Ratio Studiorum

Ratio Studiorum: The Shape of Modern Chant Studies

The decision of what to include on these pages, and how to organize them, inevitably follows from and expresses an overall vision of the shape of the field, either as it actually is or as it ideally should be. The following summarizes my own view of the history of Gregorian chant and the landscape of the field as I envision it, in order to make clear what will be found on the Gregorian Chant Home Page and why I decided to include it. Though individual perceptions differ (and the dialogue among different opinions is one of the engines that drives scholarship forward), I think that little of what I have written below would be considered controversial by well-informed people, even those who have publicly disagreed with me in their published writings. In any case, the historical construction I have summarized here is being spelled out in detail in my forthcoming book Prophecy Mixed with Melody: >From Early Christian Psalmody to Gregorian Chant.

Gregorian chant is one of the many traditions of liturgical song that developed in the Christian church during the medieval period, and undoubtedly the most renowned (though few people really know it well) of the chant traditions that are still in use today. All of these traditions originated in the practice of oratorical proclamation of the Christian Scriptures (the Bible) within the context of liturgical, corporate worship services. The practice itself presumably dates to the origins of the Christian religion, and even earlier, since most of the writings in the Christian scriptural canon antedate Christianity itself, and were already read as Scripture in ancient Judaism. Even today, most of the old religions (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism) still conduct worship services in which the texts of religious scriptures are cantillated or declaimed musically, using traditional melodies -- rather than being read aloud in a mere speaking voice or recited in a dull monotone. Thus the Jewish and Christian practices of singing their Scriptures are not historical anomalies unique to those traditions, but rather specific examples of a widespread and ancient practice customary to much of the human race.

Despite the over-enthusiastic claims of some, Gregorian chant as we know it has little in common with the chant that is heard in synagogues today or that can be recovered historically by scholars. The two sister religions diverged in the first century of our era, and each has followed its own historical trajectory since, despite frequent instances of both friendly and hostile contact between the two. Though it is true that both religions revere many of the same Biblical writings, they sing them in different languages, in liturgical contexts that are very different and even based on different principles. While the members of each religion often believe that their traditional melodies are very ancient, there is no scholarly procedure that permits us satisfactorily to recover melodies from anywhere near the period of the first century, before Judaism and Christianity fully separated. This is because neither group used written music notation at that time. It is true that specimens of musical notation survive from ancient China, Babylon, and Greece (including one Christian hymn, which can be heard at the Hellenic Culture Database), which permit serious scholarly study of these musical cultures at periods well before the first century A.D. With Christian and Jewish liturgical chant, on the other hand, we are dealing with oral traditions that began to be recorded in written symbols only about the tenth century A.D. How to infer what the music was like before that time -- on the far side of the historical watershed that was the emergence of written notation -- is one of the most difficult and controversial questions in contemporary chant studies. For assistance in trying to answer it, chant scholars have looked in several directions. On the one hand, the study of modern cultures in which music is transmitted orally -- a subject that falls within the field of ethnomusicology -- can help us develop a sense of what musical oral traditions are like. On the other hand are the closely related fields of cognition (the study of how the brain processes information) and linguistics -- highly relevant to the kind of text-generated music that liturgical chant is. There are at least two other reasons why language studies are important to the chant scholar: First, the liturgical chant texts were created in ancient languages, the most important of which were Greek, Latin, Old Slavonic (the earliest attested Slavic language), and Syriac (a Semitic language related to the Aramaic that was the native tongue of Jesus); Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Hebrew are also of great value. Second, a modern chant scholar cannot expect to be conversant with all the latest scholarship unless he can read at least many of the modern European languages in which it is being published.

With the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity that began during the fourth century, Christian worship changed from a persecuted secret cult, practiced surreptitiously by small groups in the house churches and cemeteries, into a formal public liturgy, celebrated in the great basilicas modeled on imperial court buildings, under the leadership of bishops who were now also officials of the empire. This inevitably affected the music, as we can tell from Christian writings of the period. Sermons by prominent bishops of the time, most notably St. Augustine of Hippo, often cited the Biblical passages that had just been read in the service, and these frequently included psalms in which the congregation responded with an unvarying refrain to the verses sung by a soloist. Already certain psalms were being linked to specific occasions, so that on a particular day in the liturgical calendar the same psalms were traditionally sung year after year. By the fifth century this practice had been formalized in a type of liturgical book known as a lectionary, containing the complete cycle of readings and responsorial psalms for each day of the year. The most important lectionary to survive from this period, and very likely the first one to be written down, was the lectionary of Jerusalem, the influence of which can be detected in most of the other early lectionaries that survive. To study this period in the history of liturgical chant, therefore, the scholar must be willing to read widely in the literature of the early church, and be especially familiar with the Bible and the history of its interpretation, for this is the source of the vast majority of chant texts. Knowledge of contemporary liturgical studies is equally essential.

During the sixth and seventh centuries the chant repertories were filled out, so that each major city, region, and monastery had a complete set of psalm refrains and other chants, not only for the Eucharist or Mass, but also for the Divine Office, the daily cycle of prayer services in which psalmody had an essential role. Each locality had its own tradition, however, with many distinctive texts and melodies that were not shared with the other traditions. By far the most influential of these traditions was the local rite of Jerusalem, witnessed by countless pilgrims from all over the Christian world and therefore widely imitated elsewhere, particularly in the East. The desert monasteries of Egypt were also widely imitated by monasteries throughout the East and West, though in Egypt itself there was a variety of practices rather than a single unified rite. Such great cities as Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria also had their own local rites, though these had only limited influence at this period except within their immediate geographic environs. The earliest written copies of these local chant repertories are to be found in manuscripts that date from the eighth century, but they tend to be fragmentary and they include only the texts, for music notation had not yet been developed. It is perhaps the most frustrating period for chant scholars, because the written documentation is relatively sparse. However, one neglected but potentially fruitful area for studying this period is the art and archaeology of the major Christian centers -- for in each local tradition the chant texts frequently refer to the relics and saints who were venerated in the church buildings where the chants were sung, and whose commemorations contributed to organizing the local liturgical calendar. This is nowhere more true than in the Gregorian chant tradition itself, where many of the texts, though excerpted from the Bible, were chosen for their applicability to the local martyrs whose relics were and are still venerated in the church buildings at Rome -- the very same texts that are sometimes quoted in extant Roman mosaics from this period.

The ninth century began a period of consolidation, at least in the Latin and Greek-speaking cultural spheres. Recovering from the initial military expansion of the new religion of Islam, and seeking to reverse the cultural decline of the preceding few centuries, both East and West inaugurated a process of replacing the myriad local traditions with a single uniform rite derived from the spiritual capital of the region. In the Latin West, this was part of the effort known as the Carolingian Renaissance, in which Pepin and his son Charlemagne, kings of the Franks, imposed on all their subjects (in the region that is now France and Germany) a homogenized liturgy derived from the local rite of Rome. The music of this Franco-Roman rite was what we now know as Gregorian chant, and it was about this period that it first became linked to the name of Pope Gregory the Great, who actually reigned from 590 to 604. There is little to support the Carolingian belief that this repertory was indeed compiled by Gregory, and significant reason to doubt it, including the fact that in Gregory's time there was no musical notation in which he could have written the melodies down.

In the East, there were two major liturgical centers: Jerusalem, which fell to Muslim rule in the seventh century, and the imperial capital of Constantinople, the New Rome. Liturgical unification there consisted of a kind of fusion of the two local traditions, worked out by Constantinopolitan and Palestinian monks, and therefore giving precedence to the monastic forms of these traditions. The end result was what we now call the Byzantine rite, the traditional music of which is Byzantine chant. The introduction of Byzantine Christianity into the Slavic world at this time resulted in the formation of a Slavonic branch of the Byzantine rite. A similar process of unification, though much less fully researched, was carried on by the Coptic-speaking monks of Egypt; among its results was the general adoption of the Bohairic dialect of Coptic, to the exclusion of Sahidic and other dialects. In the Syriac-speaking realm, however, the process of unification seems to have proceeded more slowly, so that there is still significant variation in the Syriac rites today. Little is known about the history of the Ethiopian rite before the end of the Muslim invasions in the sixteenth century, but it too seems to have undergone some standardization in the seventeenth century.

In both East and West the process of liturgical unification required several centuries, but was ultimately fairly successful. As a result very few manuscripts survive of the original local rite of Constantinople, while the rite of Jerusalem is known almost exclusively from Armenian and Georgian translations that were made when these areas unified their own liturgies around the Jerusalem practice. In the West, the only local rite that successfully resisted the Franco-Roman unification that began in the Carolingian period was the tradition of Milan, known as the Ambrosian rite after the fourth-century bishop of the city to whom it was traditionally ascribed, though in fact most of it developed after his lifetime. Many manuscripts remain of the two local traditions that prevailed in Spain (collectively known as the Mozarabic rite), but the music notation is too primitive for us to decipher today. Vestiges of the many local traditions of France (collectively called the Gallican rite) are far fewer, and only a few remnants of the original traditions of Aquilea-Grado, Ravenna, and southern Italy (now called Beneventan chant) can now be recovered. In the nineteenth century, when the beginning of modern chant scholarship provoked the first great attempt to locate and survey the surviving manuscripts, researchers discovered a local tradition in Rome that was textually similar to Gregorian chant, but melodically quite different. This tradition is usually referred to as Old Roman chant, and the question of why it is so different from Gregorian chant is the most debated issue in modern chant studies. The problems that must have been encountered in exporting an oral tradition from Rome to the Frankish kingdom are often cited as among the most likely reasons.

The need to develop a uniform chant tradition that could be easily and accurately taught provoked many new developments, including the creation of a system of notation for writing the melodies down, and a literature of music theory for explaining it. These innovations may have changed the music itself quite profoundly, making it more difficult for scholars to imagine what the chant may have been like before. But it is notation and theory that make it possible for us to study the chant of this period as music, and that make it possible for us to perform and enjoy it as music today.

It was the invention of music notation that, for the first time, allowed the music itself to be written down in addition to the text. The earliest notational signs, known as neumes, primarily indicate melodic contour -- the movement of the melody between relatively high pitches and relatively low ones, but the information they convey is not specific enough to allow modern scholars to decipher the melodies with confidence. This type of notation first appears in manuscripts of the ninth century, but only from the tenth century do we have complete copies of the Gregorian and Byzantine chant repertories in which the texts are fully neumated. Further developments in the notation, beginning about the eleventh century, made greater specificity possible, leading ultimately to the familiar musical staff in the West, and to the so-called Round Notation in the East, both of which were fully formed by the thirteenth century. These developments make it possible for us to recover the pitches of the medieval melodies. The original rhythms on the other hand, are still in doubt, for the notation seems never to have become explicit enough to communicate rhythmic information unequivocally. Perhaps the customary procedures for declaiming the texts were clear enough in those days to render a more explicit rhythmic notation unnecessary.

Alongside the neumatic notations, the other product of the ninth-century standardization was the literature of music theory. In the West, teachers of the chant relied heavily on Latin textbooks of the late antique period, which outlined the classical Greek science of acoustics, but had not previously been applied to Christian liturgical chant. In the East, the study of classical acoustics was also integrated into the pedagogy of the liturgical chant, but more slowly. The most original development, however, was the theory of the eight church modes, categories for classifying the melodies that have some features in common with modern scales. This system, also known as the Oktoechos, seems to have emerged in the eighth-century monasteries around Jerusalem, but it was quickly adopted by the Byzantine, Gregorian, Armenian, Georgian, and some Syrian chant traditions. The rapid integration of ancient Greek acoustical terminology into modal theory soon led to the misapprehension that the oktoechos itself was a heritage from ancient Greece, an error that was not corrected until the late twentieth century.

The modern field of chant studies, therefore, by necessity embraces many types of approaches to many kinds of evidence. The bulk of the data to be studied comes to us in handwritten manuscripts of the tenth through fourteenth centuries, yet an understanding of oral tradition and musical performance is needed to interpret them. Sensitivity to the rhetorical and syntactical qualities of texts must work in synergy with detailed knowledge of the mathematical discipline that was and is music theory, without losing sight of the Biblical and liturgical matrix that is the chant's proper environment. Finally, the complexity of the topic, combined with the perennial international popularity of the music, has ensured a vast bibliography for chant studies, with dozens of publications appearing every year and frequent international conferences. In our time the Internet too has become a significant repository of information relevant to chant scholarship. The purpose of the Gregorian Chant Home Page is to make as much as possible of this information conveniently available to all of those with a serious interest in chant studies, but especially to those involved in the forthcoming Nassau Edition of Gregorian chant, which will utilize fully the new technologies for humanistic and scholarly computing.

Peter Jeffery
Professor of Music, Princeton University
Oblate of St. Benedict at St. John's Abbey, Collegeville

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