. The monophonic chant of the medieval Latin liturgy, sometimes known as “plainchant.” Although the term is often used for chant compositions from the later Middle Ages, “Gregorian chant” applies specifically to the music for the Mass and Divine Office according to the Romano-Frankish liturgy as it was codified ca. 800. It excludes other regional chant repertoires (Gallican, Milanese, Visigothic, Beneventan, Aquileian, Ravennate), all of which, with the exception of Milanese, or “Ambrosian,” chant, finally yielded to Gregorian chant, a repertoire promoted first by the Carolingians and later spread throughout Europe. The epithet “Gregorian” derives from Pope Gregory I (r. 590–604), who was thought to have played a decisive role in the shaping of western chant and liturgy. A connection between Gregory and the music named after him has never been demonstrated, however. The expression “Gregorian chants” (gregoriana carmina) does not antedate the mid-9th century, even though a verse prologue found in earlier books of Mass chants attributes the contents to one “Gregorius presul.” It has been argued that this prologue was intended to celebrate the work of Gregory II (r. 715–31) and that the text became associated with his more famous eponymous predecessor.
Although the origins of the medieval Latin chant repertoires are clouded in an obscurity that will probably never be penetrated, a process of growth and transformation can be assumed. The “Proper” chants of the Roman Mass (Introit, Gradual, Tract, Alleluia, Offertory, Communion), which vary according to the season or feast, were undoubtedly introduced singly over a period of time. What is presumably the earliest Mass chant, a responsorial psalm sung between the Scripture readings—predecessor of the musically more elaborate Gradual—existed by the end of the 4th century. Though the custom of singing during the reception of communion dates back to about the same era, a variable cycle of communion chants did not yet exist. The choice always fell on Psalm 34, chosen because of the line “taste and see that the Lord is good.” The Offertory chant was probably the last of the Proper chants to be introduced.
A simple explanation of the origin of Gregorian chant is complicated by the existence of a body of music known to modern scholars as “Old Roman” chant. Both share the same texts and the musical traditions are obviously related, but the musical styles rest on different aesthetic foundations. As far as we know, Old Roman chant was sung only in Rome, its oldest witness being a graduale copied there in 1071. Scholars have not arrived at a consensus about where and when the Gregorian repertoire received the shape found in the earliest notated manuscripts. Some argue that what we know as Gregorian chant preserves essentially intact the musical repertoire brought from Rome in the late 8th century as part of the Carolingian liturgical reforms and scrupulously guarded by Frankish musicians. Others maintain that the Franks reshaped and adapted the Roman music to their own native idiom. The latter process is difficult to assess in detail, because the earlier Gallican chant, which would presumably have reflected that idiom, disappeared with virtually no trace. Manuscripts from France and elsewhere attest to the uniformity and stability of the Gregorian musical tradition throughout the Middle Ages. Some of the earliest and best manuscript sources of chant originated in French territory: four of the Sextuplex manuscripts and several of the earliest notated gradualia from the 10th century (Laon, Bibl. mun. 239; Angers, Bibl. de la Ville 91; and Chartres 47). The first and third of these have been published in facsimile in the series Paléographie musicale.
The repertoire may be divided into two large categories: chants for the Mass and those for the Office. The Book of Psalms provides most of the texts. The psalm text can be sung in one of three musical forms: (1) direct, (2) responsorial, or (3) antiphonal. Each has more than one possible realization, but in general it can be stated that (1) involves the continuous recitation of the psalm text by a soloist or chorus, (2) calls for a choral response to the solo singing of a psalm, and (3) implies an alternation between the two choral groups, possibly in conjunction with a soloist. These performance practices were also used with nonpsalmic texts, like hymns, chants of the Ordinary of the Mass, and responsories of the Office.
Eventually, the Proper chants of the Mass consisted of a repertoire of about 600 chants for all feasts of the Lord and Sundays of the year (temporal cycle) and for the commemoration of the saints (sanctoral cycle). Some feasts of the saints had unique chants, while others were supplied from the “common”—chants with texts chosen because of their appropriateness to the category of saint (martyr, virgin, confessor, etc.) being honored. Later in the Middle Ages, this core repertoire was expanded by additions of various types: new compositions in the traditional genres for new feasts; tropes, new musical material—usually with text—prefaced to and inserted between phrases of the preexistent Gregorian melody; prosae or prosulae, new texts fitted to already existing melismas; and independent compositions like the sequence, the Aquitanian versus, and liturgical drama. Although the sequence was at first attached to the Alleluia of the Mass, it later became a virtually independent genre with an accentual, rhyming text set to successively repeated musical phrases (aa, bb, cc, etc.).
The Ordinary of the Mass consists of items sung at the eucharist on a daily, or almost daily, basis. The texts of the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei do not vary according to the seasons of the church year or sanctoral celebrations. Whereas the Proper chants are unique—there is, for example, but a single Gregorian melody for “Resurrexi,” the Introit of Easter day—settings of Ordinary chants continued to be composed well into the 12th century and beyond. In fact, most of them seem to belong to later compositional layers. Though some melodies for the Ordinary chants are represented in large numbers of sources, others enjoyed only a restricted geographical distribution.
The three most important musical elements of the Divine Office are antiphons used in conjunction with the weekly chanting of the Psalter, responsories sung after readings from the Bible or the fathers of the church, and hymns. Although the antiphon repertoire is large (1,600 or more items), the number of model melodies to which the texts are set is much smaller, amounting to less than three dozen basic types.
Because of the large span of time during which Gregorian chant (in its broadest sense) was composed, stylistic generalities can claim only limited validity. One of the most readily perceived distinctions rests on the relationship between the text and the degree of melodic embellishment it receives. In the simplest style, syllabic chant, each syllable of text corresponds more or less to a single pitch. In neumatic style, most syllables receive melodic figures of two to six pitches. Melismatic style is the most elaborate of all: melodic decoration takes precedence over the declamation of the text. The degree of melodic elaboration depends to a certain extent on the genre: antiphons for ordinary weekdays are syllabic, while Graduals, Alleluias, and Offertory verses tend to melismatic style. The relationship between text and music need not remain exactly the same from phrase to phrase. Although prevailingly syllabic chants, which tend to be relatively short, do not contain melismatic passages, neumatic and melismatic chants frequently have recourse to syllabic style.
The chant was transmitted orally for many centuries. The earliest surviving books with the chant texts date from the 9th century. These have been collected and published by Dom Jean Hesbert under the title Antiphonale Missarum Sextuplex. They lack musical notation and indeed were never intended to contain it. The existence of such unnotated gradualia, as books of Mass chants came to be called, testifies to continued oral transmission of the melodies.
One of the characteristics of the Gregorian repertoire is the fidelity of its transmission across the regional types of musical notation in which it was written down. These notational signs, known as “neumes,” were created specifically for the purpose of ensuring accurate dissemination of the repertoire. All of the notational systems share the same basic principles despite their diverse graphic configurations. The earliest specimens of notation begin to appear sporadically from about the middle of the 9th century. Most of the regional notations are cursive: two or more pitches are joined to form a single graphic gesture. Some (Lorraine, Breton, Aquitanian) portray the melodic movement as a series of discrete dots. All of the early notations are adiastematic, that is, they do not transmit precise pitch levels but only short-range melodic direction involving two to five discrete pitches. Large and small intervals appear as identical shapes on the page. The podatus signifying a rising motion, or the clivis representing a descending motion, could indicate an interval as small as a minor second or as large as a fourth or fifth. The notation did not, moreover, permit the relationship between the last pitch of one neume and the first note of the succeeding neume to be determined.
Some notations incorporated nuances indicating longer rhythmic values and specially shaped “liquescent” neumes, reserved for combinations of consonants (gn, lm) or vowels (au, ui) that require special care in pronunciation. In addition, expressive nuances could be signified either by letters above the notation or by special neume symbols (quilisma, oriscus). Their exact manner of interpretation is subject to speculation, particularly since most of these special signs disappeared in many regions at an early date.
Certain regional notations began to dispose the notes on the page in a manner that reflected the relative size of the intervals separating them. The next step in the development of this “diastematic” notation saw the line that served as the point of reference become etched more deeply into the parchment. A pitch value, usually F or C, was assigned to it and indicated at the beginning of each line of music.
The better to distinguish the two lines, the lower (F) was drawn in red and the upper (C) in yellow or green. Aquitanian manuscripts employ cleffing other than C or F, and sometimes only a B-flat sign under a line is employed. One of the French regional notations, Norman, developed into “square” notation. Placed on a four-line staff drawn in either black or red, it became the standard chant notation of the Roman Catholic church and has continued in use for printed chant books up to the present time. The same notation was adapted for the earliest polyphonic music.
During this period originated the distinction between the new rhythmic polyphony, cantus mensuratus, and plainchant (cantus planus), sung in relatively equal note values. Chant was sometimes sung in proportional duration values and notated with symbols derived from the mensural polyphonic notation of the 13th century.
One of the important contributions of Frankish monastic musicians was the development of a music theory that sought to classify the new music that had replaced Gallican chant. This process took some time, and it was not until the middle of the 9th century that the first chant treatise, the Musica disciplina of Aurelian of Réôme, was written. Frankish music theory combined Byzantine concepts (a system of eight modes) and ancient Greek theory in an original synthesis. The result could hardly claim to be more than an approximate explanation of a repertoire created without reference to an explicit theoretical foundation.
At the beginning of the 11th century, there developed the concept of the hexachord, an ascending pitch set from C to A that could be duplicated on G and F (in the latter case with B-flat). By means of “mutation,” one could move from one hexachord to another and remain within a familiar configuration of steps and half-steps. Guido d’Arezzo (ca. 990–1050) assigned syllables (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la) to each of the steps of the hexachord as an aid to learning new or unknown chants.
It had long been realized that although chants customarily cadenced on one of four finals (D, E, F, G) some chants moved almost exclusively in the tonal space above the final, and others descended frequently beneath it and used fewer notes above the final. The tonal space was delimited by eight modal scales, four of which were “authentic,” corresponding to the first category, and the remaining four were “plagal,” corresponding to the second. In the fully elaborated system, each scale was composed of a species of fifth and a species of fourth. In the case of the authentic scales, both were found above the final; the plagal scales had a fourth below and fifth above the final.
Though recourse to the manuscripts is essential for historical chant studies, the modern editions published by the monks of Solesmes provide a good introduction to the repertoire. The Liber usualis is a diverse collection of chants required for the Mass and for parts of the Office. It includes the complete Office of Matins for certain days as well as other miscellaneous items. The Graduale Romanum offers Mass chants for all days of the liturgical year including the weekdays of Lent, which are not included in the Liber usualis. Particularly useful for study are the Graduale Triplex and the Offertoriale Triplex, which contain the chants not only in square notation but also the adiastematic neumes of the manuscripts Laon, Bibl. mun. 239 (10th c.) and Einsiedln, Stiftsbibliothek 121 (11th c.) or Saint-Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 358 (9th c.), written above and below the staff, respectively.
Offertoriale Triplex cum versiculis. Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1985.
Apel, Willi. Gregorian Chant. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1958.
Bryden, John R., and David G.Hughes. An Index of Gregorian Chant. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Crocker, Richard, and David Hiley, eds. The New Oxford History of Music. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, Vol. 2: The Early Middle Ages to 1300.
Hiley, David. Western Plainchant: A Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Hoppin, Richard H. Medieval Music. New York: Norton, 1978.
Pothier, Joseph. Les mélodies grégoriennes d’après la tradition. Tournai: Desclée, 1880.
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signifying a rising motion, or the clivis 
representing a descending motion, could indicate an interval as small as a minor second or as large as a fourth or fifth. The notation did not, moreover, permit the relationship between the last pitch of one neume and the first note of the succeeding neume to be determined.
