In Search of the Lost Melisma is an essay by Jack Rusher, published here Friday, February 20, 2009. It is part of The Epistemology Exhibition.
Eastern melodies meet Western pipes.
Melisma — the singing of multiple notes for each syllable in a song — is an ancient tradition in devotional music from India and the Near East. Western listeners usually identify these sounds with Indian classical music, Orthodox Jewish cantors and the Islamic muezzin’s Call to Prayer:
1. The fundamental similarity of the cultures that produced these religions seems somehow to have grown obscure.
What may be more surprising to some readers is that early Christian liturgical music — having developed among a community of Near Eastern Jewish heretics — was of the same character1. Here, for example, are a Maronite Eucharist performed in Aramaic as it has been for two thousand years, followed by a Greek orthodox chant preserved from the Byzantine Empire:
2. A piece so beautiful that I spent a particularly difficult year listening to it every morning.
Gregorian chants contain a less aggressive form of melisma, but most Western European liturgical music has a very different character from early Christian music. For example, my favorite Catholic hymn, O Vos Omnes2 by Pablo Casals, is a more harmonically complex composition with much less melodic ornamentation:
3. Without which, no Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and so on.
The standard theory for how Western music came to sound as it does is that the development of harmonic sophistication required a reduction in melodic liberty3. This is a reasonable notion, but it doesn’t address the question of what started the process in the first place. The best theory I’ve found for this evolution involves a musical instrument that was ubiquitous throughout Western Europe into deep antiquity.
The triple pipe is a form of drone and cantor reed instrument, sort of like a bagpipe without a bag that’s played using circular breathing. Scottish bagpipes, Irish uilleann pipes, the Musette de cour of France, the Galician gaita, Balkan gaida, and dozens of others are all descendants of this sort of instrument. The only modern players of the bagless pipes of which I am aware are Sardinian shepherds, who call them launeddas:
4. This is the music of gooseflesh and glory if ever I’ve heard it.
Medieval peasant dances throughout Europe contained the same melodies and rhythms that are still heard in launedda music, and the sustained harmonies of the triple pipes prefigure the style of much European choral music that developed during the Middle Ages. In addition to preserving the triple pipes, Sardinia retain a vocal quartet tradition in which one man sings rhythmic, melismatic melodies while the rest of the group uses a technique similar to throat singing to emulate the sound of launeddas while producing sophisticated harmonies in glorious4 just intonation:
I suspect that music like this, lost in the rest of Europe, is the bridge between the Maronite Eucharist and O Vos Omnes.