Gregoryen İlahilerindeki Modal Antifonların Analizinde Ezgi Çekirdekleri Yaklaşımının Uygulanması

Abstract

Gregorian chant is the monophonic liturgical music repertoire that forms the cornerstone of Western church music. The antiphon, the most numerous genre of this repertoire, frames the liturgical context by accompanying psalms and hymns, and anticipates the modal character of the text. In Gregorian chant, modal identity has most often been defined through a static pitch inventory. However, this approach fails to adequately reflect the dynamics of melodic motion and pitch hierarchy. In this study, the melodic nuclei (ezgi çekirdekleri) model developed by Bayraktarkatal and Güray (2023) within Turkish music theory has been adapted to antiphons, a subgenre of the Gregorian chant repertoire. The model conceptualizes modal identity as a dynamic melodic process by defining the identity of a mode through the smallest indivisible melodic units based on tension-resolution relationships, rather than through a pitch inventory. The study corpus consists of Mode 1 antiphons found in the 1924 modern notation edition of the Liber Usualis. As a result of the study, 4 basic melodic nuclei were identified and the characteristics of these nuclei were demonstrated on the antiphons. This study demonstrates that the melodic nuclei method offers a complementary analytical perspective that goes beyond traditional scale-based approaches; the application of Turkish music theory to the medieval Western repertoire, meanwhile, carries the nature of an original contribution to the field of comparative musicology.