Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes

by Katherine Bergeron

Overview

The oldest written tradition of European music, the art we know as Gregorian chant, is seen from an entirely new perspective in Katherine Bergeron's engaging and literate study. Bergeron traces the history of the Gregorian revival from its Romantic origins in a community of French monks at Solesmes, whose founder hoped to rebuild the moral foundation of French culture on the ruins of the Benedictine order. She draws out the parallels between this longing for a lost liturgy and the postrevolutionary quest for lost monuments that fueled the French Gothic revival, a quest that produced the modern concept of "restoration."

Bergeron follows the technological development of the Gregorian restoration over a seventy-year period as it passed from the private performances of a monastic choir into the public commodities of printed books, photographs, and Gramophone records. She discusses such issues as architectural restoration, the modern history of typography, the uncanny power of the photographic image, and the authority of recorded sound. She also shows the extent to which different media shaped the modern image of the ancient repertory, an image that gave rise to conflicting notions not only of musical performance but of the very idea of music history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520919617
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/28/2023
Series:	California Studies in 19th-Century Music , #10
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	196
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Katherine Bergeron is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley and coeditor of Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (1992).

Editorial Reviews

If good ensemble, unanimous and sensitive phrasing, blend and tuning are your goals, there is nothing better than Solesmes. -- The New Republic

Peter Phillips