Gregorian Chant

For those of you who are struggling with this assignment due to a lack of musical resources, I'll allow you to complete it in class under my supervision. Please bring sheet music with you even if you were unable to complete the assignment. 

Please explore the pages of this gregorian chant site

Gregorian Chant

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

The origin of the ancient ecclesiastic music, with character of monody, sung in the liturgy of the Roman Rite under the name of Gregorian Chant, goes back to a distant past. The traditional name stems from that of the Pope Gregory the Great (about the year 600). Gregory I was a Doctor of the Church. He studied laws and about the year 570 he obtained the charge of prefects urbis. He moved back later to his own house which turned into a monastery. In the year 578 he was ordained as a priest and in 590 he was elected as a Pope; it had to face to a great crisis for Justiniano's restoration had failed. He was the first pontiff who with his pastoral review and his reform exposed himself to the Germanic world. Due to an information contributed by his biographer it was admitted later and in a widespread way that this Pope not only had polished and arranged the musical repertoire of the ancient ecclesiastic music, but even he was the author, partly well or completely, of numerous melodies. These were his works: pastorals, Regula pastoralis; hagiographical, Libri quattuor dialogorum; and homiletics,Homiliae 22 in Ezech, and Homiliae 40 in Evang. In his iconography he is represented frecuently writing under the dictation and inspiration of the Holy Spirit which appears symbolically in the shape of pigeon placed next to his ear.

Nevertheless, the Gregorian Chant that currently can be compiled in several volumes and forming the quite unitary one is not a work of only one man nor even of only one generation. The knowledge that we possess of the history and of the origin of the ecclesiastic melodies is far from being deep, since scarcely there are some few manuscripts previous to the 10th century that have come up to us. Fortunately, the compared study of the old texts and of the liturgical forms has thrown new light on this topic. The graduals and the current antiphons contain all the chants corresponding to the ecclesiastic year, but the order in which they are presented to us does not indicate of what periods the different melodies proceed neither to what changes they have been submitted and how they have taken place in the course of the centuries.

The christianity never broke with the cultural forms that already existed in the moment of his appearance. What it did was to recapture them and, only in case of need, to adapt them for his own employment. The language and the art of the cultural medium was placed to the service of the spread of the new religious message. Thus, the first Christians used, undoubtedly, the melodies that previously they knew.

In Jerusalem and his surroundings, the zone where the first organized Christians arose, there existed two cultures, one next to other, and also intermingled: the purely Jewish traditional culture that had expression in the temple and in the services of the synagogues and the culture of the Hellenistic civilization that had arisen in the last centuries before Jesus Christ and that was spreading over the countries of the basin of the Mediterranean (from Alexandria in Egypt, up to Rome). This culture created a common language, the so called Hellenistic Greek , and in her there were fused some other own cultures of different peoples that were part of this so wide and varied world. The liturgy of Rome —that was celebrated, at first, in Greek language and from the IVth century already in Latin—, was using words of Hebrew origin proceeding from the epoch previous to Christ, as "Hosanna", "Hallelujah", "Amen ", and also Greek words like "Kyrie eleison" and "Agios o Theos".

The primitive music comes essentially from the Jewish synagogues. We have no information about the ancient Hellenistic music to be able to state his traces or his influence on the Christian music. In the Christian liturgy we can detect, on the contrary, the clear influence of the Jewish liturgy, like for example, the prayer that is intoned when the lamp is ignited in the evening (Eves) "Deus in adjutorium meum intende. Domine ad adjuvandum me festina", or the consecration of the hours in the Divine office (Prima, Terce, Sext and Nine). From the exit up to the sunset, the ancient Christians were dividing the day in twelve hours.

The alternation in the Sacred Scripture texts readings and that of the chants has remained across the centuries, and also that a person of major status between the presents always directs the prayers and that the dialogue established between "presbyters" (priest) and people (congregation) is answered by the above mentioned on simple motives. The singer soloist supported his importance between the first Christians. In Occident, his role was assumed by the "schola" (a small group of elected singers) and here resides the reason of the gradual decline and later abandonment of the original flowery embellishment of the melody (melismas, etc).

Due to its origin in the synagogues, the Gregorian Chant was in its beginning exclusively vocal. Ethiopians and Copts still were using the ancient instruments of percussion as it is mentioned in the psalms and in the worships of the antiquity; they were the only used in the temple of Jerusalem. It should pass a lot of time before the organ was doing his appearance in the western churches; in East, on the contrary, this instrument was used in the profane festivities.

During the following centuries, the organ found his real place in the temples, accompanying even to Gregorian music that, at first it was, since it appears earlier, only of vocal character. For some erudites, the authentic Gregorian Chant must preserve this naked form of vocal interpretation without accompaniment, whereas others affirm that the organ is suitable and should not to be deprived of an accompaniment that has made him so familiar.

In Occident there arose two new factors that determined powerfully the course of the religious music. One of them was the opposition of the Roman Church to the excessive employment of the hymns in the liturgical functions ; the other one was the change that suffered the language of the liturgy with change from the Greek to the Latin, which supposed that from the 5th century it was necessary to re-translate the psalms into Latin prose. From these moments, after soloist supports the melodic line with character of improvisation, that often was using traditional topics, it is possible to find again the free expression of the feelings described in the texts of the psalms, feelings of happiness, of serenity, of repentance and of peace, of hate and of love, that is to say, all those feelings in which the psalms are so abundant. It is here where we find the real fundamentals of the antiphonal wealth of the repertoire that belongs to the Gregorian Chant, much especially the chants that accompany certain parts of the Eucharistic celebration (the Mass): the Introit, the Offertory and the Communion.

The Gregorian Chant constitutes an authentic source of inspiration for the free development of the melody and the emotional expression of the western music.

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Gregorian Chant Assignment Guidelines
1. Please compose a piece in the Gregorian melodic style (based on information from the site posted).
2. Music should set a complete Psalm text or part of the Mass (Kyrie, Credo, etc.) in either english or latin.
3. Music should be in a simple, chant-style rhythm.
4. Music should follow the feel of the text.
5. Should be handed in on sheet music, with text clearly marked, and lined up with notations.
6. Music should include both syllabic and melismatic melody.(syllabic = one note per syllable, melismatic = several notes per syllable)