Chapter 1 - Gregorian chant in the service of the church

Summary

Singing music in church in the Middle Ages; the function of Gregorian chant; levels of musical elaboration in the declamation of sacred texts; sacred sound for sacred space

Gregorian chant is the single-voice (‘monophonic’) music sung in the services of the Roman church. It was first recorded in writing, that is, with musical notation, in the ninth century. A great number of its Latin texts can be traced back for another century before that, but the melodies first become tangible, so to speak, in the ninth century. Gregorian chant is the earliest music preserved in such quantities – for we are talking about thousands of items. Much of the medieval corpus has dropped out of use, but it is still the music with the longest reconstructible history sung today. It is an inspiring thought that we can not only stand in an early medieval church like Charlemagne's Palatine chapel at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), built 792–805, but also perform the chant sung at the time the chapel was built or soon after. Inspiring in more ways than one: most obviously because something embedded deep in our history becomes audible. Admittedly, music does not survive in notation alone and there is, alas, no unbroken line of performance practice between then and now. When we sing Gregorian chant today we cannot ultimately be sure how close we are getting to the way it was done in Charlemagne's time. Nevertheless, the written link between then and now is longer than a millennium.