Old Hispanic Chant and the Early History of Plainsong

Abstract

Given the fragmentary evidence about the emergence of Western plainsong, scholars have not reached a consensus about how early liturgical chant was transformed into fully formed Medieval repertories. Proposed explanations have centered on the Roman liturgy and its two chant dialects, Gregorian and Old Roman. The Old Hispanic (or Mozarabic) chant can yield new insights into how and why the creators of early repertories selected and altered biblical texts, set them to specific kinds of music, and assigned them to festivals. I explore these questions from the perspective of the Old Hispanic sacrificia, or offertory chants. Specific traditions of Iberian biblical exegesis were central to the meaning and formation of these chants, guiding their compilers’ choice and alteration of biblical sources. Their textual characteristics and liturgical structure call for a reassessment of the theories that have been proposed about the origins of Roman chant. Although the sacrificia exhibit ample signs of liturgical planning, such as thematically proper chants with unique liturgical assignments, the processes that produced this repertory were both less linear and more varied than those envisaged for Roman chant. Finally, the sacrificia shed new light on the relationship between words and music in pre-Carolingian chant, showing that the cantors shaped the melodies according to textual syntax and meaning.