Gregorian Chant Primer

The land of Solesmes has long been dedicated to God, according to the Acts of the bishops of Le Mans. Saint Thuribus organized public worship in the Gallo-Roman villa de Solesmis in the fifth century. The property of the Church of Le Mans was held as a benefice for a vassal of Charlemagne's court by the beginning of the ninth century. Soon, Norman raids were to place the church and its surroundings into other hands of Raoul de Beaumont, Vicecount of Le Maine. At the time, the counts of Le Mans, in order to fortify their border against Anjou, installed Geoffroy, Raoul's own brother, as lord at Sablé.

Raoul gave ownership of Solesmes to Geoffroy, who donated it to the monks of la Couture
by a charter conjecturally dated October 12, 1010. It is from this date that today's monastery of Solesmes reckons its foundation.  Very little is known about the monastery during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  The peace and prosperity of the era allowed brother Guillaume Patry, to dam the river Sarthe and construct two windmills to supply power.

However, difficult times were ahead. Some time before 1365, a house on the Isle of Sablé was donated to the monks and soon served as a place of refuge.  In 1375, Solesmes experienced it’s first taste of the sufferings brought on by the interminable Hundred Years War. Fifty years later, the English occupied the countryside, burning and devastated the monastery and left the town a skeleton of its former self, desolate and barren. In 1491, and again in 1497, Jean de Nemous made considerable donations so that the monks could fulfill their various liturgical and devotional responsibilities. Among these duties were the daily offices and the King's Mass, established in 1408 by Louis II of Anjou, king of Sicily and Jerusalem.

Gregorian Chant is a musical repertory of chants used in the liturgical services of the Roman Church. The liturgical tradition that the Church has bestowed on us is vocal, monophonic music composed in Latin from sacred texts. This is why Gregorian chant has often been called the sung Bible. Combined with liturgy in this way, the goal of Gregorian melodies is to favor spiritual growth in all parishioners, reveal God’s gifts, and the understanding of the message of salvation.

Gregorian chant, as it is referred to today first appeared in the Roman repertory of the fifth and sixth centuries. Its development and composition was in the hands of a group of clergy specifically dedicated in service to the Roman basilicas, the schola cantorum. Gregorian chant also appears to have been aural traditions, transmitted by ear and committed to memory, like most of the world’s music of the time.

In the second half of the eighth century, with much political upheaval between the French kingdom of Pepin, Charlemagne, and the papacy, widened the Roman liturgy's field of acceptance. The French crown expected it to be used throughout the kingdom. It was at this time that the written records begin to first appear first in France, then all over the entire Roman Empire and throughout its realm. Despite graphical differences it’s standardization is clearly recorded a single line unbroken tradition.

Texts, words and musical notation were committed to writing in books, which become an official reference text. The general attraction of Roman chant was its modal structure, which was of great attraction to Gallican singers. However, it was viewed in an entirely different way. Gregorian chant was the first term used to describe this mixture of Roman and Gallican chant.  Written records at first served as memory prompts with artistic directions for correct interpretation and performance practice.  Musical tones were still instructed by ear and conveyed from memory.

However, with the increase of pitch indications in the manuscripts came an equivalent decrease in interpretive guidelines, and a decrease in the role of memory. Because of this, Gregorian chant fell into disuse by the end of the middle Ages: the manuscripts offer little more than a heavy and tiresome succession of square notes. The Renaissance era brought with it Gregorian chant's death. The melodies, which show the correct reading of the literary text by highlighting keywords and phrases, were corrected by official musicologists, the long melismatic lines, for example were reduced to a few notes each. In addition the words, literary texts which were the official texts of the Roman liturgy, which that constituted a lyrical catechism, were also officially corrected and were aligned with a precise reading of the Vulgate Bible. This garbled form continued for two hundred years and is generally known in England as plainsong.

Dom Prosper Guéranger a priest in 1833 of the diocese of Le Mans, assumed the task of restoring the Benedictine monastic life on the site of an old priory at Solesmes, after forty years of disuse due to the French Revolution: he seized upon the restitution of Gregorian chant with eagerness. He began by working on its implementation by enlisting the help of his monks by placing the task of restoring the authentic melodies, with respect to the primacy of the text in their hands: pronunciation, accentuation and phrasing, with a goal to guaranteeing its understandability, in services of prayer.

The thin flyspecks handwriting of the original manuscripts was impossible to read at the time. However, the invention of photography brought surprising benefits with it. As time went on an unparalleled collection of facsimiles of the principal manuscripts was collected at Solesmes and in the libraries of all Europe: the Paleography of Solesmes.

Gregorian chant might seem monotonous. Unquestionably it creates discomfit in our ears, which are accustomed to more harmonic music, but often less thoughtful. The Gregorian repertory is a multifaceted genre, which unites several centuries of musical history. It is in fact a plethora of surprising variety, which without explanation invokes enthusiasm, as well as the most delicate periphery of emotions.