Melisma

MELISMA. - Term generally reserved for ancient liturgical music, whether Eastern (Byzantine, Syriac, etc.) or Western (Gregorian, Ambrosian, Gallican, Visigothic); it consists of a vocalization by which the syllable of a text is enriched with a purely musical commentary. In Gregorian chant the melismas preferably adorn the final syllable, then the accented syllable.

According to the absence or presence and importance of melismas, a melody written with a single note per syllable is said to be in syllabic style, whereas neumes of a few notes on some or on all syllables characterize the neumatic style (Introits and Communions, in general); to the melismatic or florid style belong many Graduals and Offertories and, as a rule, the Alleluias. The melisma of the Alleluia, or Jubilus, gave rise to that poetic-musical form which appeared in the 9th century or even at the end of the 8th, called the "Sequence," in which every note of the melisma, at first sung on the "a," the final vowel of the Alleluia, is sung syllabically on a poetic text of more or less free structure.

The Offertory verses, composed in the 8th-9th century and now vanished, abounded in melismas. In the Kyriale the chants most easily treated in neumatic style are the Kyrie; more rarely the Gloria. The Credo is always syllabic with some simple neume. The Sanctus and the Agnus Dei are generally neumatic. The Gloria "more ambrosiano" represents a melismatic form characteristic of ancient composition: it is found in the ornate verses of the Office and perhaps in some ancient hymn; the text is almost entirely declaimed without melodic ornaments, and the last syllable of this recitation is embellished with a well-wrought flourish.

From the historical point of view, the opinion has found no credence according to which the melismatic chants are later in the Gregorian repertoire than the syllabic chants, and appear only at the end of the 7th century (F. A. Gevaert, La mélopée antique dans le chant de l'Eglise latine, Ghent 1895). The singing of the Alleluia certainly existed in the time of St. Augustine, and although the singing of the Gradual was almost syllabic in the 4th century, it no longer is in the 6th century, when a Schola Cantorum is necessary for the training of expert singers. On the other hand, the Eastern influence is undeniable at the beginnings of Western liturgy and chant, and, among other things, this influence manifests itself in the introduction of the melismas, which are instead absent in the few fragments so far known of Hellenic music, another source of Latin musical technique. The documents of music believed to be pre-Gregorian, the Ambrosian Antiphonary and perhaps the Antiphonaries of the Archive of St. Peter's, are the richest in melismas. For its high aesthetic value the melisma is rightly appreciated and considered as one of the characteristics of ancient liturgical music. New ideals advised the polyphonists of the 16th and 17th centuries to suppress the melismas in editions of plainchant, but in the restoration they have been largely reinstated, though unfortunately in forms very far from the expansive freedom of the original impulse.

Pietro Thomas