Music Missing Melody, Harmony & Rhythm: Gregorian Chant

My wife, my 25-year-old daughter, and I once went to Italy for Christmas. Somewhere en route we decided that it would be appropriate to attend midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in the church of San Francesco in Assisi. I had grown up low-church Episcopalian. I had never attended a Roman Catholic service. I had all sorts of romantic notions about solemnity and devotion and the stark sound of Gregorian Chant (as one encounters it in costume films, like Olivier's Richard III).

That turned out to be a snare and a delusion. The setting was right -- the lower church with the dim lights and the Piero delta Francescas on the wall. Off in the distance some sort of ritual was going on with priests and acolytes and incense. But around us the congregation (if that's what it was) tramped about restlessly and chattered. My daughter and a handsome youth, neither of whom knew the other's language, struck up a flirtation, largely through the exchange of the names of rock bands. I guess there was some music because I recall they both burst into laughter at a priest who, they agreed, sounded like Santana, whoever he was.

At the apparent climax of the ceremony, the chief celebrant suddenly set on the altar one of those tin hamboilers you used to find at Woolworth's. Lifting the lid off, he produced from inside an ordinary baby doll, which he waved around by one leg. I assume this symbolized the miraculous birth, but the crowd showed no reaction. We left.

If you want the sort of thing I was seeking, you’ll do much better with this record. No thundering herd. No posturing priests. Just music against a background of utter silence.

Gregorian Chant takes its name from Pope Gregory I, called "The Great." It was not the only music of early Christianity -­ one thinks of Ambrosian and Mozarabic and Byzantine chant off the top of one's head -- nor probably the earliest. Pope Gregory almost certainly did not compose it, as legend once had it. He may have had something to do with its codification in his own day (ca. 540-604 A.D.), but much of what has come down to us was written long afterward.

If we take as factual the statement by the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, a slightly younger contemporary of Pope Gregory, that it was then impossible to write melodies down, it places Gregory's role in even greater doubt. Though so-called neumatic notation came along, notation remained only approximate until the formulation of the Guidonian system in the 11th century. By the Renaissance the tradition was very corrupt. Gregorian Chant, as we now know it, is the product of more than a century of recent musicology.

We contemporary westerners take it for granted that music is comprised of melody, harmony, rhythm. Chant tells us that until the 12th century it knew neither counterpoint nor harmony, and probably not rhythm, at least in the way that Johann Strauss, jazz bands, and rock groups have known it.

What we have on this record is the third of the three Christmas Masses, with the omission of the Creed. The performers are the heirs of the oldest performing group in Vienna, the Imperial Chapel, which goes back to the Emperor Maximilian I who reigned from 1493 to 1519 (Columbus to Luther roughly!). Taken over by the Ministry of Education after the last Hapsburg Emperor, Charles I, was deposed after World War I, it includes the famous Vienna Choirboys, and still sings Mass in the palace chapel on Sundays.