New York Polyphony: Devices & Desires

About:

The outcome of a highly successful online Gregorian chant remix competition sponsored by Indaba Music, Devices & Desires puts a modern spin on the Medieval. Newly expanded for 2013, this experimental 11-song digital-only EP features groundbreaking remixes of ’Victimae paschali laudes’, ’Gaudeamus in omnes Domino’, and ’Beati mundo corde’, three of plainchant’s most celebrated melodies.

From the pointillistic explorations of David Minnick to the halo of Eileen Carpio’s vocal harmonies, the remixes chart new creative ground. And when paired with the original chants—recorded exclusively for this collection by New York Polyphony—they combine to create a fascinating juxtaposition of ancient and modern music.

For more information on Devices & Desires and to go behind-the-scenes with the remix creators, follow this link. (And if you really want a treat, check out the music video for Alex B’s remix of ‘Victimae paschali laudes’!)

Here's that video:  



Apparently many interesting things have come out of this project!   From NYP's Facebook page:

Last year, with the help of Indaba Music, we sponsored the FIRST-EVER online Gregorian chant competition. It was a huge success. We received hundreds of remixes in a dizzying array of styles from musicians all over the world!

The winning remixes (alongside our original chant recordings) are available on DEVICES & DESIRES, an 11-track digital-only release. More details on our website.

One of the winners, Alex B, produced a music video for his remix of Victimae paschali laudes. (WARNING: his guitar solo at 4:48 will blow your face off.)

Studio Access: New York Polyphony Gregorian Chant Remix Opportunity - Indaba Music

Studio Access: New York Polyphony Gregorian Chant Remix Opportunity - Indaba Music

It's an interesting idea; check it out, and send them something!

New York Polyphony Gregorian Chant Remix Opportunity

Enter the 3 Opportunities Below to Win $1,500 in Cash and a Release on Sony's Ariama Online Classical Music Store!

Gregorian chant lies at the very heart of Western music. It's a thread that runs unbroken through nearly two thousand years of musical expression and its presence can be felt not only in countless creative works, but also in our modern concepts of harmony, melody and form. The influence of plainchant is so complete, it’s as if we know these melodies—consciously or not—at the genetic level.

For centuries, Gregorian chant has been subjected to every compositional technique, treatment and device imaginable—remixed long before anyone even thought to call it that. But now, with the tools available to musicians in the 21st century, it’s time for the next generation of reinvention. Now it's your turn.

Acclaimed classical vocal quartet New York Polyphony and Indaba are giving you the opportunity to put your own unique spin on Gregorian chant. They are providing the stem sets to three different plainchants: "Victimae paschali laudes”, “Gaudeamus in omnes Domino”, and “Beati mundo corde”. Each chant is featured in its own contest, allowing you to remix your favorite.

Submit your music and breathe new life into these ancient melodies.

A New View

Today, March 31, Blogger - i.e., Google - put out a preview of some new formats called "Views." At some point I will be able to change the layout of this blog to my favorite of these formats ("sidebar"), but at the moment a user is required to append the word "view" to the URL. Here's what the views look like - there are 5 of them; use the little dropdown to switch between them - but you will have to do the appending each time. There are still some glitches, but you'll get the flavor.

Better still - I'll put a link in the sidebar here so that you can switch when you come to the page. They are much nicer than the whole long scroll thing you have to do currently - especially on a blog like this one, which is so heavy with video that it takes a long time to load the whole page. I cut down to only 8 posts on the main page (from 12) because of this problem, but I'm sure it's still very slow. That will change once I can use the template; meantime, it's got to be done by you, by hand - if you want.

The Global Chant Database

I've posted on this before, but here's an updated version, at a new web address.

This is a beta version of the new Global Chant Database - Gregorian Chant Research Interface. The old version is available at www.globalchant.org.

The main ideas of the Global Chant Database:

• Everyone searching for a concrete chant or medieval manuscript should find the information on what is the content of the manuscript, in which editions the repertory can be found, which publications concern with the manuscript and which scholars have done research on this manuscript.
• Everyone doing research on a plainchant manuscript can share the results with the scholar community.
• The database aims to follow the principles of the Cantus Planus Study Group, concerning the free exchange of data in electronic form.

Please register to access the full content of the database. Only registered users can add a new data.

More:

The Global Chant Database was developed by Jan Koláček - PhD student of the Institute of Musicology at the Charles University in Prague. The database is intended as an easy tool for scholars and students to search and identify plainchant melodies with a possibility of displaying the sources. The purpose of the database is to comprise the chant incipits of all important editions of plainchant and medieval manuscripts.

North Point's iBand

"Christmas music using borrowed iPhones and iPads at North Point Community Church. Download more free music from North Point -- www.northpointmusic.org/christmas"

New online chant resource - with search by melody!

Wow - check this out! You can actually enter some (at least 3, it says) notes of any chant melody, and the database will return all pieces of melodies that contain that sequence! And then link you to square note chant scores of each item returned!

It also notes that "The pitch of the first note is not important - in the search results the melody appears in all transpositions."

Amazing! The website is called "Global Chant Database," and I haven't looked at anything but the Search feature yet, so amazed am I at that.

This is just terrific!

The Book of Common Prayer for the iPhone

Here, for $4.99.

Not that I have an iPhone or anything....

Free Midi-and-Score-Creation Software

It's called MuseScore, and it's open-source, and simple and easy to use. Here's the Wikipedia article about it.

I created this file of one of the chants we will be singing this year:

A Song of Our True Nature

Julian of Norwich

Christ revealed our frailty and our falling, *
our trespasses and our humiliations.
Christ also revealed his blessed power, *
his blessed wisdom and love.
He protects us as tenderly and as sweetly when we are in greatest need; *
he raises us in spirit
and turns everything to glory and joy without ending.
God is the ground and the substance, the very essence of nature; *
God is the true father and mother of natures.
We are all bound to God by nature, *
and we are all bound to God by grace.
And this grace is for all the world, *
because it is our precious mother, Christ.
For this fair nature was prepared by Christ
for the honor and nobility of all, *
and for the joy and bliss of salvation.

Here's the PDF; I had to create this in 4/4, because MuseScore asks for a time sig.; I tried 14/4 first (just counting the number of notes in the first phrase), and it had a nervous breakdown.

One of the members of our Schola is blind, and this will help her (I hope) to learn music that's not readily available on the web.

Anyway, it works like a charm (well, as well as midis ever work, that is).

"Learning Gregorian chant with the help of GNU Solfege - interval recognition"

A long article on the topic at the blog of the Recovering Choir Director:

A reader inquired about how he could use the GNU Solfege freeware ear-training program to help acquire foundational skills required to learn Gregorian Chant. This is an interesting question; GNU Solfege covers a lot of material beyond the minimum required for Gregorian Chant, and yet lacks features best addressed by actually singing in a schola cantorum or at a Mass where singing of the chant is regularly employed.

This tutorial will show the student of chant how to use GNU Solfege to solidify recognition of the subset of melodic intervals employed in Gregorian chant. The only prerequisite to this tutorial is that the student can recognize pitches. Terminology unfamiliar to the student will become more familiar once he begins to assimilate the tutorial into his mind’s ear.

More Chant Manuscripts

Here are four complete manuscripts at the Latrobe University Medieval Music Database:

The Dixson Gradual

A thirteenth-century Cistercian gradual of 200 folios from the Abbey of San Stephano al Corno, Lodi, Italy. This manuscript is now in the Dixson Collection, State Library of New South Wales. It contains a Temporal Cycle, a Sanctoral Cycle, some Commons and a Hymnal.


The Poissy Antiphonal

A certified Dominican antiphonal of 428 folios from Poissy, written 1335-1345, with a complete annual cycle of chants for the Divine Office (Temporal, Sanctoral and Commons) and a hymnal. The manuscript also contains rules for copying chant and 23 historiated initials: it is in the State Libary of Victoria


The Rimini Antiphonal

A Franciscan Common of the Saints of 155 folios from Rimini, written 1328 and palimpsested on 40 folios with new texts and altered melodies sometime after 1582. The manuscript was decorated by Neri da Rimini with 8 historiated and 21 decorated letters: it is in the Richardson Collection of the State Library of New South Wales.


The Adelaide Antiphonal

A 13th century Italian antiphonal of 180 folios from Christmas to the Saturday after Epiphany held by the State Library of South Australia. This site includes a transcription, translation of the text and rubrics into English and sound recordings of selected works. The manuscript has one historiated and 13 illuminated letters and other noteworthy features

The MMDB is a wonderful thing; it lists the Annual cycle of feasts by both The Temporal Cycle and by The Sanctoral Cycle - and most entries have single or multiple instances of chant scores of introits, graduals, antiphons and etc.

Here's more about the MMDB; I believe the changes they refer to have already been included. At least, we know the manuscripts have been.

La Trobe University closed its Music Department at the end of 1999. This site has not been updated since February 2004. A new and updated version of the Medieval Music Database is currently under construction and should be available early in 2008: in the meantime we welcome your comments, corrections and additions.

The main features of the new version are a much expanded repertoire of works in addition to the melodic incipits of liturgical works. Four complete manuscripts, a gradual and three antiphonals, have been added. Browse by Liturgical Feast is entirely new. This displays the melodic incipit of each liturgical chant for each feast, analyses related melodies and displays colour images of source manuscripts. The Browse by Composers, by Genre and by Manuscripts remain the same as they were is the earlier versions.

Note to Howard: I didn't think to tell you, but all the antiphons for all the days of Lent are listed at the Temporal Cycle page. It may not have the one you were looking for, though, which I think you said was new?

More Chant Software

Here's the history of Gregorio:

The Gregorio project was born in 2006 in ENST Bretagne, a graduate engineering school in France. It was at the beginning a student project of six months, supervised by Mr Yannis Haralambous, developer of Omega. Only Élie Roux decided to continue the project and to develop it under GPL.

At the beginning, the goal of the project was to create a graphical interface to the monks of the abbey Sainte Madeleine du Barroux so that they could use a gregorian font. This font, Gregoria, is a professional OpenType font designed by Elena Albertoni, a typographer and graphic designer. Finally, for licence issues, it has been decided that the project will have its own font called gregorio.

At the end of 2006 year, a new developer, Olivier Berten joins the project and creates the OpusTeX part. In April 2007, Gregorio reached a certain maturity and can start to be used, at least its command line interface, as a preprocessor for OpusTeX. A project has been created on gna.org.

This site was set online in April 2007 with a design by Patrick Roux and has been corrected and improved by Nicolas Aupetit. The autotools support and modularization of the code is made by Jérémie Corbier since April 2007 too.

From this page, which includes download instructions:

The gregorio software is able to read the formats gabc and GregorioXML, and to write those two formats as well as OpusTeX. For now it can only be a powerful preprocessor for writing scores in OpusTeX.

This software is only available (for the moment) on GNU systems (like GNU/Linux). Porting it under Windows would probably be easy. If you want to try, please contact the gregorio developers.

Open-source, of course. Sounds like they want eventually to create a simple GUI for this, too - and looks like they might like volunteers, if anybody's interested.

Yes, Virginia, there is Gregorian Chant software

And here it is.

I make no claim about it; I haven't tried it myself, and I need to find some reliable source who has, before I download it. Call me neurotic about downloading .exe files. I do suspect it's totally on the level, though, after reading the FAQ What does the program Grégoire cost ?:

Developing the program was a considerable amount of work. To give you an impression: the complete application is compiled from over 45000 lines of code (almost 700 pages!). You might expect that such a program is sold for a very high price… but that's not the case! The program has been developed and deployed in a spirit of charity, and it will remain available along the same line, contributing to the dissemination of the vast patrimony of Gregorian chant. Today we consider it abnormal that a regular user would not make any contribution. Therefore we ask you, after you've tried the program for one month and when you wish to continue using it, to donate a minimum amount of €50 (about $50 or £35) to a charitable institution of your choice.

Hackers don't, in my experience, usually request a donation to charity. So I suspect the thing's OK. But if I can't find a reliable recommendation, I'll have to partition my hard drive or something, to try it out. Will re-post in that event.