Not the old school Gregorian chants

The haunting, otherworldly sound of Gregorian chant transports us to another time and place. The trouble is, that time and place may never have existed.

That’s because the style of chant we’re used to hearing was actually created in late 19th century France, at the height of Romanticism, by the Benedictine brothers of the monastery in the northern town of Solesmes.

“There were no recordings of the way chant was sung in the medieval ages,” says Alexander Lingas, founding music director of the Portland, Ore.-based vocal chamber group Cappella Romana. “So they had to invent one.

“When we do Western chant, we try to recontextualize it within its Mediterranean sound world.”

The 13-year-old Cappella Romana will present its approach tonight in Irvine and Saturday at the Getty Center in “Music of Byzantium: The Fall of Constantinople.” It’s a concert that focuses on a critical moment in Christianity.

The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches had famously split in 1054 over the issue of the pope’s authority. But a few centuries later, as the Ottoman Empire menaced Constantinople -- the seat of the Eastern church -- Easterners grew eager to heal the break, if only to ensure military help.

Both sides sent representatives to Ferrara, Italy, in 1439, but because of the plague, the conference had to be moved to Florence. There, the West promised aid, but it never delivered.

Yet any assistance might not have mattered. People back home refused the terms hammered out for reunification. Constantinople fell on May 29, 1453.

For all the conflict between the two churches, however, people on both sides lived side by side and influenced one another. “They would have heard each other’s music,” Lingas says. “Being able to compare the two musical traditions is one thing that comes out of this concert.”

The differences are most clear at the extremes. Byzantine music elaborated and ornamented a single melody, sometimes to extraordinary lengths. Western music, by contrast, stacked voices and texts vertically, often with astonishing complexity. Several Guillaume Dufay motets to be heard on the program, for instance, require that different texts in Latin and Old French be sung simultaneously.

Under those circumstances, was anyone really expected to distinguish the words of the different texts?

“Most researchers now say yes,” says Cappella tenor and executive director Mark Powell. “This music was meant for a very specific, educated, sophisticated audience who would understand Latin, French and sometimes old Italian, all at the same time.”

Even more unbelievable to us: The polyphony was usually off the cuff.

“Until the coming of the printing press, most polyphony was improvised, not written out,” says Lingas. “What we have today is only the tip of the iceberg.” And it was never written down.

Still, all that was at the extremes. “Their workaday music was actually quite similar,” says Lingas. So Cappella Romana’s concert will also include a Greek hymn composed in honor of a Catholic, St. Thomas Aquinas, and a Latin Kyrie written in Byzantine notation.

Unlike Western notation, which uses a staff or lines to indicate pitch and duration, the Byzantine variety indicates what is to be sung by placing signs above the words of a chant. (Examples are on Lingas’ website, https://users.ox.ac.uk/~fmml0030.)

There are signs that represent an interval, indicating whether to stay on the same note as the previous one or to go up or down a second, third, fourth or fifth.

“The intervals are crystal clear,” Powell says. “But how those notes are sung, Byzantine notation also tells you. Other signs tell you where to start and what mode you’re in.”

If all this sounds pretty academic, Lingas found the style is a living tradition after studying with a well-known Greek teacher and choir director, Lykourgos Angelopoulos, and exploring Greek-speaking areas in Italy and Albania.

“Greek tradition is a continuous one,” Lingas says. “Changes were made slowly and very much from the bottom up, whereas with Gregorian chant -- and the French monks -- you got a top-down, elite effort to bring back the original music of the church. It worked well with late 19th century Catholic worship, but there were a good number of scholars who disagreed with it from the word ‘go.’

“Now people realize that chants, particularly around the Mediterranean, didn’t sound that way. When you read the treatises about the way chant was sung, you find out it was sung with more bravura, resonance, a lot more flexibility in the voice. You can ornament these things, very tastefully.

“We take a stand that way. It’s one thing as a scholar to talk of all kinds of options, but as a performer, when you open your mouth you have to do something.”

*

Cappella Romana

Where: St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church, 4949 Alton Parkway, Irvine

When: 8 p.m. today

Price: $20

Contact: (949) 733-2366

Also

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A.

When: 7 p.m. Saturday

Price: $15 and $20

Contact: (310) 440-7300 or www.getty.edu