The classic procedure consists of singing first the liturgical piece until the end of the first vocalization that later is resumed superposing a syllable for note. This procedure is classic for us since it is that of Sankt Gallen, but there are others that are at least equally ancient. The tropes of the kyrie and of the Gradual consist often of a new musical and verbal phrase exposed before the liturgical text. Now then, the tropes of the kyrie are very previous to the letter of Nockera. The tropes are in most of the pieces of the Mass and of the Office. The most widespread are those of the ordinary of the mass, Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. Almost always in prose, they are extended between the invocations and are quite brief. If they reach a certain dimension, they are in poem form. In the night office, it is Benedicamus Domino the one that receives a trope and adopts the form of a brief strophic Hymn. For the Mass, the sequences are limited to the vocalization of the Hallelujah. In the offices they are reserved to the responsories that finish the nocturnes, third, sixth and ninth between the secular ones, and are shorter than that of the Mass. His composition changes. The absolute constant is the division of the text in equal strophes, two by two, exactly as if it was a question of alternating two choirs. The melody is equally repeated in two strophes and it changes at the same time as the form of these. This alternation does not always begin in the same beginning of the poem.

There is often a first odd strophe that uses the same form of Hallelujah, dividing it in necessary case, the first half of the word before and the second half after the first verse. Initially, the strophes were assonate, generally in "a" , but also in "e". Later the rhyme appears and the poems take an affected and even decadent verbal form which has come until our days.

HOW TO LISTEN GREGORIAN CHANT

There is known the debt contracted with the monastic foundation of Solesmes where, while the Gregorian papers are guarded like in a museum of great wealth, they continue the systematical studies and the alive singing of the tradition resounds every day, as in Silos. This brief excursus has introduced us, at least partly, in the plurisecular Gregorian Chant vicissitudes. Nevertheless the essential of his characteristics has not been mentioned yet: we must attract the attention on the musicological connotations and especially on the ritual identity of what sprouts his real aesthetic and spiritual originality, and for this motive to associate both perspectives to treat them together. The Gregorian chant is not a singing for the liturgy, but the same sung liturgy. Everything constitutes it, his sonorous substance, rhythmic movement, drawing of intervals, modal flavor, constructive skill in consideration of the balance of phrasing or of the expansion of the forms, corresponds to the prayer and to the service of the ritual specific moment in whose interior text and gesture are placed. Out of such a hermeneutic horizon the speeches on the Gregorian Chant, be of subtlety technical nature or eaten away of rhetoric or of pious fantasy, they prove to be incomplete or affectedly pious. But the own experience of audition, beyond a horizon that does not consider in context all of the elements nor even value the whole weight of the relation singing-prayer, would turn out to be slightly pertinent, for not saying deceitful.

Gregorian Chant is the model of purely vocal singing and nobody should think about an archaism, about poverty or about pauperism, but about a project that supports a concrete spirituality well defined by the Church fathers. The organum par excellence is the man, the person made with a heart, a mind and a voice. The personal communication between the divine and the human thing happens across the wealth of the naked gift of himself. Then in coral interpretation, the faithful-liturgical people raise in a symbolic way and update existentially the reciprocal one to get lost and to meet again, as a gift of charity and sign of unit, taken off of tinsels.

Gregorian Chant is articulated as word-melodic flow doing without metric organizations or measuring rigor, which means the opposite of magnificent melody in which the text might turn into a "pretext". The intervalic movement, so much in case of using one or few notes for syllable (syllabic or little adorned style), or in that of the melismatic expansion, is always inspired in the alive word, in his being born and in his becoming exhausted, happening for the intensity of a tonic or pathetic accent. And the rhythmic movement firstly at level of semantic units and later in the combinatorial game in coherent sequences of clauses and phrases more articulated every time, produces the version of an equally attentive "reading" to fragments, segments and sequences, calibrated and offered with studied calculation. Here it honors the plenitude of the "given word", so much more from the moment that a part of the messages are believed and received in the faith as a divine and rewatching Word. The Bible is the essential literary source of Gregorian Chant. The statute of the oral, typical communication for the sacred books, continues prevailing, though departing from freer ancient hymnodies it has come near to the sonorous careful formalization of the texts; and for it the contexts, the rituals are also determinant. The sonorous poetry of Gregorian Chant reaches his maximum expressiveness when he agrees with all the codes of ritual communication, since it tries to print in the man who listens (and in God who is invoked, if it was possible) the stigmas of an affectionate dialogue.

An element of the Gregorian Chant identity is also his modal flavor. His melodies are not structured following the rules of what presides the harmony and the major or minor scales. The orthodoxy of the tonal system has accustomed us only to two modes affirmed from the XVIIth century and socialized later in the European culture. But the liturgical chant forms every step as a mode, elementary or developed, that is to say, as an individuality internally provided from own and characteristic relations to intervals, on everything in reason of the position of the semitone. Gradually, during the Carolingian renaissance already mentioned previously, there took place a learned "systematon" (inspired by Greek models) and functional for its simple linkage between fragments of chant (antiphons) and psalmodies. The Antiphonaries were born as classifying compilations of all the melodies inside a scheme of eight modes, named Octoechos. The new system was based on four so called "Authentic" modes and another four called "Plagals" owing to the development of the sounds in the modal scale low region. The melodic balance of the fragments reflected on studied tension between the low (final) notes that are D, E, F, G or his transpositions, and a recitative line (which might be compared to "dominant" ), though not always it was corresponding to the fifth grade. Such a theoretical desegregation ended up by sending to the values that the ancient people were perceiving and loving: values of ethical nature, identified in the Hellenic music (it was considered that the ethos of the modes was influencing the human behaviors) and especially of very important symbolic nature for the celebration. The modal election gives colors to the piece, awards a kind of ceremonial habit, associates a peculiar melodic stamp with a concrete behavior of prayer or with a certain revelation message. The ritual repetition plays with the multiple communicative variants of which it uses; the travel between the significant and the meaning is simplified and becomes univocal and sure.

At present, nevertheless, far from a type of knowledge and of liturgical experience, the modes provoke rather the fascination of unusual or exotic ambience: what "gave the atmosphere" is in danger of being perceived as something that it "alters" though he continues being delightfull and agreeable.

Another aspect that awards a great value to Gregorian chant is his variety and wealth of musical forms, derived so much from certain coral behaviors induced by the rites, as of real dimensions of the prayer, that preserves in his base a truly anthropologic value.

That listener who, lacking in liturgical initiation and in personal experience of authentic celebration, with all his playful but demanding determination, is capable of catching the Gregorian chant not only from his exterior but from his most intimate expression, to turn out to be touched of reading it in a flat way, with the consequent risk of perceiving (though without confessing) the "monotony" of his melody. Come to this moment and already up to a point it is necessary to say that in the same repertoire there exists an "excess of music" that has affected objectively the peculiarity of some oratorical attitudes, reduced the forms and planned the functions; nevertheless, the subjective appropriation can rescue this information.

It is not enough the simple audition, and much less the audition of descontextualized "interpretations". The liturgical chants are authentic if they are perceived and experienced by a person who celebrates —initial fragments—, who is glad —hallelujah—, who arouses and applauds —acclamations—, who listens as a disciple —lessons—, who wails like afflicted —lamentations—, who asks as a beggar —litanies—, who sighs or wants to channel his way "towards another place" —processional—, who ponders the God's Word —responsories—, who eats hungry the Word —psalmody—... All this remains fitted inside an informed coral drama even when different ministerial contributions take part in.

Some time ago, a friend was asking to me on the occasion of the world success that obtained the CD of the monks' Choir of Santo Domingo of Silos: "Do you believe that this repertoire serves to increase the grade of culture between the people or is only an instrument to sell more discs?". The response was evident: Gregorian Chant does "culture"; thanks to him there is a series of persons who know a "culture" different from his culture, or at least it is perceived hereby. Only who seeks and manages to catch his real identity, at least with his study and audition, will be able to obtain the most valuable aesthetic bounty. Only who practices it as a kind of "coloquy-dialogue" with God will be able even to obtain an ecstatic experience.