How to sing a quilisma

[gwyn]

Gywn asked this on another thread, it seemed appropriate to start another one to address this question:

B.t.w. How does one treat the square note with jagged top and bottom edges? I've been told that it doubles the note that preceeds it. There seem to be a number of interpretations of this particular note.


For those logged in, there's (hopefully) a picture of said note below

Quilisma.gif

[musicus]

Ha! The quilisma.

Can of worms, that one.

[docmattc]

Solesmes says you make the preceding note a bit longer

[John Ainslie]

B.t.w. How does one treat the square note with jagged top and bottom edges? I've been told that it doulbes the note that preceeds it. There seem to be a number of interpretations of this particular note.

I've just looked up the latest gen on this from Dom Eugène Cardine's book, Gregorian Semiology. As before, the answer to Gwyn's question is "no one really knows". However, the traditional wisdom that it is a kind of passing note still holds. In the ancient MSS, the preceding note is "almost always written" with a 'long' sign (not necessarily of doubled length), and the next accented note is the one after the quilisma, which needn't be lengthened at all.

While I'm at it, the big change in Cardine's interpretation is the salicus - three ascending notes marked in the Solesmes books with a vertical episema under the second note, which, it was said, should be prolonged. Solesmes now admits they got this wrong. That second note is an oriscus, which, like the quilisma, is some kind of passing note. In a salicus it is the third note that should receive the emphasis. This makes a difference to how you sing the introit Requiem ae-ternam, inter alia. Dom Laurence Bévenot wrote an article supporting this new interpretation in about 1984.

[presbyter]

mcb posted this very useful link a while back:

http://ceciliaschola.org/pdf/squarenotes.pdf

[Lakelark]

It's true that no one is certain about the way to sing a quilisma, but you have to find a way of doing it all the same, and of doing it the same every time. A simple method was given to me by an old monk fifty years ago: I've used it ever since, and most people get the hang of it quite easily. He said, "Lean on the note before, skip lightly through the quilisma, and lean a bit on the note that follows."

[alan29]

In the last line of "Ave Maris Stella" it often sounds like a triplet - it works quite well there. I learned my plainsong from Fr Des Coffey who had studied with Dom Guer - thingy at Solesmes. He always had us double the length of the preceding note.