Sequentia, led by Benjamin Bagby, has been performing Medieval music for close to thirty years. Dialogos, led by Katarina Livljanic, has only been around ten years, but has earned considerable esteem among Medieval music afficionados during that time. These two groups recently pooled their musical abilities to create the album Chant Wars. Contrary to what the title might suggest, Chant Wars does not consist of Sequentia and Dialogos squaring off against each other with deuling sets of Gregorian chants. In fact, the vocalists of the two groups perform together on this recording. The album title instead refers to the conflict of different approaches to chanting that took place during the reign of the emperor Charlemagne in the ninth century. Charlemagne wished to make his empire as unified and uniform as possible, and one of the methods he tried to use to achieve this goal was to standardize liturgical chanting so that it conformed with a traditional Roman model throughout his realm. Regional parishes which had developed specific styles naturally resisted Charlemagne’s efforts, preserving their own traditions subtly or covertly when necessary. As a result, some manuscripts reflecting local diversity in chanting survived, and Sequentia and Dialogos perform material from these manuscripts on Chant Wars. Most of the melodies come directly from the source material, although Bagby and Livljanic worked together to reconstruct a couple of the melodies.Thankfully, the makers of this CD anticipated that some listeners (myself included) would not have an academic knowledge of Medieval chants. The liner notes are very detailed and informative. Particularly valuable are the historical anecdotes, dating back to the ninth century themselves, written by some of that period’s leading authorities on chants. These provide some necessary context to enable the listener to pick out the differences in the chanting styles performed on this disc. One, written by John the Deacon in 872, laments the way that the Germans and Gauls, with their untamably rough voices, have corrupted the sweetness and purity of the Roman chants. A millennium of hindsight makes the text seem amusingly chauvinistic, but I picked up on a few differences as Chant Wars segued from purely Roman pieces to Gallic and Germanic ones, particularly in the broader range of notes incorporated into the singing. The Gallic “Venite, populi” and the Germanic “Domine, exaudi orationem meam,” for example feature higher singing than the Roman chants. By contrast, the sequence “Natus ante saecula” composed by the Swiss monk Notker of St. Gall in Switzerland features a deep, modal, very masculine second vocal part.
The second half of the disc focuses on slightly later material, primarily from the eleventh century. Despite Charlemagne’s best efforts, Gallic influences remained present in the subsequent generations of chanting. The chants in this section are taken from throughout Europe. One secular pice, a lament on the death of Charlemagne featuring accompaniment on a germanic harp, is included as well. The religious pieces here are sung with more energy and fervor, reflecting both a vigorous embrace of Roman faith throughout Europe and a departure from the more traditional, stately Roman style of celebrating Mass.
Fans of Gregorian chants, or of the groups Sequentia or Dialogos, will almost certainly find something to like in Chant Wars. The performances are strong, and at least make the appearance of accurately reflecting how these chants were meant to be sung by their creators. There is a lot of subtlety in the music on this disc that I wouldn’t have noticed without the liner notes, but some people who like chanting may not care all that much about the history behind the chants as long as they like what they’re hearing.
(Sony/BMG, 2005)
