History 06

THE CLIMAX OF GREGORIAN CHANT

It is considered that Gregorian chant reached his climax in the course of the 8th century. Let's notice again the possibility of an oriental influence in this climax since several Popes of the 7th and 8th centuries were Greek. Gregorian chant was taken to Gallia from the year 753. The Pope Stephen II (dead in 757), threatened by the Lombards, was led by Crodegand of Metz in the presence of Pipino the Brief (whom dedicated again as king of France). In this regard there has been evoked the astonishment that Crodegand would have experienced assisting to the Roman ceremonies, but the employment of the time in this tragic year, allows to guess on the contrary that the Pope turned out to feel angry in Gallia by a ritual different from his own. From this epoch the chantres were sent from Gallia to Rome which gave in turn books to Gallia in order to promote a reform. Nevertheless there was a century of difficulties. The music not always was written and the tradition was getting lost.

The formation of a chantre lasted almost ten years and the repertoire so rapidly transmitted got altered. Besides, everything allows to guess that Rome did not always send the same books. They wanted to turn to the source but this source that for Ambrose had been the East, for Charlemagne was located in Rome.

This Chant that initially was named Roman and that very soon was called Gregorian was adopted slowly by the whole western Europe. The repertoire is completed with new pieces which music is modeled according to that of the ancient repertoire. This is what happens to the Deceased Office or to that of the Trinity, both of the 9th century.

The new pieces were so numerous that the need for writing them was considered a must. Till then the procedure was in the classic manner still usual in East. The singer teaches, the pupils listen and repeat and then they remember it with this thousand-year-old memory of the civilizations. Everything changed when the repertoire was more abundant and when was filled especially with composition of works not adapted already to the ancient schemes. To represent the melody on the parchment there were signs similar to the accents of the language: the neumes. Outlying signs in the manuscripts serve initially to note down precisely the new works that the singer is afraid to forget. This is the case of some works of the 9th century.

They went over with enough rapidity from these first works, all of them syllabic, to the notation of the classic repertoire. It was necessary to represent the vocalized groups of notes named neumes which were a very important element: the kanon of the melody recounted previously.

These melismas were translated badly by the outlying signs. They were grouped together and, as they sound, some of them turned out to be solidary. The name that was designating what was sung went on to be written and was named a neume. Nevertheless, at the end of the Xth century an increase of signs size will serve to designate the exact place where the sound is located. This procedure was demanding that some signs were separated again from others. The following stage was the musical stave. The invention attributed to Guido d'Arezzo (992-1050) spread rapidly and less than fifty years after Guido's death, about 1090, it is possible to find it in Italy and in the north of France. Guido d'Arezzo, a Benedictine Italian monk, was the renovator of the musical notation. He invented the stave of four lines and gave to each of the lines and spaces a sonorous significance (the one that prevails at present). He gave the name to the first six notes of the scale (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la —C, D, E, F, G, A—), being based on the first syllable of each of the verses of the hymn "Ut queant laxis" written by Paul the Deacon and which is sung on St John the Baptist feast: "ut queant laxis / resonare fibris / mira gestorum / famuli tuorum / solve polluti / labii reatum, Sancte Joannes" (Antiphonale Monasticum, 922, Liber Hymnarius, 382). He designated too the different octaves with capital and double letters. As the sound ut, for being closed, did not seem to lend so well to the exercises of solmization, the italian Bononcini (m. in 1673), changed it for do, a syllable more open and more sonorous (French people still use sometimes the ut). These innovations found great resistance between the friars of his Pomposa abbey; this fact forced him to move to Arezzo, where he was a teacher in the cathedral school. His reform, exposed in Micrologus (h. 1025) and Regulae rhythmicae treatises, finished up the previous system of neumes.

This improvement was containing a danger; it was not indifferent that notes expressed simultaneously were separated: the neume was dismembered. On the other hand, some sounds were described in the treatises as vague, slid, tremulous, etc. The neumes were realizing that but the stave only was admitting precise intervals of tone and semitone. The indeterminate notes were disappearing, since the manuscripts with lines did not bear them in mind. On the other hand it is necessary to state that, once established, the new type was scrupulously preserved. Only the external appearance of the manuscript is different: the notes are increasingly isolated. The melismas are illegible.