A term conventionally applied to the central branch of Western Plainchant. Though not entirely appropriate, it has for practical reasons continued in use. Gregorian chant originated as a reworking of Roman ecclesiastical song by Frankish cantors during the Carolingian period; it came to be sung almost universally in medieval western and central Europe, with the diocese of Milan the sole significant exception. The pivotal event in its history was the visit of Pope Stephen II (752–7) to King Pippin III (751–68) in 754. Pope Stephen, together with a considerable retinue of Roman clergy, including, presumably, the Schola Cantorum, remained for several months at St Denis and other Carolingian centres. King Pippin is reported to have ordered the imposition of the cantus romanus at the time and to have called for the suppression of the indigenous Gallican liturgy. Subsequently Pippin's son Charlemagne (768–814) issued numerous edicts endorsing his father's policy.
The association of the chant with the name of Gregory took place during this earlier period of Frankish assimilation of the Roman chant. The earliest Frankish chant books – unnotated libelli with the texts of the Mass chants copied from lost Roman exemplars – have a short preface beginning with the words ‘Gregorius presul composuit hunc libellum musicae artis’. There is reason to believe that the Gregory the Romans had in mind when writing these words was the commanding 8th-century figure of Pope Gregory II (715–31), but the Franks assumed that the preface referred to Pope Gregory I (590–604), that is Gregory the Great. They had good reason to make this assumption because the earlier Gregory was a special favourite of the English (he was remembered with gratitude for sending St Augustine of Canterbury to convert them), and English scholars like Alcuin of York dominated the Carolingian court circle. It was Gregory I, then, who came to be permanently associated with Western ecclesiastical chant.
The assimilation of the Roman chant by the Franks was no small task: while the texts and their liturgical framework appear to have been absorbed virtually intact, there is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that the melodies – which unlike the texts were transmitted orally – were altered in the process. Scholars differ widely, however, as to the nature and the extent of the alteration. They differ also on how much the Frankish chant itself might have changed in the century between its initial assimilation and its appearance in the earliest preserved notated manuscripts of about 900. One view has it that the chant was reconstructed annually in a quasi-improvisatory manner until finally fixed in notation (see Hucke; and van der Werf); another holds that it was maintained for the entire century with substantially intact melodies (Hughes); and a third, while agreeing with the latter view, contends that such melodic stability required the support of notated manuscripts, now lost, that existed already in the time of Charlemagne (Levy).
In any event, the so-called Gregorian chant that these manuscripts of about 900 preserve was successfully imposed, owing to a combination of political and ecclesiastical factors, upon virtually the entire Latin Church. Rome, however, was late to succumb; it maintained its own chant in isolation, transmitting it orally for more than three centuries after Stephen's journey to the north, and committing it finally to notation only in the later 11th century. The resultant chant dialect, which is commonly calledOld Roman chant, has substantially the same texts and liturgical framework as the chants of the Gregorian branch, but its melodies, while essentially related to their Gregorian counterparts, differ greatly from them in surface elaboration and tonal focus.
Consideration of the momentous issues raised by the relationship of these two chant dialects has caused the conventional names for each to be called into question. It is hard to believe that Gregorian chant closely resembles the chant of Gregory's time, just as it is hard to believe that Old Roman chant is truly ‘old’ when it was subject to the vagaries of oral transmission for several centuries before its 11th-century redaction. Some scholars have proposed alternative terms for the two, for example ‘Frankish-Roman’ for Gregorian and ‘Urban-Roman’ for Old Roman. Such terms, however, only lessen the degree of historical inappropriateness without eliminating it altogether, and many scholars, while fully aware of the inadequacies of the standard terms, continue to use them for reasons of presentational convenience.
R.-J. Hesbert: Antiphonale missarum sextuplex (Brussels, 1935/R)
W. Apel: Gregorian Chant (Bloomington, IN, 1958, 2/1990)
B. Stäblein: ‘“Gregorius Praesul”: der Prolog zum römischen Antiphonale’, Musik und Verlag: Karl Vötterle zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. R. Baum and W. Rehm (Kassel, 1968), 537–61
B. Stäblein: Die Gesänge des altrömischen Graduale Vat. lat. 5319, MMMA, ii (1970)
L. Treitler: ‘Homer and Gregory: the Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant’, MQ, lx (1974), 333–72
H. Hucke: ‘Toward a New Historical View of Gregorian Chant’, JAMS, xxxiii (1980), 411–87
H. van der Werf: The Emergence of Gregorian Chant (Rochester, NY, 1983)
D. Hughes: ‘Evidence for the Traditional View of the Transmission of Gregorian Chant’, JAMS, xl (1987), 377–404
K. Levy: ‘Charlemagne's Archetype of Gregorian Chant’, JAMS, xl (1987), 1–30
J. McKinnon: ‘The Emergence of Gregorian Chant in the Carolingian Era’, Antiquity and the Middle Ages (London, 1990), 88–119
D. Hiley: Western Plainchant: a Handbook (Oxford, 1993)
JAMES W. McKINNON