Chants de l'eglise milanaise - Ensemble Organum, dir. Marcel Pérès

Ensemble: Organum, dir. Marcel Pérès
Album: Chants De L' Eglise Milanaise
Video: Sant'Ambrogio, Milan Vth cent.
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The great figure of Saint Ambrose dominates the so-called “Ambrosian” plainsong, the tradition of which has been perpetuated since the beginning of the 5th century at Milan and in some of the valleys of the Italian Alps and Southern Switzerland. An administrator, poet and orator, the future saint was the son of a high-ranking official of the Roman Empire, and was called to the see of Milan by the acclamations of the people even before he had been baptized. Milan, where he thus became Bishop, was the administrative capital of the western territories of the Empire. An important commercial centre, the city was the confluence of numerous cultural currents, bringing together men of Roman stock, Italians, Greeks and Barbarians. Ambrose succeeded a certain Auxentius, a Greek who preached Arianism, a heresy of Eastern origin. On the other hand, Ambrose, in his defence of orthodoxy, drew his inspiration from the works of the fathers of the Eastern Church, most notably those of Origen and Saint Basil. A gifted poet, the new Bishop composed numerous hymns, some of which are still in use today. Saint Augustine, who stayed with him in Milan, gives us a very precise account of one of the earliest known manifestations of Christian ecclestastic singing. At the height of the Arian dispute the Empress-Regent Justina, an adherent of the heresy, sent troops to invest some of the basilicas of the city. Ambrose opposed this order and had the threatened churches occupated by crowds of the faithful. “It was on this occasion,” Augustine relates, “that they began to sing hymns and psalms in the manner of the Eastern regions, in order to prevent the people from giving way to dejection and boredom”. Saint Augustine’s testimony is extremely valuable. The author of the confessions was himself an excellent musician and would later have to attend to the liturgy and the singing in his own pastoral functions. He speaks with authority when he emphasizes that the use of this Eastern style of singing “was maintained” once the crisis was over, and that it even spread “to the rest of the world”. A besieged Church, an anxious crowd composed of a mixture of nationalities and languages, antiphonally sung psalms — these were the circumstances of one of the first manifestations of liturgical singing. We cannot be indifferent to the fact that it took place in the Eastern manner. The Milanese community was sometimes forced to put up quite a struggle to defend its rite and its way of singing against the attempts at unification by both Rome and the secular powers. At the beginning of the 9th century it was to be against Charlemagne and Pope Adrian I, and later against Nicholas and Gregory VII. At the time of the Council of Trent it required all the authority of Saint Charles Borromeo, a distant successor to Saint Ambrose, to protect a mode of singing to which the Milanese wished to remain faithful. To be sure, the Ambrosian and the Roman chants existed side by side over the centuries, and it is almost
certain that numerous elements of the first were incorporated into the second. We will find in the pieces chosen by the Ensemble Organum for this recording certain familiar melodic features which have been repeated until the present day in the most commonly used liturgies. At the same time it is no less obvious that the proximity of Rome and the standardization of plainsong notation in square notes have sometimes “vulgarized” Ambrosian singing, partly masking its specific qualities. During the working sessions at the Abbey of Royaumont, Marcel Pérés and his companions applied the manner of singing and the modes of the
Churches of Athens and of Antioch to a chant that usage had Romanized to an excessive extent, thereby restoring its original colour. Returning to the living sources, they have revived, “in the union of voices and hearts”, the very gesture of the great Bishop of Milan. As he would have wished, they sing “the hymns and the psalms in the manner of the East.” The
result requires no justifying commentary: the beauty of it is its own conviction. From the booklet.
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1 Lucernarium: Paravi Lucernam Christo Meo
2 Psalmellus: Tui Sunt Celi Et Terra
3 Ingressa: Lux Fulgebit Hodie Super Nos
4 Angelorum Laus: Gloria In Excelsis Deo
5 Psalmellus: Tecum Principium In Die Virtutis Tue
6 Alleluia Verset: Hodie In Bethlehem Puer Natus Est
7 Offertorium: Ecce Apertum Est Templum Tabernaculi
8 Canticum: Ecce Quam Bonum Et Jocundum
9 Offertorium: Hec Dicit Dominus
10 Responsorium: Congratulamini Mihi Omnes Qui Diligitis Dominum
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