(from Lat. cento: ‘patchwork’).
Composition by the synthesis of pre-existing musical units. The term is modern, borrowed from poetry by Ferretti in 1934, and has been applied mainly to Gregorian and other chant. Some later studies have sought to expose weaknesses in the concept it represents.
Since the 19th century scholars have recognized the role played in some music by traditional aptness rather than originality; the notion of centonization has gradually grown out of this recognition. Gevaert (1881) wrote of ‘prototype melodies’ and ‘melodic schemes’ (type mélodique, schéma mélodique) which he claimed musicians in ancient Greece used to build up compositions (see Nome), as did composers of Latin chant, and musicians in ancient and modern India. These ideas were developed by Peter Wagner (1921), who described the ‘wandering melismas’ of Gregorian chant: certain melodic formulae that recurred in different contexts in some of the oldest chants of the repertory, such as graduals. He attributed an archaic oriental origin to this formulaic procedure and, by contrast, saw a Latin ‘drive towards order and clarity’ in the ‘freely composed’ melodic repetition structure of the alleluias, in which formulaic structure scarcely occurs (Wagner, 417). He categorized the recurrent melismas in Gregorian graduals of the 2nd mode, and Frere similarly studied responsories of the 2nd mode.
In 1934 Ferretti published a systematic attempt to comprehend this formulaic method of composition, together with other features of the chant, in a full aesthetic of Gregorian plainchant. He used the word ‘cento’ for the first time to describe melodies in which formulaic procedures could be observed: chants were classified in three groups, centos, original melodies and prototype melodies (i.e. complete melodies adapted to new texts). Ferretti’s concept of centonization has been immensely influential and has even been used in the construction of new chants for the Latin church.
Scholars in other areas subsequently found the concept of centonization useful. Formulaic construction is recognized even more explicitly in medieval Byzantine chant than in Latin chant (see Byzantine chant, §7). Schiødt has suggested a rigorous application of Ferretti’s principle to the Byzantine repertory. Formulaic construction also occurs in Russian chant (see Russian and Slavonic church music, §2) and in the oriental Christian chant repertories such as Ethiopian chant, where individual melodic cells are notated with single symbols as in ekphonetic notation. Some of these repertories display formulaic features arising from a concept of Mode as a collection of traditionally apt melodic procedures.
Throughout the period of the use of the term ‘centonization’, writers have attempted to overcome what they saw as pejorative overtones attaching to it. Ferretti devoted a whole chapter to defending prototype melodies and centos against those who ‘denied authentic expressive value’ to them; Sachs similarly wrote that ‘the composer of cantillations, far from being a patcher, might better be compared to an ingenious gardener who arranges his two dozen of motley flowers in ever new bunches’ (p.85).
However valid the application of the term centonization to other branches of Christian chant, its use with respect to Gregorian chant has been criticized on the grounds that there is at best an imperfect analogy between the original literary phenomenon and chants that employ formulaic melodies (see Stäblein; Treitler, 1975; Hiley). A ‘cento’ was in the first instance a garment sewn together from diverse pieces of cloth; and a literary cento a poem patched together with lines from a variety of other works or from different places within the same work. A formulaic chant, however, is a more organically unified creation. Some formulaic chants, for example, those of the Alleluia, Dies sanctificatus type, simply adapt an entire model melody to new texts. Most of them, however, such as the mode 2 graduals or mode 8 tracts, do not follow a model so strictly, but rather accommodate the different texts of each chant by a free reworking of new material together with a fund of common formulae (frequently maintaining the latter in the same order). In each case there is no juxtaposition of heterogeneous musical bits and pieces but an integral melody, one, moreover, that is homogeneous as to modal substance and liturgical destination. At the same time individual formulae can cross modal and genre boundaries (Wagner’s ‘wandering melismas’), but these, too, are so musically integrated into their new compositional destinations that they appear to be less the property of a particular mode or liturgical genre than part of a common Gregorian musical language.
For categories of composition constructed from pre-existing units, to which the term ‘centonate’ has not generally been applied, see Fricassée; Pasticcio; Potpourri; and Quodlibet. See also Composition.
MGG1 (‘Gradual’; B. Stäblein)
F.-A. Gevaert: Histoire et théorie de la musique de l’antiquité (Ghent,1875–81/R)
W.H. Frere: Antiphonale sarisburiense (London, 1901–25/R)
P. Wagner: Einführung in die gregorianischen Melodien, iii: Gregorianische Formenlehre: eine choralische Stilkunde (Leipzig,1921/R)
P. Ferretti: Estetica gregoriana ossia Trattato delle forme musicali del canto gregoriano, i (Rome, 1934/R; Fr. trans., 1938)
C. Sachs: The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York, 1943)
W. Apel: Gregorian Chant (Bloomington, IN, 1958, 2/1990)
A.C. Lord: The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA, 1960)
N. Schiødt: ‘A Computer-Aided Analysis of Thirty-Five Byzantine Hymns’, Studies in Eastern Chant, ii, ed. M. Velimirović (London,1971), 129–54
L. Treitler: ‘Homer and Gregory: the Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant’, MQ, lx (1974), 333–72
L. Treitler: ‘“Centonate” Chant: Übles Flickwerk or E pluribus unus?’, JAMS, xxviii (1975), 1–23
P.F. Cutter: ‘Oral Transmission of the Old-Roman Responsories?’, MQ, lxii (1976), 182–94
D. Hiley: Western Plainchant: a Handbook (Oxford, 1993), 74–5
GEOFFREY CHEW, JAMES W. McKINNON