A NEW LOOK AT OLD ROMAN CHANT - II

Abstract

I. THE MUSIC: GALL-TO-GREG-TO-ROMFor archaeologists of plainchant - those who deal with the music before there are notational records - the focus has been on the repertories ROM-11 and GREG-8/10.Thanks to Susan Rankin and David Ganz for many improvements. Abbreviations for repertories: ROM = Old Roman; GREG = Gregorian; GALL = Gallican; MOZ = Old Hispanic or Mozarabic. Numerals indicate a century or range of centuries: GREG-8/10 = Gregorian recension, text witnesses of the late eighth century, as represented in R.-J. Hesbert, Antiphonale missarum sextuplex [hereafter AMS] (Brussels, 1935), with first musical witnesses of the tenth century, as in Graduale triplex, ed. M.-C. Billecocq and R. Fischer (Solesmes, 1979); ROM-8 = Old Roman states of the eighth century; ROM-9/11 = Old Roman states of the ninth through eleventh centuries, that of the eleventh century in Die Gesänge des altrömischen Graduale Vat. Lat. 5319, ed. B. Stäblein and M. Landwehr-Melnicki (Monumenta monodica medii aevi, 2; Kassel, 1970). Each represents a ‘Roman’ practice. ROM-11 appears in a handful of manuscripts from the region of Rome, dating from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries; the liturgical usage is Urban. GREG-8/10 appears in hundreds of manuscripts from all over Europe, with verbal texts reaching back to the late eighth century, and with neumatic notations to the late ninth. In liturgical and textual respects GREG is a near twin of ROM, yet it has clear marks of formulation in the Frankish north. In musical respects, what is most significant about the repertories is that they share certain amounts of modal-melodic substance, yet they differ markedly as to process, style and detail. It has been a major challenge to define those relationships and determine what they mean about earlier musical developments.D. Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford, 1993) summarises earlier positions (pp. 561-2); recent book-length contributions include P. Bernard, Du chant romain au chant grégorien (Paris, 1996); M. Haas, Mündliche Überlieferung und altrömische Choral (Bern, 1997); T. Karp, Aspects of Orality and Formularity in Gregorian Chant (Evanston, 1998); J. W. McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley, 2000).