Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I was raised Catholic. I still consider myself practicing, but while I'm away at school I'm honestly not very good at it. Sundays come and go and I spend the whole day resting, cleaning, and catching up on homework. Every Lent I try to remedy this; I tell myself I'm going to start going to Mass again, and I do, even though it usually fades away after. I'm doing the same this year. I honestly do try, but realistically I'm just too scatterbrained for it to really stick when I'm doing it alone.

Why talk religion in an arts blog? Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Lent, for non-Catholics, is a period of forty days before Easter, and is intended as a period of intense spiritual renewal. In other words, you repent, you fast, you repent some more, and you genuinely try to be a better person. It's essentially the religious atmosphere of the whole middle ages crammed into about five weeks.

The reason I bring this up is that Lent, being a time when you're supposed to improve yourself, is a perfect time to expose yourself to new and different types of music, suitable for all your meditative needs. (Okay, okay. It's an excuse for me to try and convince you that chant isn't boring. I have ulterior motives.)

If traditional or Gregorian chant isn't your cup of tea, don't stop reading yet. What plainsong or monophonic chant did in the middle ages, Renaissance composers made much more interesting. Most relgious music is actually like this. For example, Mozart's Requiem mass is based on the traditional Gregorian Requiem mass. On top of borrowing the text, adaptations of these chants usually retain at least some aspects of the original tune.

The most obvious one that comes to mind for me is Alma Redemptoris Mater. The plainsong version is here. (It's not the best performance I've ever heard, but it was either this or the sheet music, and for the moment it's better just to hear it.) Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (most commonly known as Palestrina, for the city where he lived) did one of my favorite arrangements of it. You can see a performance of it on YouTube. If you listen to both, you'll notice right away that the first six notes are the same. After that they diverge, but you can still hear echoes of the original throughout. Tomas Luis de Victoria also did one.

Apparantly musical integrity wasn't quite as popular in the middle ages and renaissance, though. One of my favorite Palestrina pieces isn't even his. Adoramus Te has been circulating since the nineteenth century, according to CPDL.org, and borrows the soprano line from Francesco Roselli's Adoramus Te. I'm not sure how accurate all of this information is, since no sources are cited and because I remember hearing something different about it, but they do make the sheet music for both pieces available as PDF files, and the soprano lines match up.

My favorite Victoria piece... well, pieces... are not actually related to Lent at all, and are O Magnum Mysterium and the mass based on it, called "Missa de O Magnum Mysterium." "O Magnum Mysterium" is actually about the nativity. It really is difficult to choose, though, and Magnum only comes ahead by about a hair because of my own sentimental attachment to it.

It should be noted here that Palestrina and Victoria are two of my absolute favorite composers. Both are listed on www.classiccat.com, which is a directory of free classical music recordings across the internet. Most of these recordings are done by amateur, church, community, and university ensembles, but a lot of them are quite good. Check them out. Even if you're not religious, polyphonic chant is simply gorgeous and is definitely worth a listen.

Introduction!

Last night was our first Chant Schola rehearsal of the semester. (This is the first thing you will learn about me. I join geeky clubs that eat up all of my time.) Chant Schola at our school was formed for two reasons: first, our concert last year was horrifying in its lack of material, and second, because our director had been looking for an excuse to do it anyway. He picked five people with solid musical backgrounds and the ability to learn music really quickly, handed us music and recordings, and said "Go!" Anyway, it just so happened that, because of our musical training and background, we were able to reproduce the dark, hollow sound that boy choirs often make and it turned out quite well. A Schola was born.

As was mentioned above, I'm also in choir. Here is the second instance of why I'm a geek: I have a (probably annoying) tendency to foist my musical tastes upon the director and the rest of the choir. (Read: Please, please, pleeease can we sing the Kyrie from Mozart's Requiem?) This extends to chant, and I spent all of last semester begging our director to choose Dies Irae. He was hesitant... he thought it was too dark and too depressing. Well, I won. Not only are we chanting Dies Irae, but we're ALSO singing Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem.

(Here is where I give props to Margot Lorena on YouTube. Really, her channel is amazing. More people should upload that many good songs AND the sheet music.)

Anyway, we were rehearsing Dies Irae, and the director pointed out the sort of "up-down" quality of stresses and attributed it to the application of the Solesmes Method, which was a somewhat controversial method of chant notation and interpretation that involved imposing phrasing and lengthening notes that had not been there prior to their editing. It's still in use today, at least to some degree. I pointed out that, "Actually, the rhythm is there naturally in the text; the lyrics are written in trochaic tetrameter, and in tercets!" Trochaic tetrameter, for the poetically challenged, is a pattern of four "Stressed-unstressed" feet per line. Trochees are the opposite of iambs, which are the ones you'll find in Shakespeare. Tercets are three line stanzas, as in the Divine Comedy.

That was when Becca turned to me and said, "You should blog about this kind of thing!" Music, poetry, et cetera. I thought to myself that I certainly have more to say about neumes and meter than I do about Britney Spears, and then I remembered an episode in my friend's car when she said, "Whenever I put this [Vivaldi's Four Seasons] on, everyone always says it's the diamond commercial!" And then there was the episode of Boy Meets World where Eric accompanied Mr. Feeney to see The Barber of Seville and only started enjoying himself when he heard Bugs Bunny.

So now I'm here to save the humanity from certain doom, and hopefully turn a few more people into culture snobs like me.