Plainchant at Ampleforth

I confess I had a very woolly understanding of plainchant – until last weekend that is, when the RCO gave us a day of Discovering Plainchant at Ampleforth Abbey, in the North Yorkshire hills (near where I grew up).

Plainchant isn’t just a pleasant experience, a tradition to be maintained, explained Fr Alexander.  Psallite sapienter – sing praise with all your skill, or wisdom- commands Psalm 46.  And Pius x, in the early 20th century, put his weight behind the revival of Gregorian chant within the Catholic Church, and said that the performance of chant should be studied as an art.

“Inasmuch as this kind of pleasure (ie singing, music) is innate in our mind…so God established the psalms…” advised St John Chrysostom, back in the 5th century.  “Charismatic” praise singing in the church was a very early oral tradition, too sacred to be written down. It was hundreds of years before systems of written plainchant codified this extempore oral tradition handed down from cantor to cantor.

The psalm texts are extremely suggestive and pictorial, and rather that being just one note after another (as I had seen it), the written form of the music hides codes and symbolic structures which represent the text, and the modes each have their meaning.

William Dore, organist at Ampleforth, and Martin Baker from Westminster Cathedral (staying over from a concert with the Westminster Choir the night before) joined us for a discussion of the slightly contentious topic of accompanying plainchant.  “Avoid root position chords or V7″ suggested William, “they give it far too tonal a feel.”  Martin demurred slightly – acceptable for later chants, perhaps, in the major?

Coming from the Anglican tradition, I felt a little small at my feeble grasp of the modes, let alone the skills to improvise an accompaniment, but hey, this is the story of my life at the moment.

Back in the Abbey, Martin blew us away with a masterclass in improvisation using plainchant as a basis.  Then William knocked our socks off with a recital ending with the Demessieux Te Deum.

As a fellow organist and I wandered, slightly dazed, back to the car park, she muttered “The trouble is, tomorrrow morning my first hymn is Who put the colours in the rainbow…..”  Back to our world.