Singer & Scribe

Welcome to our blog - a space where members of Idrîsî share thoughts, discoveries, and dreams connected to our work.

Our first London concert, Singer & Scribe, was an important stepping stone for us. Here are the programme notes - a brief introduction to our music and ethos. People often ask me for recommended books and articles, so I’ve also included a non-exhaustive list of sources and further reading for those who’d like to delve deeper.

 
 

John Dagenais posited that the colonisation of the past is an indispensable companion of empire, characterising the Middle Ages as a vastness of time ripe for exploitation. In classical music, nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of plainchant. For Idrîsî Ensemble, Old Roman chant and living traditions are essential to our understanding of medieval sources. Musicological research increasingly underscores the importance of incorporating intangible heritage into performances of medieval repertoire, as living Mediterranean traditions preserve techniques of ornamentation, improvisation, tuning and vocal placement that written sources alone cannot fully transmit. Old Roman chant, in turn, offers a written witness to these aesthetics. Only rediscovered in the 20th century, it was first neglected and pronounced a decadent, distorted chant. Concurrently, prominent liturgists such as Théodore Nisard described microtones as ‘monstrosities’ akin to ‘the meowing that we call Arabic Music’. Yet these manuscripts offer a miraculous insight into late antiquity and an invaluable resource for medieval ornamentation, strikingly consistent with period treatises. They affirm the legitimacy of oral memories, aesthetics and cultures still marginalised in the writing of medieval music history.

If history may indeed be treated as a territory to be conquered, it is not, I would suggest, entirely passive or vulnerable. The voices of unwritten polyphonies, hailing from subaltern pasts, relentlessly reroute and expand our archives. In dialogue with living traditions, medieval manuscripts reveal a Europe of ceaseless exchange and irreducible contradictions. Nurturing this encounter between singer and scribe is not only necessary to make sense of the repertory, but may also help us uncover histories, legitimacies and ways of knowing still absent from our institutions. By returning European history to the Mediterranean, we may begin to renegotiate its contours and constitution.

Thomas Fournil

Konstantinos Glynos performing in Singer & Scribe. Photograph by Genevieve Reeves.

Sources and further reading

  • Bergeron, Katherine. Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes. University of California Press, 1998.

  • Bushnell, Cameron F. A. E. Postcolonial Readings of Music in World Literature. ROUTLEDGE, 2017.

  • Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2012.

  • Chambers, Iain. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2008.

  • Dagenais, John, and Margaret R. Greer. “Decolonizing the Middle Ages: Introduction.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 30, no. 3, 2000.

  • Ewell, Philip. “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame.” Music Theory Spectrum, vol. 43, no. 2, 2020.

  • Hornby, Emma. Gregorian and Old Roman Eighth-Mode Tracts: A Case Study in the Transmission of Western Chant. Milton: Routledge, 2018.

  • Huglo, Michel, Marcel Pérés, and Christian Meyer. Polyphonies de Tradition Orale: Histoire et Traditions Vivantes : Actes du Colloque de Royaumont 1990. Paris: Créaphis, 1993.

  • Jeffery, Peter. Re-Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant. University of Chicago Press, 1992.

  • Kinoshita, Sharon. Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature, 2013.

  • Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

  • Lousberg, Leo A. G. Microtones According to Augustine: Neumes, Semiotics and Rhetoric in Romano-Frankish Liturgical Chant. Utrecht University, 2018.

  • McGee, Timothy J. The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

  • Moore, Megan. Exchanges in Exoticism: Cross-cultural Marriage and the Making of the Mediterranean in Old French Romance. University of Toronto Press, 2014.

  • Olwage, Grant. “The Class and Colour of Tone: an Essay on the Social History of Vocal Timbre.” Ethnomusicology Forum, vol. 13, no. 2, 2004.

  • Pérès, Marcel, and Jacques Cheyronnaud. Les Voix du Plain-Chant. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2001.

  • Ricossa, Luca. Hyeronimus de Moravia: Ornamentation and Exegesis in Gregorian, Old Roman, and Byzantine Chant. Lecture, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 7 May 2006.

  • Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1994.

  • Sherman, Bernard D. Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

  • Vincent, Alexandre-Joseph-Hyacinthus. Emploi des Quarts de Ton dans le Chant Grégorien: Constaté sur l’Antiphonaire de Montpellier. Paris: Leleux, 1854.

Legacy Sources

  • Froger, Dom J. Les prétendus quarts de ton dans le chant grégorien et les symboles du ms. H.159 de Montpellier. Études Grégoriennes 19. Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, 1978.

  • Mocquereau, André. Paléographie Musicale, II. Tournay (Belgique: Société de Saint-Jean L’Évangéliste/Desclée, 1924.

  • Nisard, Théodore. L'Archéologie Musicale et le Vrai Chant Grégorien. Lethielleux, 1890.

  • Pothier, Joseph, and Jacques Chailley. Les Mélodies Grégoriennes. Paris: Stock, 1980.

  • Raillard, F. Emploi des Quarts de Ton dans le Chant de l’Église. Paris: Impr. de Lahure, 1858.

Thomas Fournil