not accept her based on false assumptions about what types of hearing are possible for musicians.

When I started college as a freshman music student at a conservatory, I had a sense of eager anticipation that my music education would introduce me to new types of music and ways of experiencing music that I had never heard of and could not imagined on my own. While I certainly learned a great deal on my way to my music degree, I also found the conservatory education to be limiting in some ways. Some of the educators (though by no means all) thought it best to limit students’ study to a narrow set of repertoire from the Western Art Music canon. They also believed it best to use that repertoire to prescribe certain definitions and methods of listening to music as objectively ideal. My dissatisfaction with that limited view of music was one of the reasons why I decided to pursue a double degree in anthropology (there was no ethnomusicology program at the time).

What truly made me realize that the definition of musical listening that we were learning was limited was an experience I had working with members of the Deaf community in my college town (see here for the difference between “deaf” and “Deaf”).

For music majors in particular, it is important to develop the skill of listening to music with scores. Scores contain a great deal of information that can help you tune your ear as you listen, and can help you to understand and analyze the piece better. It can be disconcerting to follow a score until you are practiced at it. Not only can the amount of detail be hard to process visually, but also the sonic experience of the music is always (one hopes) more exciting, surprising, colorful, and nuanced than the visual dullness of a flat, black-and-white, standard page of sheet music. Reconciling the aural and visual takes some getting used to, and keep in mind that most composers conceive their pieces to be heard by audiences who do not have the score in front of them. So while listening to musical works with their scores is not the only way you should listen to music, and while you should be aware of the way in which listening with scores can change the listening experience, you should practice listening with scores as part of any serious study of a notated tradition of music.

It used to be the case that one had to go to the music library to listen to music with scores. While that is still the best way to do it (nothing beats having the printed score in front of you), there are many channels on YouTube that contain many, many videos that pair up the music with the visual score. So you can practice score reading, and immerse yourself in new musical terrain, from the comfort of anywhere that has a wifi connection. Here are some of the most prolific channels for these sorts of videos (in no particular order):

1. Sheet Music Video

2. Renaissance Music Project

3. Gerubach (scrolling scores)

4. Cmaj 7

5. Damon J.H.K.

6. Tomekkobialka

7. Olla vogala

8. Bartje Bartmans

9. Musicanth

10. George N. Gianopoulos

11. Octavestorm

Check out Vox’s latest on music repetition from both a cognition and historical trend perspective. See the article here. The video references the “speech to song illusion” (about 2:55) discovered by Diana Deutsch, and one possible application of the speech to song illusion is a test that you can do yourself or with others. Take a dense, complex work and listen to the beginning three times in a row. I tried this by listening to the first minute of Brian Ferneyhough’s Firecycle Beta (a piece I had never heard before) three times in quick succession without pause, and it was remarkable how different the listening experience was each time. The piece almost sounded unrecognizable each time, because the texture is so dense, and I imagine that my brain parsed the copious sonic information differently with each listening. In two workshops with freshmen music major students, I tried this experiment again (the second time with the opening to Elliott Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra). Each time, many of the students responded that they heard the piece differently, or heard new things in the music. In my view, the music begins to sound more “musical” with repeated listenings. This could be a lesson to anyone who judges a piece upon the first listening. It also is a reminder about the importance of listening to pieces multiple times as a listening habit. As an educator, this exercise underlines the value of incorporating repeated listening into the classroom.