Gregorianische Psalmodie im Spannungsfeld zwischen musiktheoretischer Grundlage und praktischer Ausführung

Gregorian chant has a musicological as well as a practical component. This is also true for the singing of psalms in psalm tones chanted daily during the office of Roman liturgy. The Benedictine monastery of Solesmes was re-founded in 1837 with the aim of reviving the medieval monastic ideal. For this purpose it was necessary to renew the chants of liturgy on the basis of a practical tradition. To this end, the monks of Solesmes developed a form of collective singing of the psalms, based on the one hand on the theoretical fundamentals of medieval tradition and on the other hand on performance of the psalms in the rhythm of speaking. The Editio Vaticana at the beginning of the 20th century was based on the work of the monks of Solesmes. In 1912 the Antiphonale Romanum was published, which contains all chants of the Hours of the Office except for Matins. These books, however, do not conform with the standards of a critical edition, but rather are practical song books, in each of which some of the many variants of medieval chant have been selected and made mandatory. Research into the subject of Gregorian chant within the Catholic church is therefore not practiced as an end in itself, but serves the practice of Gregorian chant and its performance during liturgy; it therefore views itself as neither historically informed nor historicizing. The results differ widely from the methodology of a musichistorian. For the text placement of the psalms a system of rules had to be developed for the collectively sung prayer. While the notes before the cadences are counted by syllables, in the cadences the word stress is considered. Since earlier editions of Gregorian chant books have not been unambiguous in their printed appearance, complicated explanation schemes had to be designed. Finally, in 1981 the new edition of the Psalterium Monasticum and, especially, the introduction of the first volume of the new Antiphonale Monasticum defined the allocation of syllables and stresses. In the new Antiphonale Monasticum of 2005 the order of the models of psalm tones was amended by the introduction of new tones, which had not been part of the octoechos system. Dom Jean Claire and Alberto Turco have demonstrated that some antiphons of small ambitus, which could not be assigned to a certain church mode, had originated already before the implementation of the octoechos system. They had, however, never been fully introduced into the new system; therefore the monks of Solesmes developed new psalm tones, which were deduced from the existing material. By designing the models, the rules of text placement and the derivation of new models of psalm tones, preoccupation with liturgical chant and its performance have brought forward new theoretical fundamentals of Gregorian chant.