In message <[log in to unmask]>, Luca
Ricossa <[log in to unmask]> writes
>That means no way singing gregorian chant with a drone. One singer holds a
>note, the other sings a FREE melody (that's clear from the text), trying to
>concord with the held tone in the cadences. That is more like the
>aquitanian organum and has nothing to do with "western chant", neither with
>drones.
As I posted privately to Nick Sandon, Marcusson (having discussed the
matter with Leo Treitler) seems to think that the early prosula texts
added to various melismatic chants were performed simultaneously with
their parent chant, resulting in a kind of polyphony which may have led
to the various later polyphonic/organum developments. I'm none too
sure about this myself, if only because a lot of these pieces survive in
Northern Italian sources, a locality whose pre-Gregorian chant tradition
involved repetitive and variative melodies, which might suggest that they
took to the "Gregorian" prosula as a way of perpetuating something of
their own style in the new repertory - repetitive monody rather than
polyphony. Nonetheless, I note that whenever symposia publish their
papers on "early polyphony" or "The Origins of Polyphony",
Marcusson's theories appear as if established fact.
--
Peter Wilton
The Gregorian Association Web Page:
http://www.beaufort.demon.co.uk/
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