Early Chant Research Articles

Tradition and transmission in early chant

Tradition and transmission in early chant

Hildegard, Hermannus, and Late Chant Style

The music of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) has often been described as standing outside medieval chant traditions. This article argues that although many features of her music deviate from early chant, her repertoire conforms instead in remarkable ways with a late chant style, which appeared first in the eleventh century. Detailed analysis and comparison of the music (and theory) of Hermannus Contractus (1013-1054) with Hildegard's demonstrates a shared emphasis on Hermannus's modal nodes of final, fifth, and octave. Further analyses of antiphons from the later Middle Ages for Saints Hubert and Roch, as found in the Salzinnes Antiphonal, confirm that this musical style prevailed for several centuries. A contextualization of Hildegard's musical output makes it clear that she was not as isolated musically (or as musically untutored) as generally thought, but rather immersed in the musical traditions of her day. A historiographical overview reveals that nineteenth-century scholars were already aware of these similarities, in contrast to scholarship of the last thirty years, which has focused on Hildegard's originality.

New evidence of the Old Beneventan chant

The material presented here summarizes information that has come to light in the last ten years regarding the repertory and practice of the Beneventan chant of southern Italy. The information itself is provided in tabular form; the commentary that precedes it gives some brief background and points out a few interesting details. The Beneventan chant is one of those varieties of liturgical song that made the early medieval musical landscape so much more interesting than it later became, after the Carolingian urge to unity, combined with ecclesiastical reform, created a universal music that we now call Gregorian chant. Some of these early chant repertories have survived: the Ambrosian chant of Milan; the music of the Old Spanish liturgy. Others, like the Gallican chant, have disappeared.

Compositional Planning in the Roman Mass Proper

The members of the panel have already read a long version of my paper, and therefore I'll address this brief summary of it to you the audience, enabling you to have some idea of what it was that served as starting point for their own papers. The idea behind mine was not so much that my colleagues were to respond to its content as that they were invited to offer examples, from their own areas of expertise, of the liturgical phenomenon I designate by the term planning. By compositional planning I mean a pre-conceived idea that is carried out in the composition of a series of chants over a significant portion of the liturgical year. The best known example of this from the Roman liturgy is the use of numerically ordered psalm texts for the communions of Lent; the weekdays of Lent from Ash Wednesday to the Friday before Palm Sunday derive their texts, in sequence, from Psalms 1 through 26. In my paper I described my experiences in searching out other such examples within my own area of study, the Roman Mass Proper, and I expressed the hope that the panelists would find further instances of the same kind in other liturgical repertories, whether from Mass or Office, or from eastern or western rites. My interest in liturgical compositional planning came about by accident, during a seminar I conducted in the fall of 1989 at Chapel Hill. I had been much impressed by reports of a seminar given by David Hughes at Harvard in which two alleluias an earlier one, Dies sanctificatus, and a later one, Non vos relinquam were both transcibed from more than a hundred manuscripts. The result was that the melody of the earlier chant showed itself to be remarkably stable from manuscript to manuscript, but that the later one displayed much variation. Thus, to oversimplify: early chants are melodi-

Antoine Chavasse and the dating of early chant

Chant scholars who attempt to deal with their subject in the pre-Carolingian period will sooner or later come up against the formidable oeuvre of Antoine Chavasse, the eminent Strasbourg scholar who dominates the field of Roman liturgical history from the sixth to the eighth centuries. A knowledge of the development of the church year is crucial to speculation on the chronology of early chant, and Chavasse has written extensively on every phase of the subject – on Lent especially, but also on Paschaltide, Advent, and the Sundays after Christmas and Pentecost. While he has not neglected the sanctorale, his emphasis has always been on the more demanding area of the temporale. There are other scholars who have contributed much to the field, but none could be considered even a close second in either the scope of their contribution or its influence: frequently one finds other liturgical scholars accepting without question some of Chavasse's most far-reaching conclusions as premises to their own work.

Early Chant

Early Chant