ESTERDAY I had occasion to deliver a lecture on the origins of Gregorian chant. We all know the beautiful legend of how St. Gregory received the chant by divine inspiration and composed the cycle of Mass propers, which then was carried north to the Frankish realms by Roman cantors and spread thence into the rest of the world. Recent chant scholarship has constructed an alternative narrative that is a bit more complicated (centuries of Roman development followed by hybridization with Frankish practices), but this story is both interesting in itself and hardly less miraculous in its end results.
I say miraculous—because in the proper chants of the Mass, the Church preserves for us an incomparable treasure, given to us as a free and entirely undeserved gift. The Gregorian Mass proper is one of the truly great works of human art. Every Sunday morning, as I get to the church worn down from all the cares and distractions of the week (“guilty of dust and sin,” as the poet has it), I am simply and repeatedly dazzled by the peerless beauty of the Gregorian music. This is a vague statement and can easily be dismissed as romantic, although I hope you share my view. Scholars tend to be rather more reserved in their enthusiasms, but I was never very good at that. Indeed, I truly mean that singing the Gregorian melodies and contemplating (while singing) the relation of words and melody and their concrete historical development is the greatest artistic privilege I have, for the music suits the words in a particular way that seems almost unique to the chant that emerged from the meeting of Roman and Frankish singers in the late eighth century.
Moreover, to wander even farther from the normal path of scholarship, each proper chant has its own character and its own place in the grand drama of the liturgy, which is ordered for our sanctification and our transformation in Christ. Of course, you can sing the chant in any number of ways; the performance of chant is sometimes quite uninspired and uninspiring. But lurking behind the veil of each of these imperfect performances is a melody that dresses the words of the prayer perfectly, as though in a royal robe of music, and elevates the words into something that truly partakes of heaven. Since this thought occurs to me often, indeed weekly, I wish I had more time to write here about how I think that experience comes about, to show by analysis the intricate inner workings of the melody and the words. How often I think: “That is a beautiful and exceptionally apt turn of phrase in the music! I shall write up my insights on this to encourage other church musicians!” But I have many other pressing duties; I generally must content myself to live with the chant in the moment, to be fed by its sound.
But my consideration in class of chant as it actually seems to have developed in Rome and in the Frankish realm has inspired the present reflection, which looks at just one chant coming up this week. Naturally, this kind of approach could be multiplied forever; for now, I will merely look at this coming Sunday’s (the twenty-eighth of ordinary time) communion antiphon in its Roman and Gregorian versions. [Edit: A colleague points out that this is the communion antiphon for the eighteenth, not the twenty-eighth Sunday. We will have to wait until next year for the chant to come again!]
A Song to the Beloved • In the drama of the Mass, the communion antiphon comes in the last act. Sometimes it reprises the gospel of the day or draws some scriptural connection to the saint or the mystery being celebrated. But the ones I love most are simply a love song to our Lord present in the Blessed Sacrament. This Sunday’s communion chant is one of these. The text comes from the book of Wisdom: “Bread from heaven thou hast given us, O Lord, having every delight and every savor of sweetness.” Of course, the manna given by the Lord to his people was a type of the true heavenly bread given in the form of his own body at the Mass. Perhaps you are used to singing a slightly different version of these words at the end of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, in the form of a simple versicle and response. Here the words are clothed in the music of the chant, as is fitting for the highest liturgy of all in the Holy Mass. Here is the melody:
Skeleton Chants • Melodic analyses of Gregorian chant can be dull, a mere play-by-play account of the melodic contour. Writing about music is indeed hard. It is for this reason that there are kinds of musical analysis that forego prose and just use music to analyze music. In this melody, this could take the form of the following crude reduction. Here is my proposed process:
- Respect and retain the phrasing and barlines of the Vatican edition.
- Reduce each syllable to one note, using the following two rules:
- For each final syllable before a barline, use the last note of that syllable.
- For every other syllable, use the highest note in the syllable.
With this method, here is what you end up with:
We can make the reduction a little less crude by changing a few notes, sanding down the rough corners and reinstating the striking appearance of b-flat in the last word:
I think, singing this version of the chant, that it is striking how much of the original chant’s savor is retained.
Phrases & Modal Modulations • What emerges from this skeletal version is that we see more clearly how the Gregorian composers use pitch height to highlight the accentuation of the words and groups of words. For instance, the high point of the melody is on “Domine.” The melody builds to that point word by word, in a sort of crescendo of energy: “bread from heaven you have given us O Lord!” We can couple that contour analysis with a modal analysis, using Suñol’s idea of constant Gregorian modulation. The ascent from F to c is characteristic of the joyful fifth mode, but the “Domine” cadence onto a from the e above gives a hint of the first mode, the mode of gravity. A second, less high, wave follows, again reaching a cadence on A: “having every delight,” but this time in the character of the second mode, the mode of sadness. The contour of that wave is repeated in what follows: “and every savor,” but in the last small section, on “suavitatis,” the formula that introduces b-flat brings us back to an F tonality, with the coloring of the devotional sixth mode. Of course, I would hesitate to draw any conclusions from the flat/natural exchange on the pitch b, as there is always so much variation in the sources on that question. Undoubtedly, the melody in the Vatican edition uses this color change quite effectively.
This sketch of the modes and the contour is still rather clumsy compared to the melody itself. But my purpose here is to compare the Gregorian melody to its close cousin the Roman melody. You have probably heard of what we call the Old Roman chant. This is a branch of the study of chant about which I am very excited. This is easily something one could spend an entire lifetime considering.
The Chant of the Church of Rome • The “Old Roman Chant” is a repertoire of chant melodies that use the same texts (the same Roman rite) as the Gregorian chant but different (if often closely related) melodies. This repertoire centers around the city of Rome, and the sources are preserved there in books that date from the eleventh century or later. The earliest of these is dated 1071, and comes from the beautiful basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. The existence of this special Roman repertoire, coupled with the simultaneous lack of early Gregorian sources from Rome, makes it difficult to maintain that the Gregorian repertoire represents the Roman chant brought north across the Alps in the late eighth century and spread from there to the rest of Europe as was formerly thought. Instead, the newer consensus seems to be that the Old Roman repertoire derives from the Roman chant of the first millenium, and that Roman chant brought north by the Roman singers around the year 800 merged with local chant customs and otherwise changed in the Frankish realms (roughly modern Germany and France) to give rise to what we now call the Gregorian chant.
Here is the Old Roman version of this Sunday’s communion. I don’t pretend that this is a great or scholarly edition; it is just a quick transcription into vaguely Gregorian-looking neumes of the version of the melody in the Old Roman Graduale connected to St. Peter’s Basilica:
I think this chant is beautiful as it is, but there are many striking differences when compared with the Gregorian version. First, the Roman chant has a greater reliance on repeated neume formulas (as in the repeated two-note figures on “Panem” and “dedisti nobis”). Second, the Roman version typically has more notes and more stepwise motion; in this case, there are no leaps larger than a third, while the Gregorian version has two fourths and a fifth. Third, the Roman version has weaker cadences. I copied the barlines as they are given in the Vatican edition to facilitate comparisons. It seems obvious that all the cadences before the final one sound rather less definitive than in the Gregorian version. On the other hand, there are also many similarities, especially at the end of the melody.
I can illustrate this more fully by applying my same rough analytical process to this version of the chant, taking only high notes and final notes at cadences. Here is the resulting melody:
The end of the melody is indeed very similar to the skeletal Gregorian version, but the first half is striking in its use of repetition of a single pitch. Trying to hear possible modal modulations, there is again a lack of the variety of the Gregorian version, in which we had discerned modes 6, 5, 1, 2, and 5 in turn. Instead, this melody feels ancient, beautiful, and clear, but also features a certain static quality that distinguishes it from the Gregorian. Sometimes the Roman melodies are more closely related to their Gregorian counterparts; other times less so. These broad observations of melodic features tend to recur in most melodies, however.
Gregorian Text Setting Really is Divinely Inspired • This brings me to what I consider the real miracle of Gregorian chant. Supposing the Old Roman version is something like what the Roman cantors taught to the Franks in the Carolingian era. Well that makes it a precious artifact of the Church’s patrimony and a thing worthy of great respect and attention. But somehow the Franks had such difficulty learning this melody that they came up with the Gregorian version. Both melodies (close cousins) are beautiful, but the Gregorian version has a new and wonderful respect for the accentuation and a seeming intention of melodic design unfolding over the text and driven by the emphasis of the sentence. What a sweet mystery is that! And, again, how fortunate are we to be able to sing these melodies week in and week out, letting them slowly permeate our entire musical identity.
