MOCQUEREAU, ANDRÉ - Benedictine monk, b. at La Tessoualle (Maine-et-Loire) on 6 June 1849, d. at Solesmes on 18 Jan. 1930. Professed as a Benedictine at Solesmes in 1877, ordained priest in 1879, he became the collaborator of Dom Pothier in the restoration of Gregorian chant.
Pius X's initiative for an official edition of the liturgical chants (1904) placed at the service of the Church the great resources of scholarship and art already accumulated by M. and his group of Solesmes monks. The volumes of the Paléographie musicale, from 1880 onward, are M.'s achievement. For scholars the Paléographie musicale still represents a unique working resource, as a collection of the best liturgical musical documents of the 9th, 11th and 12th centuries, according to the different schools of neumatic notation. For an understanding of M.'s doctrine, the studies he published in vols. I, IV, VII are especially useful. His masterwork, Nombre musical grégorien (I, Tournai 1908; II, ibid. 1927), takes up subjects already treated in the introductions to the volumes of the Paléographie, which reappear in various pamphlets and in the numerous articles in the Revue grégorienne and in lectures at Paris, Rome, Washington, etc. He follows Pothier as regards the rhythmic unity of the Latin word (cf. Nombre musical, II, p. 231), but departs from him in asserting a greater freedom of rhythm toward intensive accentuation, whether verbal or not; and M.'s originality would consist in restoring to honor the Hellenic concept, rhythm = ordo, motus: from this there followed the restoration of the almost forgotten distinction, but one of great practical consequence, between rhythm and measure.
The rhythmic system applied by M. to the performance of Gregorian chant tends to reconcile the general laws of rhythmics with the positive data of the musical manuscripts of the various schools, with the all too sparing explanations of medieval theorists, and with the austere nobility of the liturgical functions for which the Gregorian chants are intended. The worldwide diffusion of the so-called rhythmic editions demonstrates the eminently practical character of the system. To M. are owed certain adaptations of Gregorian chants and a few melodic compositions, such as Alleluia, Rosa vernans, etc.
Bibliography5 works
Pietro Thomas