When did Gregorian chant first develop?
Gregorian chant
Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainchant, a form of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song of the Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed mainly in western and central Europe during the 9th and 10th centuries, with later additions and redactions. Although popular legend credits Pope Gregory I with inventing Gregorian chant, scholars believe that it arose from a later Carolingian synthesis of Roman chant and Gallican chant.
Pope Gregory I
The mainstream form of Western plainchant, standardized in the late 9th century, was attributed to Pope Gregory I and so took the name of Gregorian chant. The earliest such attribution is in John the Deacon's 873 biography of Gregory, almost three centuries after the pope's death, and the chant that bears his name "is the result of the fusion of Roman and Frankish elements which took place in the Franco-German empire under Pepin, Charlemagne and their successors".
Old Roman chant
There are several theories concerning the origins of Gregorian and Old Roman chants, but one prominent hypothesis, supported by Apel and Snow, posits that both chant traditions derive from a common Roman ancestor in use circa 750 AD. In order to consolidate ecclesiastical power and strengthen their political ties to the power of the Roman church, the Franks, especially under the Carolingian rulers Pepin and Charlemagne, brought this older Roman chant north. There it was subsequently modified, influenced by local styles and Gallican chant, and categorized into the system of eight modes. This Carolingian, or Frankish-Roman, chant, became known as "Gregorian." In the meantime, the local chant remaining in Rome gradually evolved into the form in which it was eventually notated, at the same time that Gregorian was supplanting it in Rome.
Mary Berry (conductor)
Mary Berry, CBE (also known as Sister Thomas More, C.R.S.A., 29 June 1917 – 1 May 2008) was a canoness regular, noted choral conductor and musicologist. She was an authority on the performance of Gregorian chant, founding the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge to revive this ancient style of music.
Gregorian chant
Gregorian melodies provided musical material and served as models for tropes and liturgical dramas. Vernacular hymns such as "Christ ist erstanden" and "Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist" adapted original Gregorian melodies to translated texts. Secular tunes such as the popular Renaissance "In Nomine" were based on Gregorian melodies. Beginning with the improvised harmonizations of Gregorian chant known as organum, Gregorian chants became a driving force in medieval and Renaissance polyphony. Often, a Gregorian chant (sometimes in modified form) would be used as a "cantus firmus", so that the consecutive notes of the chant determined the harmonic progression. The Marian antiphons, especially "Alma Redemptoris Mater", were frequently arranged by Renaissance composers. The use of chant as a cantus firmus was the predominant practice until the Baroque period, when the stronger harmonic progressions made possible by an independent bass line became standard.
Gregorian chant
True antiphonal performance by two alternating choruses still occurs, as in certain German monasteries. However, antiphonal chants are generally performed in responsorial style by a solo cantor alternating with a chorus. This practice appears to have begun in the Middle Ages. Another medieval innovation had the solo cantor sing the opening words of responsorial chants, with the full chorus finishing the end of the opening phrase. This innovation allowed the soloist to fix the pitch of the chant for the chorus and to cue the choral entrance.
Gregorian chant
Gregorian chant appeared in a remarkably uniform state across Europe within a short time. Charlemagne, once elevated to Holy Roman Emperor, aggressively spread Gregorian chant throughout his empire to consolidate religious and secular power, requiring the clergy to use the new repertory on pain of death. From English and German sources, Gregorian chant spread north to Scandinavia, Iceland and Finland. In 885, Pope Stephen V banned the Slavonic liturgy, leading to the ascendancy of Gregorian chant in Eastern Catholic lands including Poland, Moravia and Slovakia.
Italophilia
Gregorian Chant, an outgrowth of Roman plain chant, strongly influenced both liturgical and secular music during the Middle Ages. An Italian monk, Guido of Arezzo (born in 991), developed the form of musical notation that became the basis of Western music and, subsequently, of music worldwide.
Music history of Italy
Italy was the site of several key musical developments in the development of the Christian liturgies in the West. Around 230, well before Christianity was legalized, the "Apostolic Tradition" of Hippolytus attested the singing of Psalms with refrains of Alleluia in Rome. In 386, in imitation of Eastern models, St. Ambrose wrote hymns, some of whose texts still survive, and introduced antiphonal psalmody to the West. Around 425, Pope Celestine I contributed to the development of the Roman Rite by introducing the responsorial singing of a Gradual, and Cassian, Bishop of Brescia, contributed to the development of the monastic Office by adapting Egyptian monastic psalmody to Western usage. Later, around 530, St. Benedict would arrange the weekly order of monastic psalmody in his "Rule". Later, in the 6th century, Venantius Fortunatus created some of Christianity's most enduring hymns, including "Vexilla regis prodeunt" which would later become the most popular hymn of the Crusades.
The earliest extant music in the West is "plainsong", a kind of monophonic, unaccompanied, early Christian singing performed by Roman Catholic monks, which was largely developed roughly between the 7th and 12th centuries. Although Gregorian chant has its roots in Roman chant and is popularly associated with Rome, it is not indigenous to Italy, nor was it the earliest nor the only Western plainchant tradition. Ireland, Spain, and France each developed a local plainchant tradition, but only in Italy did several chant traditions thrive simultaneously: Ambrosian chant in Milan, Old Roman chant in Rome, and Beneventan chant in Benevento and Montecassino. Gregorian chant, which supplanted the indigenous Old Roman and Beneventan traditions, derived from a synthesis of Roman and Gallican chant in Carolingian France. Gregorian chant later came to be strongly identified with Rome, especially as musical elements from the north were added to the Roman Rite, such as the Credo in 1014. This was part of a general trend wherein the manuscript tradition in Italy weakened and Rome began to follow northern plainchant traditions. Gregorian chant supplanted all the other Western plainchant traditions, Italian and non-Italian, except for Ambrosian chant, which survives to this day. The native Italian plainchant traditions are notable for a systematic use of ornate, stepwise melodic motion within a generally narrower range, giving the Italian chant traditions a smoother, more undulating feel than the Gregorian. Crucial in the transmission of chant were the innovations of Guido d'Arezzo, whose "Micrologus", written around 1020, described the musical staff, solmization, and the Guidonian hand. This early form of do-re-mi created a technical revolution in the speed at which chants could be learned, memorized, and recorded. Much of the European classical musical tradition, including opera and symphonic and chamber music can be traced back to these Italian medieval developments in musical notation, formal music education and construction techniques for musical instruments.
Lombards
Characteristic of this rite was the Beneventan chant, a Lombard-influenced chant that bore similarities to the Ambrosian chant of Milan. The Beneventan chant is largely defined by its role in the liturgy of the Beneventan rite; many Beneventan chants were assigned multiple roles when inserted into Gregorian chantbooks, appearing variously as antiphons, offertories, and communions, for example. It was eventually supplanted by the Gregorian chant in the 11th century.
Galician chant
The first compilation of Galician chant by a Ukrainian was in 1894.
Gregorian Antiphonary
The Gregorian Antiphonary was an early Christian antiphonary, i.e. book of choral music to be sung antiphonally in services; it is associated traditionally with Pope Gregory I.
Gregorian chant
During the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries in France, the system of rhythmic notation became standardized, with printers and editors of chant books employing only four rhythmic values. Recent research by Christopher Holman indicates that chants whose texts are in a regular meter could even be altered to be performed in Time signatures.
Mozarabic chant
The basic structure of the rite that came to be known as the Visigothic rite (later Mozarabic) was documented by St. Isidore of Seville in the 7th century. The Credo had already been introduced into the Visigothic rite (later Mozarabic rite) in the Third Council of Toledo of 589, in which the Visigoths officially converted to Catholicism. (The Credo would not be used in the Roman rite in Rome itself until after 1014, at the request of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II.)
The Visigothic rite (later Mozarabic rite) shares similarities with the Ambrosian rite and Gallican rite, and differs from the Roman rite. As the Christian reconquest of Hispania went on, the Roman rite supplanted the Mozarabic. With the papal appointment of a French abbot as the new archbishop of Toledo, which had been recaptured in 1085, Roman influence could be enforced throughout the Hispanic Church. Following its official suppression by Pope Gregory VII, the Mozarabic rite and its chant disappeared in all but six parishes in Toledo.
Gregorian Institute of Paris
The Gregorian Institute of Paris was a pedagogical and religious establishment founded in Paris in 1923 having in view the musicianship of Gregorian chant. This institute was created following a Parisian congress devoted to Gregorian chant and sacred music, held in December 1922.
Gregorian chant
The other plainchant repertories of the Christian West faced severe competition from the new Gregorian chant. Charlemagne continued his father's policy of favoring the Roman Rite over the local Gallican traditions. By the 9th century the Gallican rite and chant had effectively been eliminated, although not without local resistance. The Gregorian chant of the Sarum Rite displaced Celtic chant. Gregorian coexisted with Beneventan chant for over a century before Beneventan chant was abolished by papal decree (1058). Mozarabic chant survived the influx of the Visigoths and Moors, but not the Roman-backed prelates newly installed in Spain during the Reconquista. Restricted to a handful of dedicated chapels, modern Mozarabic chant is highly Gregorianized and bears no musical resemblance to its original form. Ambrosian chant alone survived to the present day, preserved in Milan due to the musical reputation and ecclesiastical authority of St. Ambrose.
Gregorian Antiphonary
It was reopened by Martin Gerbert in 1774, and by Zaccarin in 1781, the latter of whom at last lit upon the text of Egbert. Between 1781 and 1890 no one seems to have discussed, critically, the ascription of the antiphonary to any particular pope. Indeed, the question was supposed to have been settled by the discovery of the antiphonary itself, which was said to be none other than the St. Gall manuscript 359 of the ninth or tenth century, containing an antiphonary between pages 24 and 158. This illusion passed through various phases from 1837 to 1848, when Danjou, in his turn, discovered the Gregorian antiphonary in a Montpellier manuscript of the tenth or eleventh century. In 1851 the Jesuit Lambillotte published a facsimile of the St. Gall manuscript, but the Gregorian question made no real progress.
Gregorian Institute of Paris
That is why, taking advantage of this success, the Gregorian Institute in Paris was founded under the protection of the Cardinal. Dom Joseph Gajard of Solesmes was in charge of teaching Gregorian chant there for two years, between Wednesday and Friday. Two years later, a former student of the Schola Cantorum de Paris, Auguste Le Guennant, succeeded him, not only as professor but also as director of the school. Following this creation, Pope Pius XI, a true successor of the liturgical reform of Saint Pope Pius X, expressed his "lively satisfaction" to Cardinal Dubois, sending him a brief message.
Mass (music)
The earliest musical settings of the mass are Gregorian chant. The different portions of the Ordinary came into the liturgy at different times, with the Kyrie probably being first (perhaps as early as the 7th century) and the Credo being last (it did not become part of the Roman mass until 1014).
Gregorian chant
Although the modes with melodies ending on A, B, and C are sometimes referred to as Aeolian, Locrian, and Ionian, these are not considered distinct modes and are treated as transpositions of whichever mode uses the same set of hexachords. The actual pitch of the Gregorian chant is not fixed, so the piece can be sung in whichever range is most comfortable.
Monophony
Mozarabic chant, Byzantine Chant, Armenian chant, Beneventan chant, Ambrosian chant, Gregorian chant and others were various forms of plainsong which were all monophonic. Many of these monophonic chants were written down, and contain the earliest music notation to develop after the loss of the ancient Greek system. For example, "Dodecachordon" was published by the Swiss Renaissance composer Heinrich Glarean (also Glareanus) and included plainsong or Gregorian chant and monophony. The earliest manuscripts which contain plainsong were written in neumes, a primitive system which recorded only the outline of the melody, and it was not until the 11th century that Guido d'Arezzo invented a more modern musical notation system that the exact notes of the melodies were preserved.
Sadeness (Part I)
The Gregorian vocals were mostly taken from the 1976 album "Paschale Mysterium" by the German choir Capella Antiqua München with conductor Konrad Ruhland, specifically from their track "Procedamus in pace! (Antiphon)". The vocals were at first used without permission; a lawsuit followed in 1994 and was settled by compensation.
Gallican chant
Several sources attest the existence of a distinctive Gallican rite in the Frankish lands between the 5th and 9th centuries. The Celtic Rite and Mozarabic rite, which are liturgically related to the Gallican, are sometimes collectively referred to as "Gallican" as opposed to the different structure of the Roman rite. Lack of a central authority led to the development of local traditions of the Gallican rite in Francia, sharing a basic structure but varying in details. These traditions endured until the Carolingian dynasty. During a papal visit in 752-3, Pope Stephen II had Mass celebrated using Roman chant. According to Charlemagne, his father Pepin and Chrodegang of Metz abolished the Gallican rites in favor of the Roman use, in order to strengthen ties with Rome that would culminate in Charlemagne's elevation to Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne completed the job his father had begun, so that by the 9th century the Gallican rite and chant had effectively been eliminated. However, the Roman chant brought to the Carolingian churches was incomplete, and ended up incorporating musical and liturgical elements from the local Gallican traditions. The resulting Carolingian chant, which developed into Gregorian chant, was a Romanized chant, but one in which traces of the lost Gallican repertory may still be found.
History of the Roman Canon
From the time of Gregory the most important event in the history of the Roman Canon is not any sort of change in it, but the rapid way in which it spread all over the West, displacing the Gallican Liturgy. Charlemagne (768-814) applied to Pope Adrian I (772-95) for a copy of the Roman Liturgy, that he might introduce it throughout the Frankish Kingdom. The text sent by the pope is the basis of what is called the ""Sacramentarium Gregorianum"", which therefore represents the Roman Rite at the end of the 8th century.
Joseph Pothier
A musicologist, disciple and collaborator of Dom Prosper Guéranger, Dom Pothier contributed to the reconstitution, the restoration and the renewal of the Gregorian chant, a form of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song of the Roman Catholic Church.
Gregorian chant
Scholars are still debating how plainchant developed during the 5th through the 9th centuries, as information from this period is scarce. Around 410, St. Augustine described the responsorial singing of a Gradual psalm at Mass. At c. 520, Benedict of Nursia established what is called the rule of St. Benedict, in which the protocol of the Divine Office for monastic use was laid down. Around 678, Roman chant was taught at York. Distinctive regional traditions of Western plainchant arose during this period, notably in the British Isles (Celtic chant), Spain (Mozarabic), Gaul (Gallican), and Italy (Old Roman, Ambrosian and Beneventan). These traditions may have evolved from a hypothetical year-round repertory of 5th-century plainchant after the western Roman Empire collapsed.
Gregorian chant
Willi Apel and Robert Snow assert a scholarly consensus that Gregorian chant developed around 750 from a synthesis of Roman and Gallican chants, and was commissioned by the Carolingian rulers in France. Andreas Pfisterer and Peter Jeffery have shown that older melodic essentials from Roman chant are clear in the synthesized chant repertory. There were other developments as well. Chants were modified, influenced by local styles and Gallican chant, and fitted into the theory of the ancient Greek octoechos system of modes in a manner that created what later came to be known as the western system of the eight church modes. The Metz project also invented an innovative musical notation, using freeform neumes to show the shape of a remembered melody. This notation was further developed over time, culminating in the introduction of staff lines (attributed to Guido d'Arezzo) in the early 11th century, what we know today as plainchant notation. The whole body of Frankish-Roman Carolingian chant, augmented with new chants to complete the liturgical year, coalesced into a single body of chant that was called "Gregorian."
Gregorian chant
Recent developments involve an intensifying of the semiological approach according to Dom Cardine, which also gave a new impetus to the research into melodic variants in various manuscripts of chant. On the basis of this ongoing research it has become obvious that the Graduale and other chantbooks contain many melodic errors, some very consistently, (the mis-interpretation of third and eighth mode) necessitating a new edition of the Graduale according to state-of-the-art melodic restitutions. Since the 1970 a melodic restitution group of AISCGre (International Society for the Study of Gregorian Chant) has worked on an "editio magis critica" as requested by the 2. Vatican Council Constitution "Sacrosanctum Concilium". As a response to this need and following the Holy See's invitation to edit a more critical edition, in 2011 the first volume "De Dominicis et Festis" of the "Graduale Novum Editio Magis Critica Iuxta SC 117"was published by Libreria Editrice Vatican and ConBrio Verlagsgesellschaft, Regensburg.
Mary Berry (conductor)
In 1975 Berry founded the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge for the study and performance of Gregorian chant. The Cantors of the Schola are a group of young, largely professional singers and have performed and recorded extensively under her direction, often working from primary sources. The Schola was one of the first ensembles to perform (and certainly the first to record) music from the "Winchester troper" after research by Berry and others made the music accessible from the manuscripts.
Gregorian chant
While the standard repertory of Gregorian Chant was partly being supplanted with new forms of polyphony, the earlier melo-rhythmic refinements of monophonic chant seem to fall into disuse. Later redactions such as the "Editio medicaea" of 1614 rewrote chant so that melismata, with their melodic accent, fell on accented syllables. This aesthetic held sway until the re-examination of chant in the late 19th century by such scholars as Wagner, Pothier, and Mocquereau, who fell into two camps.
Vocal pedagogy
The first surviving record of a systematized approach to teaching singing was developed in the medieval monasteries of the Roman Catholic Church sometime near the beginning of the 13th century. As with other fields of study, the monasteries were the center of musical intellectual life during the medieval period and many men within the monasteries devoted their time to the study of music and the art of singing. Highly influential in the development of a vocal pedagogical system were monks Johannes de Garlandia and Jerome of Moravia who were the first to develop a concept of vocal registers. These men identified three registers: chest voice, throat voice, and head voice (pectoris, guttoris, and capitis). Their concept of head voice, however, is much more similar to the modern pedagogists understanding of the falsetto register. Other concepts discussed in the monastic system included vocal resonance, voice classification, breath support, diction, and tone quality to name a few. The ideas developed within the monastic system highly influenced the development of vocal pedagogy over the next several centuries including the Bel Canto style of singing.
Joseph Pothier
Dom Joseph Pothier, O.S.B. (1835–1923) was a worldwide known French prelate, liturgist and scholar who reconstituted the Gregorian chant.
Antiphon
Antiphons have remained an integral part of the worship in the Byzantine and Armenian Rite. The practice did not become part of the Latin Church until more than two centuries later. Ambrose and Gregory the Great, who are known for their contributions to the formulation of Gregorian chant, are credited with 'antiphonaries', collections of works suitable for antiphon, which are still used in the Roman Catholic Church today.
Cantus firmus
The term first appears in theoretical writings early in the 13th century (e.g., Boncampagno da Signa, "Rhetorica novissima", 1235). The earliest polyphonic compositions almost always involved a cantus firmus, typically a Gregorian chant, although by convention the term is not applied to music written before the 14th century. The earliest surviving polyphonic compositions, in the "Musica enchiriadis" (around 900 AD), contain the chant in the top voice, and the newly composed part underneath; however this usage changed around 1100, after which the cantus firmus typically appeared in the lowest-sounding voice. Later, the cantus firmus appeared in the tenor voice (from the Latin verb 'tenere', to hold), singing notes of longer duration, around which more florid lines, instrumental and/or vocal, were composed or improvised.
Gregorian chant
The earliest notated sources of Gregorian chant (written ca. 950) used symbols called "neumes" (Gr. sign, of the hand) to indicate tone-movements and relative duration within each syllable. A sort of musical stenography that seems to focus on gestures and tone-movements but not the specific pitches of individual notes, nor the relative starting pitches of each neume. Given the fact that Chant was learned in an oral tradition in which the texts and melodies were sung from memory, this was obviously not necessary. The neumatic manuscripts display great sophistication and precision in notation and a wealth of graphic signs to indicate the musical gesture and proper pronunciation of the text.
Scholars postulate that this practice may have been derived from cheironomic hand-gestures, the ekphonetic notation of Byzantine chant, punctuation marks, or diacritical accents. Later adaptations and innovations included the use of a dry-scratched line or an inked line or two lines, marked C or F showing the relative pitches between neumes. Consistent relative heightening first developed in the Aquitaine region, particularly at St. Martial de Limoges, in the first half of the eleventh century. Many German-speaking areas, however, continued to use unpitched neumes into the twelfth century. Additional symbols developed, such as the "custos", placed at the end of a system to show the next pitch. Other symbols indicated changes in articulation, duration, or tempo, such as a letter "t" to indicate a tenuto. Another form of early notation used a system of letters corresponding to different pitches, much as Shaker music is notated.
By the 13th century, the neumes of Gregorian chant were usually written in "square notation" on a four-line staff with a clef, as in the "Graduale Aboense" pictured above. In square notation, small groups of ascending notes on a syllable are shown as stacked squares, read from bottom to top, while descending notes are written with diamonds read from left to right. When a syllable has a large number of notes, a series of smaller such groups of neumes are written in succession, read from left to right. The oriscus, quilisma, and liquescent neumes indicate special vocal treatments, that have been largely neglected due to uncertainty as to how to sing them. Since the 1970s, with the influential insights of Dom Eugène Cardine (see below under 'rhythm'), ornamental neumes have received more attention from both researchers and performers.
B-flat is indicated by a "b-mollum" (Lat. soft), a rounded undercaste 'b' placed to the left of the entire neume in which the note occurs, as shown in the "Kyrie" to the right. When necessary, a "b-durum" (Lat. hard), written squarely, indicates B-natural and serves to cancel the b-mollum. This system of square notation is standard in modern chantbooks.
Gregorian (band)
Gregorian is a German band headed by Frank Peterson that performs Gregorian chant-inspired versions of modern pop and rock songs. The band features both vocal harmony and instrumental accompaniment. They competed in Unser Lied für Stockholm the German national selection for the Eurovision Song Contest 2016 with the song "Masters of Chant". They placed 5th in the first round of the public voting, missing the top 3. They gained 9.06% of the public vote.
Music of Vatican City
As the seat of the Papacy, the Vatican City and its predecessor, the Papal States, has played an important role in the development of Christian music. They perform chants of ancient origin, such as Gregorian chants, as well as modern polyphonic music. The papal choir is a well-known institution that dates back more than four hundred years. Singers were originally from northern Europe, but began arriving more from Spain and Italy in the 16th century. At this time, church authorities became concerned about the words of liturgical texts being drowned out by the traditional melodies. As a result, reformers like Palestrina revised the rules behind Gregorian chanting, which were printed by the Medici Press in Rome; these reforms continued to be followed to the present day. A traditional musical instrument was the pipe organ.
Masters of Chant
Masters of Chant is the second album by Gregorian, released in 1999. It is the first "Masters of Chant" album.
Chant (Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos album)
The monks of Santo Domingo de Silos have been singing Gregorian chant since the 11th century (before that, they used Mozarabic chant). There was a break in the tradition in the 1830s when the abbey was closed by the government as part of the so-called Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizábal. The abbey was reestablished with the help of monks from Solesmes Abbey in France. Solesmes is known for its commitment to plainsong and the Solesmes style of singing has influenced the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, although the monks' pronunciation of Latin reflects their Spanish background.
Old Roman chant
Introits in the Old Roman Mass retained the "versus ad repetendum", a repeat of the verse, which had disappeared from the Gregorian chant by the 11th century. Musically, Old Roman Introits resembled their Gregorian counterparts, although the neumatic passages were more ornate and the syllabic passages were simpler.
Music of Ireland
Helias of Cologne (died 1040), is held to be the first to introduce Roman chant to Cologne. His contemporary, Aaron Scotus (died 18 November 1052) was an acclaimed composer of Gregorian chant in Germany.
Pierre de Manchicourt
Manchicourt is an excellent example of a Franco-Flemish composer who learned his craft and art in northern Europe, and then assisted in the diffusion of the style by traveling to another region and composing and performing there. The movement of these many skilled composers out of Flanders and northern France created what was one of the first truly international styles since the original diffusion of Gregorian chant during the reign of Charlemagne.
Antiphonary
It is impossible to trace here the progress of the Gregorian antiphonary throughout Europe, which resulted finally in the fact that the liturgy of Western Europe, with a very few exceptions, finds itself based fundamentally on the work of St. Gregory, whose labour comprised not merely the sacramentary, and the "Antiphonarium Missæ", but extended also to the Divine Office. Briefly, the next highly important step in the history of the antiphonary was its introduction into some dioceses of France where the liturgy had been Gallican, with ceremonies related to those of Milan and with chants developed by newer melodies. 
From the year 754 may be dated the change in favour of the Roman liturgy. St. Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, on his return from an embassy to Rome, introduced the Roman liturgy into his diocese and founded the Chant School of Metz. Subsequently, under Charlemagne, French monks went to Rome to study the Gregorian tradition there, and some Roman teachers visited France.
Semiology (Gregorian Chant)
The growing number of choirs or scholae that perform Gregorian Chant according to these developments are thus said to follow the 'semiological approach'. The International Society for the Study of Gregorian Chant (Associazione Internazionale Studi di Canto Gregoriano) carries on the legacy of Eugène Cardine, putting special emphasis on bridging the gap between Gregorian research and praxis. The Society has some 500 members in 30 countries worldwide.
Old Roman chant
Musically, there are a number of similarities between the Gregorian chants and their Old Roman counterparts. In addition to the similarities in texts noted above, corresponding Old Roman and Gregorian melodies often begin and end musical phrases at the same points. They use similar intonations for incipits, reciting tones, and cadences. Unlike most other chant traditions, they occasionally repeat words within a text, and the two traditions repeat such words in the same places. Corresponding chants in the two traditions are usually assigned to the same mode, although that appears to be the result of later Gregorian influence on the Old Roman repertory, as these analogous chants often have very distinct tonalities.
Gregorian chant
Responsorial chants such as the Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory, and the Office Responsories originally consisted of a refrain called a "respond" sung by a choir, alternating with psalm verses sung by a soloist. Responsorial chants are often composed of an amalgamation of various stock musical phrases, pieced together in a practice called "centonization". Tracts are melismatic settings of psalm verses and use frequent recurring cadences and they are strongly centonized.
Melisma
Music of ancient cultures used melismatic techniques to induce a hypnotic trance in the listener, useful for early mystical initiation rites (such as Eleusinian Mysteries) and religious worship. This quality is still found in Arabic music where the scale consists of "quarter tones". Orthodox Christian chanting also bears a slight resemblance to this. Middle Eastern melismatic music was developed further in the Torah chanting, as well as by the Masoretes in the seventh or eighth centuries. It then appeared in some genres of Gregorian chant, where it was used in certain sections of the Mass, with the earliest written appearance around AD 900. The gradual and the alleluia, in particular, were characteristically melismatic, for example, while the tract is not, and repetitive melodic patterns were deliberately avoided in the style. The Byzantine Rite also used melismatic elements in its music, which developed roughly concurrently with the Gregorian chant.
Gregorian chant
Given the oral teaching tradition of Gregorian chant, modern reconstruction of intended rhythm from the written notation of Gregorian chant has always been a source of debate among modern scholars. To complicate matters further, many ornamental neumes used in the earliest manuscripts pose difficulties on the interpretation of rhythm. Certain neumes such as the "pressus", pes quassus, strophic neumes may indicate repeated notes, lengthening by repercussion, in some cases with added ornaments. By the 13th century, with the widespread use of square notation, most chant was sung with an approximately equal duration allotted to each note, although Jerome of Moravia cites exceptions in which certain notes, such as the final notes of a chant, are lengthened.
Metz
Metz was an important cultural centre during the Carolingian Renaissance. For instance, Gregorian chant was created in Metz during the 8th century as a fusion of Gallican and ancient Roman repertory. Then called Messin Chant, it remains the oldest form of music still in use in Western Europe. The bishops of Metz, notably Saint-Chrodegang promoted its use for the Roman liturgy in Gallic lands under the favorable influence of the Carolingian monarchs. Messin chant made two major contributions to the body of chant: it fitted the chant into the ancient Greek octoechos system, and invented an innovative musical notation, using neumes to show the shape of a remembered melody. Metz was also an important centre of illumination of Carolingian manuscripts, producing such monuments of Carolingian book illumination as the Drogo Sacramentary.
Gregorian chant
Recent research in the Netherlands by Dr. Dirk van Kampen has indicated that the authentic rhythm of Gregorian chant in the 10th century includes both proportional elements and elements that are in agreement with semiology. Starting with the expectation that the rhythm of Gregorian chant (and thus the duration of the individual notes) anyway adds to the expressivity of the sacred Latin texts, several word-related variables were studied for their relationship with several neume-related variables, exploring these relationships in a sample of introit chants using such statistical methods as correlational analysis and multiple regression analysis.
Classical music
The Medieval period includes music from after the fall of Rome to about 1400. Monophonic chant, also called plainsong or Gregorian chant, was the dominant form until about 1100. Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern European musical notation in order to standardize liturgy throughout the worldwide Church. Polyphonic (multi-voiced) music developed from monophonic chant throughout the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, including the more complex voicings of motets. The Renaissance era was from 1400 to 1600. It was characterized by greater use of instrumentation, multiple interweaving melodic lines, and the use of the first bass instruments. Social dancing became more widespread, so musical forms appropriate to accompanying dance began to standardize. It is in this time that the notation of music on a staff and other elements of musical notation began to take shape. This invention made possible the separation of the composition of a piece of music from its "transmission"; without written music, transmission was oral, and subject to change every time it was transmitted. With a musical score, a work of music could be performed without the composer's presence. The invention of the movable-type printing press in the 15th century had far-reaching consequences on the preservation and transmission of music.
Aurelian of Réôme
Aurelian's work is one of the earliest authors concerned about Carolingian plainchant, still within the period during which Gregorian chant became standardized by its oral transmission in northern and western Europe. One copy became the earliest extant sample of musical notation, although it was added later. Hence, the particular notational scheme which was used so far by a later scribe resisted definitive interpretation, and it only appears randomly in the earliest manuscript.
Grand chant
The gran(d) chan(t) (courtois) or, in modern French, (grande) chanson courtoise or chanson d'amour, often abbreviated "chanson", was a genre of Old French lyric poetry devised by the trouvères. It was adopted from the Occitan "canso" of the troubadours, but scholars stress that it was a distinct genre. The predominant theme of the "grand chant" was courtly love, but topics were more broad than in the "canso", especially after the thirteenth century. The monophonic "grand chant" of the High Middle Ages (12th–13th centuries) was in many respects the predecessor of the polyphonic "chanson" of the Late Middle Ages (14th–15th centuries).
Secular Jewish music
On the other hand, the origin of Gregorian chant, which was the earliest manifestation of European classical music, was Jewish choral music of the Temple and synagogue, according to a large number of analytical liturgists and music historians.
Ambrose
Ambrose is traditionally credited but not actually known to have composed any of the repertory of Ambrosian chant also known simply as "antiphonal chant", a method of chanting where one side of the choir alternately responds to the other. (The later pope Saint Gregory I the Great is not known to have composed any Gregorian chant, the plainsong or "Romish chant".) However, Ambrosian chant was named in his honor due to his contributions to the music of the Church; he is credited with introducing hymnody from the Eastern Church into the West.
Gregorian chant
In his motu proprio "Tra le sollecitudini", Pius X mandated the use of Gregorian chant, encouraging the faithful to sing the Ordinary of the Mass, although he reserved the singing of the Propers for males. While this custom is maintained in traditionalist Catholic communities (most of which allow all-female scholas as well, though), the Catholic Church no longer persists with this ban. Vatican II officially allowed worshipers to substitute other music, particularly sacred polyphony, in place of Gregorian chant, although it did reaffirm that Gregorian chant was still the official music of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, and the music most suitable for worship in the Roman Liturgy.
Medieval music
Around AD 1011, the Roman Catholic Church wanted to standardize the Mass and chant across its empire. At this time, Rome was the religious centre of western Europe, and Paris was the political centre. The standardization effort consisted mainly of combining these two (Roman and Gallican) regional liturgies. Pope Gregory I (540–604) and Charlemagne (742–814) sent trained singers throughout the Holy Roman Empire (800|962–1806) to teach this new form of chant. This body of chant became known as Gregorian Chant, named after Pope Gregory I. By the 12th and 13th centuries, Gregorian chant had superseded all the other Western chant traditions, with the exception of the Ambrosian chant in Milan and the Mozarabic chant in a few specially designated Spanish chapels. Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was the earliest known female composer. She wrote many monophonic works for the Catholic Church, almost all of them for female voices.
Old Roman chant
Related chants in the Gregorian and Old Roman repertories differ mostly in ornamentation and surface detail. Old Roman chants are much more stepwise and gently undulating than Gregorian chants. Skips, even of thirds, are much less common in Old Roman chants than Gregorian. Gregorian chants often have a pentatonic structure, reinforced by their skips, while Old Roman chants are simpler in structure but more ornate, with more individual notes. Old Roman chants have intricate melodic motion within a narrow ambitus, with small repeating melodic motifs, which are common in the Italian chant traditions such as the Ambrosian and Beneventan. Old Roman chants are often highly melismatic, with melismas blending into one another and obscuring the underlying melodic structure.
Music in Medieval Scotland
In the early Middle Ages, ecclesiastical music was dominated by monophonic plainchant. The development of British Christianity, separate from the direct influence of Rome until the eighth century, with its flourishing monastic culture, led to the development of a distinct form of liturgical Celtic chant. Although no notations of this music survive, later sources suggest distinctive melodic patterns. Celtic chant is thought have been superseded from the eleventh century, as elsewhere in Europe, by more complex Gregorian chant. The version of this chant linked to the liturgy as used in the Diocese of Salisbury, the Sarum Use, first recorded from the thirteenth century, became dominant in England and was the basis for most surviving chant in Scotland. It was closely related to Gregorian chant, but it was more elaborate and with some unique local features. The Sarum rite continued to be the basis of Scottish liturgical music in Scotland until the Reformation and where choirs were available, which was probably limited to the great cathedrals, collegiate churches and the wealthier parish churches it would have been used in the main ingredient of divine offices of vespers, compline, matins, lauds, mass and the canonical hours. In the later Middle Ages, the development of the doctrine of purgatory and the proliferation of altars meant that this music would have been joined by large numbers of requiem masses, designed to speed the souls of the dead to heaven, although no traces of these masses have survived. Over 100 collegiate churches of secular priests were founded in Scotland between 1450 and the Reformation. They were designed to provide masses for their founders and their families, who included the nobility and the emerging orders of the Lords of Parliament and the wealthy merchants of the developing burghs.
Church music
In its long history Gregorian Chant has been subjected to many gradual changes and some reforms. It was organized, codified, and notated mainly in the Frankish lands of western and central Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries, with later additions and redactions, but the texts and many of the melodies have antecedents going back several centuries earlier. Although popular belief credits Pope Gregory the Great with having personally invented Gregorian chant, scholars now believe that the chant bearing his name arose from a later Carolingian synthesis of Roman and Gallican chant
History of music
During the 9th century several important developments took place. First, there was a major effort by the Church to unify the many chant traditions, and suppress many of them in favor of the Gregorian liturgy. Second, the earliest polyphonic music was sung, a form of parallel singing known as organum. Third, and of greatest significance for music history, notation was reinvented after a lapse of about five hundred years, though it would be several more centuries before a system of pitch and rhythm notation evolved having the precision and flexibility that modern musicians take for granted.
Gregorian Institute of Paris
In December 1922, a congress of Gregorian chant and sacred music was organized by l'Art Catholique. This conference was a huge success, thanks to the support of the new Archbishop of Paris since 1920, Louis-Ernest Dubois, and above all to the support of the monks of the Solesmes Abbey, who returned to France after their long exile to Quarr Abbey in England.
Gregorian Antiphonary
The silence, as it proved, was less complete than had been supposed. In the very year (732) that Egbert was raised to the See of York another prelate, Acca of Hexham, was forced to resign the office which he had held since 709. Bede appears to have been one of Egbert's friends from that time onward, which enables him to inform us (H. E., V, 20) that Acca had learned the ecclesiastical chant from a certain Maban, who had acquired it, himself, while living in Kent, from the successors of the disciples of the Pope Gregory. Acca had, in fact, spent twelve years in Maban's school. If we take 732 as the last of these twelve years, it follows that the first lessons given by Maban go back to the year 720, at which date Maban had had time to be trained by the successors of the disciples of Pope Gregory. Gregory II became pope in 715; a space of five years is, evidently, not easy to reconcile with the plain meaning of what Bede says.
Gallican Rite
The Roman Liturgy was adopted at Metz in the time of Chrodegang (742–66). The Roman chant was introduced about 760, and by a decree of Pepin of Herstal, mayor of the palace, quoted in Charlemagne's "Admonitio Generalis" in 789, the Gallican chant was abolished in its favour. Pope Adrian I between 784 and 791 sent to Charlemagne at his own request a copy of what was considered to be the Gregorian Sacramentary, but which certainly represented the Roman use of the end of the 8th century. This book, which was far from complete, was edited and supplemented by the addition of a large amount of matter derived from the Gallican books and from the Roman book known as the Gelasian Sacramentary, which had been gradually supplanting the Gallican. It is probable that the editor was Alcuin of York, Charlemagne's principal liturgical advisor. Copies were distributed throughout Charlemagne's empire, and this "composite liturgy", as Duchesne describes, "from its source in the Imperial chapel spread throughout all the churches of the Frankish Empire and at length, finding its way to Rome gradually supplanted there the ancient use." More than half a century later, when Charles the Bald wished to see what the ancient Gallican Rite had been like, it was necessary to import Hispanic priests to celebrate it in his presence. Subsequently with the Normans the Gallican rite in the Kingdom of Sicily is the official liturgy.
Semiology (Gregorian Chant)
The Holy See set up a commission which ran from 1904 till 1913, headed by Pothier, and an editorial team, run by Mocquereau, to create official chant editions for the Vatican. Mocquereau's editorial team only lasted a year: owing to editorial disagreements with Mocquereau, Pothier ended up in charge of the editing which, amongst other things, led to the production of a revised Graduale Romanum in 1908. Mocquereau published "Le nombre musical grégorienne ou rhythmique grégorienne" (two volumes) in 1908 & 1927, in which he presented his own understanding of Gregorian rhythm, several elements of which have since been generally discredited. Two elements which have not been discredited are the recognition of the existence of note lengthening, and the notion of 'nuancing', i.e., altering note durations by very small, non-proportional values. One-note syllables were declared to be normally short in duration, their written length being interpreted as 'graphic licence'.
Gregorian chant
Chants sometimes fall into melodically related groups. The musical phrases centonized to create Graduals and Tracts follow a musical "grammar" of sorts. Certain phrases are used only at the beginnings of chants, or only at the end, or only in certain combinations, creating musical families of chants such as the "Iustus ut palma" family of Graduals. Several Introits in mode 3, including "Loquetur Dominus" above, exhibit melodic similarities. Mode III (E authentic) chants have C as a dominant, so C is the expected reciting tone. These mode III Introits, however, use both G and C as reciting tones, and often begin with a decorated leap from G to C to establish this tonality. Similar examples exist throughout the repertory.
Gregorian chant
Early plainchant, like much of Western music, is believed to have been distinguished by the use of the diatonic scale. Modal theory, which postdates the composition of the core chant repertory, arises from a synthesis of two very different traditions: the speculative tradition of numerical ratios and species inherited from ancient Greece and a second tradition rooted in the practical art of cantus. The earliest writings that deal with both theory and practice include the Enchiriadis group of treatises, which circulated in the late ninth century and possibly have their roots in an earlier, oral tradition. In contrast to the ancient Greek system of tetrachords (a collection of four continuous notes) that descend by two tones and a semitone, the Enchiriadis writings base their tone-system on a tetrachord that corresponds to the four finals of chant, D, E, F, and G. The disjunct tetrachords in the Enchiriadis system have been the subject of much speculation, because they do not correspond to the diatonic framework that became the standard Medieval scale (for example, there is a high F#, a note not recognized by later Medieval writers). A diatonic scale with a chromatically alterable b/b-flat was first described by Hucbald, who adopted the tetrachord of the finals (D, E, F, G) and constructed the rest of the system following the model of the Greek Greater and Lesser Perfect Systems. These were the first steps in forging a theoretical tradition that corresponded to chant.
Tonary
Tonaries can differ substantially in length and shape:During the Carolingian reform the tonary played a key role in the organization and the transfer of Roman chant, which had to be sung by Frankish cantors according to Charlemagne's "admonitio generalis" after it was decreed in 789. The historical background was the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 during which Pope Adrian I accepted the Eastern Octoechos reform also for the Roman church. Fully notated neume manuscripts like the gradual and the antiphonary were written much later during the last decades of the 10th century, and the oral transmission of Gregorian chant is only testified by additions of neumes in sacramentaries. In the tonary the whole repertory of "Gregorian chant" was ordered according to its modal classification of the Octoechos.
Medieval music
Medieval music consists of songs, instrumental pieces, and liturgical music from about 500 A.D. to 1400. Medieval music was an era of Western music, including liturgical music (also known as sacred) used for the church, and secular music, non-religious music. Medieval music includes solely vocal music, such as Gregorian chant and choral music (music for a group of singers), solely instrumental music, and music that uses both voices and instruments (typically with the instruments accompanying the voices). Gregorian chant was sung by monks during Catholic Mass. The Mass is a reenactment of Christ's Last Supper, intended to provide a spiritual connection between man and God. Part of this connection was established through music.
This era begins with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century and ends sometime in the early fifteenth century. Establishing the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the Renaissance music era is difficult, since the trends started at different times in different regions. The date range in this article is the one usually adopted by musicologists.
Gregorian chant
Singing has been part of the Christian liturgy since the earliest days of the Church. Until the mid-1990s, it was widely accepted that the psalmody of ancient Jewish worship significantly influenced and contributed to early Christian ritual and chant. This view is no longer generally accepted by scholars, due to analysis that shows that most early Christian hymns did not have Psalms for texts, and that the Psalms were not sung in synagogues for centuries after the Destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. However, early Christian rites did incorporate elements of Jewish worship that survived in later chant tradition. Canonical hours have their roots in Jewish prayer hours. "Amen" and "alleluia" come from Hebrew, and the threefold "sanctus" derives from the threefold "kadosh" of the Kedushah.
Choir
The earliest notated music of western Europe is Gregorian chant, along with a few other types of chant which were later subsumed (or sometimes suppressed) by the Catholic Church. This tradition of unison choir singing lasted from sometime between the times of St. Ambrose (4th century) and Gregory the Great (6th century) up to the present. During the later Middle Ages, a new type of singing involving multiple melodic parts, called organum, became predominant for certain functions, but initially this polyphony was only sung by soloists. Further developments of this technique included clausulae, conductus and the motet (most notably the isorhythmic motet), which, unlike the Renaissance motet, describes a composition with different texts sung simultaneously in different voices. The first evidence of polyphony with more than one singer per part comes in the Old Hall Manuscript (1420, though containing music from the late 14th century), in which there are apparent" divisi", one part dividing into two simultaneously sounding notes.
Christian music
Among the most prevalent uses of Christian music are in church worship or other gatherings. Most Christian music involves singing, whether by the whole congregation (assembly), or by a specialized subgroup—such as a soloist, duet, trio, quartet, madrigal, choir, or worship band— or both. It is frequently accompanied by instruments, but some denominations (such as some Exclusive Brethren, the Churches of Christ, the Primitive Baptists and the Free Church of Scotland) or congregations still prefer unaccompanied or "a cappella" singing. Some groups, such as the Bruderhof, sing songs both with religious and non-religious meanings and words. For them, the act of singing is important. One of the earliest forms of worship music in the church was the Gregorian chant. Pope Gregory I, while not the inventor of chant, was acknowledged as the first person to order such music in the church, hinting the name "Gregorian" chant. The chant reform took place around 590–604 CE (reign of Pope Gregory I) (Kamien, pg. 65–67). The Gregorian chant was known for its very monophonic sound. Believing that complexity had a tendency to create cacophony, which ruined the music, Gregory I kept things very simple with the chant.
Gregorian Institute of Paris
When they arrived in Rome in April 1964, the delegates of the Institute and its schola were congratulated by Pope Pius VI for their contribution to Gregorian chant. .
Gregorian chant
John the Deacon, biographer (c. 872) of Pope Gregory I, modestly claimed that the saint "compiled a patchwork antiphonary", unsurprisingly, given his considerable work with liturgical development. He reorganized the Schola Cantorum and established a more uniform standard in church services, gathering chants from among the regional traditions as widely as he could manage. Of those, he retained what he could, revised where necessary, and assigned particular chants to the various services. According to Donald Jay Grout, his goal was to organize the bodies of chants from diverse traditions into a uniform and orderly whole for use by the entire western region of the Church. His renowned love for music was recorded only 34 years after his death; the epitaph of Honorius testified that comparison to Gregory was already considered the highest praise for a music-loving pope. While later legends magnified his real achievements, these significant steps may account for why his name came to be attached to Gregorian chant.
Gregorian chant
Not much is known about the particular vocal stylings or performance practices used for Gregorian chant in the Middle Ages. On occasion, the clergy was urged to have their singers perform with more restraint and piety. This suggests that virtuosic performances occurred, contrary to the modern stereotype of Gregorian chant as slow-moving mood music. This tension between musicality and piety goes far back; Gregory the Great himself criticized the practice of promoting clerics based on their charming singing rather than their preaching. However, Odo of Cluny, a renowned monastic reformer, praised the intellectual and musical virtuosity to be found in chant:
The Song of the Sibyl
Originally, the Song of the Sibyl was sung in a Gregorian melody and, as it can be seen in the codex previously mentioned, the musical accompaniment that was played in Majorca, with the exception of some variations, was the same documented in other places across the Iberian Peninsula. Today, it cannot be ascertained when the Song of the Sibyl was sung to this Gregorian melody, but most likely until the 16th or 17th century. Oral transmission of the song caused, as it did with the text, the birth of different variations and models. The interest this chant produced amongst early Musicologists and Folklorists of the 19th century led to the transcription of the different known versions of the song. The versions still played nowadays take these transcriptions as model.
Mozarabic chant
Visigothic/Mozarabic chants used a different system of psalm tones for psalm antiphons than Gregorian chant. Unlike the standardized Gregorian classification of chants into eight modes, Visigothic/Mozarabic chant used between four and seven, depending on the local tradition. Many Visigothic/Mozarabic chants are recorded with no musical notation at all, or just the incipit, suggesting that the psalm tones followed simple and frequently used formulas.
Gregorian chant
The Catholic Church later allowed polyphonic arrangements to replace the Gregorian chant of the Ordinary of the Mass. This is why the Mass as a compositional form, as set by composers like Palestrina or Mozart, features a Kyrie but not an Introit. The Propers may also be replaced by choral settings on certain solemn occasions. Among the composers who most frequently wrote polyphonic settings of the Propers were William Byrd and Tomás Luis de Victoria. These polyphonic arrangements usually incorporate elements of the original chant.
Men's chorus
Men have sung together throughout history. In the West, most music lovers will be familiar with monastic chanting such as the Gregorian chant.
Kievan chant
During the course of the 17th century, three new types of Orthodox liturgical chant appeared in the Rus' region. The first of them was the Kievan chant, followed by the so-called “Bulgarian” or Bulgarski chant, and finally the “Greek” or Grecheski chant. They were collectively known by the term Obikhod.
Gregorian mode
A Gregorian mode (or church mode) is one of the eight systems of pitch organization used in Gregorian chant.
Gloriæ Dei Cantores
Gregorian chant
Beneventan chant
During the Lombard occupation of the 7th and 8th centuries, a distinctive liturgical rite and plainchant tradition developed in Benevento. It included feasts of special local importance such as the Holy Twelve Brothers of Benevento. At the time it was called "cantus ambrosianus" ("Ambrosian chant"), although it is a separate plainchant tradition from the chant of Milan which we call Ambrosian chant. The common use of the name "cantus ambrosianus", the common influence of the Lombards in both Benevento and Milan, and musical similarities between the two liturgies and chant traditions suggest a Lombard influence in the origins of Beneventan chant.
Gregorian chant had already begun to take hold in the Beneventan orbit as early as the 8th century. The two traditions appear to have coexisted for about a century before the Gregorian chant began to replace the native Beneventan. Many Beneventan chants exist only as interpolations and addenda in Gregorian chantbooks, sometimes next to their corresponding chants in the Gregorian repertory. External ecclesiastical influences, such as two German abbots at Montecassino during the 11th century, led to an increasing insistence on the Roman rite and Gregorian chant instead of the local Beneventan traditions. One of these abbots later became Pope Stephen IX, who in 1058 officially outlawed the Beneventan rite and chant. A few Beneventan chants continued to be recorded and performed for a time, especially for the feasts of local importance such as the Holy Twelve Brothers, which had no Gregorian counterpart. However, the Beneventan repertory as a whole fell into disuse. This was commemorated in a legend of a singing contest between a Gregorian and a Beneventan cantor, which ended in victory for the Gregorian repertory when the Beneventan cantor fainted from exhaustion.
Beneventan chant
Beneventan chant is a liturgical plainchant repertory of the Roman Catholic Church, used primarily in the orbit of the southern Italian ecclesiastical centers of Benevento and Monte Cassino distinct from Gregorian chant and related to Ambrosian chant. It was officially supplanted by the Gregorian chant of the Roman rite in the 11th century, although a few Beneventan chants of local interest remained in use.
Gregorian chant
Gregorian chant had a significant impact on the development of medieval and Renaissance music. Modern staff notation developed directly from Gregorian neumes. The square notation that had been devised for plainchant was borrowed and adapted for other kinds of music. Certain groupings of neumes were used to indicate repeating rhythms called rhythmic modes. Rounded noteheads increasingly replaced the older squares and lozenges in the 15th and 16th centuries, although chantbooks conservatively maintained the square notation. By the 16th century, the fifth line added to the musical staff had become standard. The bass clef and the flat, natural, and sharp accidentals derived directly from Gregorian notation.
Gregorian chant
Graduals are responsorial chants that follow the reading of the Epistle. Graduals usually result from "centonization"; stock musical phrases are assembled like a patchwork to create the full melody of the chant, creating families of musically related melodies. Graduals are accompanied by an elaborate Verse, so that it actually consists in two different parts, A B. Often the first part is sung again, creating a 'rondeau' A B A. At least the verse, if not the complete gradual, is for the solo cantor and are in elaborate, ornate style with long, wide-ranged melismata.
Schola Gregoriana Pragensis
The Schola Gregoriana Pragensis is an award winning choir from the Czech republic with primary focus on Gregorian chant and Bohemian plainchant. The choir formed in 1987 under the direction of David Eben and was restricted in its repertoire to only liturgical music for the first two years. Since the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the choir has extended its repertoire to include a variety of sacred music, with particular focus on Gregorian chant (monophonic Latin liturgical music) and early polyphony.
Mozarabic chant
Mozarabic chant (also known as Hispanic chant, Old Hispanic chant, Old Spanish chant, or Visigothic chant) is the liturgical plainchant repertory of the Visigothic/Mozarabic rite of the Catholic Church, related to the Gregorian chant. It is primarily associated with Hispania under Visigothic rule (mainly in what was to become modern Spain) and with the Catholic Visigoths/Mozarabs living under Islamic rule, and was soon replaced by the chant of the Roman rite following the Christian Reconquest. Although its original medieval form is largely lost, a few chants have survived with readable musical notation, and the chanted rite was later revived in altered form and continues to be used in a few isolated locations in Spain, primarily in Toledo.
Gregorian chant
Later sources of these other chant traditions show an increasing Gregorian influence, such as occasional efforts to categorize their chants into the Gregorian modes. Similarly, the Gregorian repertory incorporated elements of these lost plainchant traditions, which can be identified by careful stylistic and historical analysis. For example, the "Improperia" of Good Friday are believed to be a remnant of the Gallican repertory.
Choreosonographies
The concept of choreosonography developed from Óscar Mascareñas' doctoral research on Gregorian chant. His thesis focused on the study of the quilisma and oriscus (two signs that so far have been understood as ornamental) in a set of particular Gregorian chant manuscripts dating from 10th and 11th centuries. Inspired by, and based on, some of the ideas/concepts of the eminent 20th-century philosopher Jacques Derrida, it aimed to challenge the premises of the comparative methodologies employed by Dom Eugène Cardine and his semiological school to study the meaning of the chant signs, as well as to challenge other very influential Gregorian chant theories that are based on the notion of formula and on concepts that are closely related to it – such as that of variant, identity, the oral and the written in chant transmission, and the concept of sign meaning. This was done by proposing a radical view that introduces a different way of interpreting the extant evidence, one that sees the chant manuscripts as an opening of re-presentation, where what they contain is no longer fixed (neither by the ink nor by an ultimate interpretative theory), but open to an active and continuous process of change and innovation.
Gregorian chant
Common modern practice favors performing Gregorian chant with no beat or regular metric accent, largely for aesthetic reasons. The text determines the accent while the melodic contour determines the phrasing. The note lengthenings recommended by the Solesmes school remain influential, though not prescriptive.
Ambrosian chant
Ambrosian chant (also known as Milanese chant) is the liturgical plainchant repertory of the Ambrosian rite of the Roman Catholic Church, related to but distinct from Gregorian chant. It is primarily associated with the Archdiocese of Milan, and named after St. Ambrose much as Gregorian chant is named after Gregory the Great. It is the only surviving plainchant tradition besides the Gregorian to maintain the official sanction of the Roman Catholic Church.
Music history of Portugal
However, the church would start worrying soon about the proliferation of liturgies. From the mixture of the galican liturgy with the antique Roman one would result, traditionally under pope Gregory I (540-604), the modern Roman liturgy, also known as Gregorian liturgy, comprising the Gregorian chant. This would become the official liturgy of the Catholic Church and substituted gradually the local ones. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Council of Burgos decreed the substitution of the Hispanic rite by the modern Roman one in 1080. This measure was eased by the fact that, during the Reconquista, most part of the bishops were French (Gérard, Maurice Bourdin, Jean Péculier, Bernard, Hughes).
Plainsong
For several centuries, different plainchant styles existed concurrently. Standardization on Gregorian chant was not completed, even in Italy, until the 12th century. Plainchant represents the first revival of musical notation after knowledge of the ancient Greek system was lost. Plainsong notation differs from the modern system in having only four lines to the staff and a system of note shapes called neumes.
Hymn
Since there is a lack of musical notation in early writings, the actual musical forms in the early church can only be surmised. During the Middle Ages a rich hymnody developed in the form of Gregorian chant or plainsong. This type was sung in unison, in one of eight church modes, and most often by monastic choirs. While they were written originally in Latin, many have been translated; a familiar example is the 4th century "Of the Father's Heart Begotten" sung to the 11th century plainsong "Divinum Mysterium".
Music in Medieval England
In the early Middle Ages, ecclesiastical music was dominated by monophonic plainchant. The separate development of British Christianity from the direct influence of Rome until the eighth century, with its flourishing monastic culture, led to the development of a distinct form of liturgical Celtic chant. Although no notations of this music survive, later sources suggest distinctive melodic patterns. This was superseded, as elsewhere in Europe, from the eleventh century by Gregorian chant. The version of this chant linked to the liturgy as used in the Diocese of Salisbury, the Sarum Use, first recorded from the thirteenth century, became dominant in England. This Sarum Chant became the model for English composers until it was supplanted at the Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century, influencing settings for masses, hymns and Magnificats. Singing techniques called gymel, a technique of temporarily dividing up one voice part, usually an upper one, into two parts of equal range, but singing different music, were introduced in England in the thirteenth century. Church music was often accompanied by instruments such as the guitar, harp, pipes and organ. The earliest evidence of two handed, polyphonic organ music is in the Robertsbridge Codex, from around 1325.
Tonary
Michel Huglo developed in his dissertation the hypothesis about an original tonary which preceded the Metz tonary and the tonary of St. Riquier. It was probably a coincidence, that Pope Adrian I supported the Eastern Octoechos reform, but it is also evident that Carolingian diplomates present at the synode did not get interest in the communication of the modes by intonations called "enechemata" for the first time. Nevertheless, it was the difference between Greek and Latin chant sources and especially the particular function of the tonary in chant transmission, which led Peter Jeffery to the conclusion, that the huge repertoire of Roman chant was classified according to the Octoechos a posteriori. While early manuscripts of Greek chant always used modal signatures (even before neume notation was used), the fully notated graduals and antiphonaries of the first generation (10th century), written by Frankish cantors, report a lot of details about accentuation and ornamentation, but the melodic structure was remembered orally by tropes. Sometimes a tonary was attached to these manuscripts, and the cantors could use it by looking for the incipit of an antiphon in question (e.g. an introit to communio), in order to find the right psalmody according to the mode and the melodic ending of the antiphon, which was sung as a refrain during the recitation of the psalm. A Greek psaltes would sing a completely different melody according to the echos indicated by the modal signature, while Frankish cantors had to remember the melody of a certain Roman chant, before they communicated their idea of its mode and its psalmody in a tonary—for all the cantors who will follow them. In this complex process of chant transmission, which followed Charlemagne's reform, the so-called "Gregorian chant" or Franco-Roman chant, as it was written down about 150 years after the reform, was born.
Concerto gregoriano
The Concerto gregoriano is a violin concerto by Ottorino Respighi. It is inspired by the history and music of early Christianity, such as plainsong and Gregorian chant. It was written in 1921 and premiered the following year in Rome.
Chant II (album)
Chant II is a 1995 album of Gregorian chant, performed by the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos in Burgos, Spain. It is a follow-up to the 1994 release "Chant", the best-selling album of Gregorian chant. Like the first album, it included material which had been recorded by the monks some years previously.
Monophony
The earliest recorded Christian monophony was plainchant or plainsong (of which one well-known style was called Gregorian chant) a single unaccompanied vocal melody sung by monks. Sung by multiple voices in unison (i.e. the same pitch and rhythm), this music is still considered monophonic. Plainsong was the first and foremost musical style of Italy, Ireland, Spain, and France. In the early 9th century, the organum tradition developed by adding voices in parallel to plainchant melodies. The earliest organum merely augmented the texture of the melody by adding a second voice in parallel octaves or parallel fifths, which could still be considered monophonic; however, by the 11th century the organum had developed a style called "free organum" in which the voices were more independent, evolving into a polyphonic tradition.
Gregorian chant
At the close of the Office, one of four "Marian antiphons" is sung. These songs, "Alma Redemptoris Mater" (see top of article), "Ave Regina caelorum", "Regina caeli laetare", and "Salve, Regina", are relatively late chants, dating to the 11th century, and considerably more complex than most Office antiphons. Willi Apel has described these four songs as "among the most beautiful creations of the late Middle Ages."