Since Byzantine chant keeps getting mentioned, a few comments from the
perspective of New Rome might be in order:

Re: Marcel Peres and Byz. Chant
I think somewhere in this thread somebody mentioned the interview with
Peres in Sherman's "Inside Early Music," in which he is asked about his
collaboration with Lycourgos Angelopoulos (under whom I've studied Byz.
singing and performance practice).  Peres responds to this question in two
ways:

1) By noting how very informative he found the perspective offered on
Christian liturgical chanting by someone who comes from an unbroken
monophonic tradition.  This relates to some of the matters of perfomance
practice that have already been mentioned in this thread: e.g.  vocal style
and  ornamentation.  As someone who has worked both sides of the street
(among other Western things, I've sung as an Anglican cathedral chorister),
I think that Peres is right about the way in which centuries of musical
development have both removed Western art music from its monophonic roots
and  imposed a  progressively more literal approach to the realisation of
musical notation (cf. the rather different conventions of the Baroque era).


Moving back to Peres, whatever I may think about his ideas regarding
clocks, I  think his point to Sherman about liturgical time is
fundamentally valid. Most Western Christian liturgical services are today
nowhere near as long as their Eastern counterparts have remained.  Even
without the  extreme of an Athonite vigil before a major feast (vespers,
matins and Divine Liturgy lasting up to a total of 12 or so hours, the vast
majority of it occupied by singing), one only has to go to a more
traditional Greek,  Ethopian, or even Russian (19th polyphony and all)
parish for a vigil or matins and Sunday Eucharist to experience a different
approach to liturgical time.

2) Peres also invokes the common Greco-Roman culture that was shared across
the Mediterranean for the first millennium of our era until that of
Northwest Europe swept South and eventually East with the Franks, Normans,
and Crusaders.  Sherman doesn't seem to grasp the full importance of this,
but any Byzantinist who is aware of the Eastern Roman Empire's continuity
with the traditions of Late Antiquity will tell you otherwise (this is not
to say there were not substantial discontinuities, but sifting through them
is one of the things that makes Byzantine history and culture interesting).
A musical variation on this theme is Timothy McGee's recent and somewhat
controversial  OUP book on the sound of medieval song.  For those of you
who haven't read it, he uses medieval singing treatises and notation to
argue that a Roman (i.e. common Mediterranean) style of singing chant went
North, but was gradually abandoned everywhere, including Italy itself.


Re: Drones
Whilst the first report of Byzantine chanting with a drone comes some time
after the fall of Constantinople from a Western traveller, many
Byzantinists are no longer jumping to the conclusion reached by Wellesz:
i.e. anything that doesn't sound like Solesmes-style singing="Arabo-Turkish
influence." (The founders of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae seemed to
confuse the palaeographic acheivement of Solesmes with its performing
style, a common enough misconception.  They also tried to trigger a
Solesmes-style restoration of medieval Byz. chant, but that is a story for
another day.)  As Zev Feldman has noted, most Turkish music (other than a
few syncretistic Sufi genres) does not use an ison.  Moreover, there are
references in Byzantine musical mss that could be interpreted as
instructions for the application of a drone.  The absence of any references
in the theoretical treatises doesn't seem to mean much, because most of the
theory books of the last two centuries also say little or nothing about
ison-singing, leaving it to the realm of performance practice.  Finally, I
should note that probably the first reference to isokratema is in a
medieval Western treatise: the Summa Musice, which refers to it as "organum
basilica" (pace Professor Sandon, here is the justification for the
Burgundian Cadence's use of drones in Western chant).

Re: Peres as "mad genius"
Although I'm well aware of his hearty laughter, I really find this
designation a bit patronising. Although he has had his hits and misses,
Peres works and studies very hard.  He runs a centre for studying medieval
music at Royaumont abbey called CERIMM that is a sort of medieval
counterpart to IRCAM.  He regularly hosts scholarly conferences on a wide
variety of subjects (Russian Old-Believer singing, various Western medieval
repertories, oral traditions of polyphony, Byzantine chant (in which I
participated), Jerome of Moravia, etc.), the proceedings of which are
published in the series Rencontres a Royaumont.  He also has a series of
ongoing study projects employing top-ranked scholars, including one on
music in various medieval cities.  In addition, some of his musical
projects take years of preparation.  I have heard from Angelopoulos, for
example, that the Ensemble Organum has been working for some time on
singing ornamented chant according to the rules of Jerome of Moravia, all
of which Peres can quote by heart in rehearsal.

Granted, it is a big shock for people to hear for the first time a sound
completely different than the usual mix of Solesmes and English cathedral
singing.  Nevertheless, I think that there is a lot more to Peres than
being a "mad genius" who has tapped into the modern market for
"authenticity."

Alexander Lingas, Ph.D.
St. Peter's College
Oxford  OX1 2DL
United Kingdom
Office Tel: + 44 (0) 1865 278917
Fax: +44 (0) 1865 278855
Home Tel:  + 44 (0) 1865 370641




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