Chapter 3 - Tradition and innovation in medieval chant: from the ninth to the sixteenth century

Summary

This chapter explains how church musicians built upon the Roman-Frankish foundation, responding to the changing and expanding needs of the church in the high Middle Ages, and how the newly composed chant often reflected different stylistic concepts. Most writers on chant would prefer not to think of the new music as ‘Gregorian’ at all. Of the types of chant discussed below, the new Office music might be called ‘neo-Gregorian’, because at least the forms of antiphon and responsory are traditional, even if the melodies become increasingly untraditional. But sequences, tropes, the new Latin songs and the representational ceremonies (‘liturgical dramas’) are categorically un-Gregorian.

Adapting the model to suit present needs: local enhancement of the repertory, new types of chant

However successful the Franks may have been in adopting Roman liturgical practice and its chant, they still had to supplement it with a considerable amount of new material. They venerated a number of saints unknown to the Romans, and needed to find chants to sing on the corresponding holy days. Other new festival days came into the calendar, such as All Saints' Day (1 November) and Trinity Sunday (a week after Whitsunday). Then there were a number of special ceremonies, which the Franks had used of old and which they wanted to retain. The chants for these occasions, if by good fortune they have been preserved in readable notation, sometimes look different in style from ‘classical’ Gregorian.