Singing to St Martin of Tours

The feast of St Martin of Tours, on November 11^th, is a pivot-point in the year, the end of the harvest season and a time of preparation for the Advent season. It was an occasion for processions (often, at least in later periods, with lanterns!), for almsgiving, and for renewal of spirit and devotional practice.

It was also tax time; paying your Martins penny or Martinizins (Martin-tithe) was a financial obligation that appears in numerous documents and charters of the time. When I say numerous, I mean that just at the Kloster of Mehrerau, for instance, at least 59 separate charters detail the Martinizins; across Vorarlberg, more than 891 charters require payments of one sort or another on that special day. (Thank you, monasterium.net, for the ability to do multi-term searches!)

In the context of a tertiary house like Thalbach in Bregenz in the 16^th century, Martin’s feast was a time for public devotion and renewal of spiritual commitements. They no doubt liked the story of how he used his sword to divide his cloak in half and share it with a beggar. As a soldier, he had been riding warm and comfortable on his horse through the sleet and snow, when he came upon a fallen man. Concerned, he cut his cloak in two and gave one part to the supine man. That evening, a vision came to him of Christ clothed in the cloak remnant; the beggar he had comforted had been Christ himself.

17th c Stained Glass image of St Martin at Wettingen, cc by Badener

The sisters were not without need of charity themselves, since food supplies were notoriously tight during this period; endowments did not yet fully cover the sisters’ needs. Here, then, was a saintly hero whose generosity might inspire the broader civic community to similarly share provisions. And, of course, the feasting of end-of-harvest season was a special reason for rejoicing. Roast goose was often a special treat on the day, and was associated with the tale the a goose had revealed his location when he was hiding to avoid appointment as bishop. Plus, the fruit of the vineyards, the year’s new wine, was often uncorked on Martinmas. Roast goose (Martinigansl) and new wine (Heuriger) remain Austrian favorites today. Many reasons to rejoice, indeed!

Thus it was when the Sisters of Thalbach took on the task of learning the Roman Breviary in 1595, adopting the Tridentine forms then newly mandated, they chose their first (and therefore forever notable) performance to be the Vespers of St Martin. Here’s a lovely performance of the antiphon, “Dixerunt discipuli,” from the Vespers service for St Martin:

The disciples said to blessed Martin: Why do you abandon us, father? Or to whom do you leave us desolate? For ravenous wolves will invade your flock. (Ps:Dixit dominus)

Martin’s disciples, realizing he is near death, plead with him not to leave them. The “ravenous wolves” are a metaphor for corrupt or heretical leaders who might harm the spiritual community once Martin, their protector and spiritual guide, has passed. Martin here serves as the pastor bonus, the good shepherd who safeguards his flock through his vigilance. His disciples’ lament highlights the saint’s transition from earthly protector to heavenly intercessor. In medieval retellings and liturgical commemorations, this scene reinforces Martin’s enduring care for the faithful even after death. His memoria continues to protect against those “wolves” through prayer and example.

As new singers, then, this office was a good choice of where to begin. The music for Vespers emphasized antiphons and psalmody. “Dixerunt discipuli” is a typical antiphon in the seventh mode, centered melodically on the fifth above G, with a narrow range. This would have been eminently singable for new singers. Moreover, the gentle neumatic layout, with two to five notes per syllable would have helped with their memorization. Invoking Martin as protector in their first celebration in a new-to-them practice of Latin chant devotions was no doubt an auspicious beginning for what was to be a two-year learning journey. But that is a story for another day.

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REFERENCES

• For a general overview of Martin’s cult, see Yossi Maurey, Medieval Music, Legend, and the Cult of St Martin: The Local Foundations of a Universal Saint (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
• For a review of the growth of the St Martin liturgical tradition in Italy, see Alejandro Enrique Planchart, “The Geography of Martinmas,” In Western Plainchant in the First Millennium (Routledge, 2003).
• A short but approachable article on Martinmas customs can be found in Shawn Tribeon, “Customs of Martinmas,” Liturgical Arts Journal, October 26, 2018, https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2018/10/customs-of-martinmas.html

The Taylor Swifting of Chant Performance

If we believe that Hildegard von Bingen’s chant is monophonic, why introduce a drone? Why add orchestration, those evocative instrumental roulades that spin seductively around the modal home pitch as intro and as formal “breaks” from the plainness of plainchant – but lack any evidentiary basis in score, or word, or notated tradition? What is chant to us here in this post-2015 environment that it cannot be simple, or vocal, or unaccompanied?

Harpa Dei Choir (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNiRNiqzRsc)

St. Stanislav Girls’ Choir (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCRQcgbWtA)

I ask not because it’s wrong – in fact, I find performances like those of the Harpa Dei Choir and that of the St. Stanislav Girls’ Choir (Helena Fojkar Zupančič, director) to be beautiful and compelling. Not authentic – not striving for some kind of Hildegard-informed sense of how the music should go – but nevertheless a compelling reading of the tune with its vocally surging lines where any “up” (often arrived at by leap) gets a counterbalancing descent, or at least some smaller response in a lower register. Hildegard’s play with ambitus and tessitura is well-displayed.

Yet part of me feels suckered by these performances. For the Harpa Dei performance, the gendered vocal shifts, the oooooo wooooo drones, the rubato; there’s a richness that almost calls for a palette cleanser afterwards. And for the lovely and compelling St Stanislav performance, yes, but… But so much twang on the drone; so many instrumental moments of disruption; the recorder as ethereal marker, but also as intrusion on the beauty of the singing. It would be easy to pick either of these performances out of a line-up. And yet they are in many ways typical of the examples I’ve been sampling as I looked for musical illustrations for class.

Why “all the everything”? Why is chant gussied up and ornamented here in our 21^st century world?

Maybe part of the answer lies in what our ears have come to crave. We live in a musical world where production is part of the storytelling, where even a single voice is rarely left alone. Taylor Swift’s vocal is never just Taylor Swift’s vocal. No, it’s reverberant, multi-tracked, shimmering with harmonic overtones and studio polish that make intimacy sound bigger. Our ears have become attuned to layers, to sonic depth as a marker of emotional authenticity. In that context, an unadorned chant feels exposed, almost too naked to believe in. So we orchestrate it. We wrap it in drones and strings and those warm and comforting ambient pads to make it “speak” in the language we’ve been taught to find moving. But in doing so, we reveal something about ourselves as listeners: that we can no longer trust simplicity, that we need resonance – literal and metaphorical – to feel that something is real.

By literal resonance, I mean those add-ins, some performed, some generated in production, that make a chant track “pop” when it comes up on your playlist. When chant is accompanied by a drone, by strings, or by an ambient pad (or a mix of all three, heaven forefend), it physically resonates in a richer, more complex way. We like that; it gives us “stuff to listen for.” We’ve got something to munch on. The music feels fuller, more present, more “real” – it fits our presumtive expectations.

In a world trained on layered, produced music, a single, unadorned line might feel too stark, too abstract to carry the weight of feeling or significance we expect. Adding accompaniment or sonic “padding” gives the chant a kind of interpretive or emotional amplification. In so doing, it resonates with our expectations, our memories, and our cultural conditioning. A pluffed-up performance mirrors the fullness we’ve learned to hear as emotionally convincing.

We seem, in this day and age of Swifties, less comfortable with the more period-informed performances of the Early Music tradition. The unadorned chant still lives in performances by the Oxford Camerata or the ever-popular Sequentia performance by Barbara Thornton.

Oxford Camerata (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hp6vSX-BQ4)

Barbara Thornton, Sequentia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iHMdmrZ_ec)

Voices alone, and textures exploring the nuance of one voice against many voices instead of one against a different kind of thing – a drone, or an instrumental timbre: these are delicate, demanding performances that invite us to dwell in a slower, more contemplative space to tease out nuances (that word again) of gesture and meaning.

So our reality is that there are options available. We can choose how we listen. We can decide what we prefer.

And being an informed and cultured society...

We prefer Taylor Swift. At least, we do numerically. Here are the YouTube stats:

• Oxford Camerata: 4.1K

• Sequential: 27K

• Harpa Dei: 2.8M

• St Stanislav: 584,979

Simple, vocal, and attention-requiring performances are getting good listening numbers. Hey, if I had that many readers, I’d be thrilled! But the bigger, richer, layered performances, those are evidently the listening draw. By orders of magnitude. For every one listener drawn to the “pure” chant, nearly 700 are drawn to the modernized, multi-layered performance. We're talking a couple of good-sized concert halls (yay, early music fans!) compared to 40 football-stadiums' worth of listeners (yay, broad public!).

As I said before, it’s not wrong. We like what we like, and I’m for anything that puts Hildegard on more people’s radar. It’s just important to recognize that when we drape an ambient pad across her vocal line, we aren’t just changing the music – we’re revealing our own ears, our own habits, our own desires for sound. Listening isn’t neutral; it’s a product of training, memory, culture, and expectation. We’ve been trained in ways that call on a soundscape that includes Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift, Delicate: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCXGJQYZ9JA)

With Taylor in our ears, we have work to do if we want to be ready to hear chant on its own terms. We have to practice what I think of as a kind of auditory humility. We can try to focus on our single line of melody. We have to resist the urge to thicken it, to sweeten it, to make it “pop.” If we’re attentive, we can notice how our own ears sometimes strain for harmonic cues that aren’t there, how our imaginations fill in the gaps with memories of orchestral swells or pop hooks. 

That tension – the tug between expectation and what actually sounds – is exactly where reflective listening begins. It’s in that space that we can start to hear Hildegard not as a Taylor Swift vocal needing polish, but as a voice moving through space, time, and ritual, and hear ourselves responding along the way.

In the end, of course, our ears can carry both Hildegard and Taylor. The challenge – and the reward – is learning to hear each on its own terms.