F YOU PLAY A GAME of “telephone,” each person whispers something complicated into another person’s ear. As the message gets passed from person to person, it usually deteriorates. The fun of the game is hearing how dramatically the original message has changed by the time it gets to the end. But there’s something no musicologist has been able to explain. When it comes to CARMEN GREGORIANUM (“Gregorian Chant”), we have an unbroken link going back more than 1,000 years: an absolutely breathtaking one-to-one correspondence with regard to the notes of the various melodies. Some of the melodies are extremely intricate, and there have been innumerable variations through the centuries, yet somehow the melodies remain (broadly speaking) identical. It’s as if each monk were looking at a “primary source”—in spite of the fact that each scribe added their own little ‘twist’ to the melodies. No musicologist has been able to explain how such a thing was accomplished. What ought to have happened was that, with each subsequent generation, the melodies would become more and more divergent—but that’s not what happened!
An Example • The beautiful excerpt below, from an ancient manuscript, demonstrates what I’m talking about. Look at the final GLORIA incipit and you will recognize it, in spite of the fact that it isn’t identical to what we find in the official edition:
Concluding Thought • The melodies should have deteriorated as the centuries rolled on, eventually becoming unrecognizable. But that isn’t what happened and nobody has been able to explain this.
