I just bought a cd of old roman chant off of itunes and I love it. It’s like a combo of byzantine and gregorian chant. I can understand it better then gregorian because often only one person is chanting the words. It also has that thing where people hold a single note in the background throughout. Is this ever used in Mass?
Now that’s something that many people (even a number of Traditionalists) do not know of: Old Roman chant.
Old Roman chant is, by definition, the liturgical plainchant repertory formerly performed in Rome, closely related to but distinct from Gregorian chant, which seems to have gradually supplanted it between the 11th century and the 13th century.
What we know of the chant comes primarily from a small number of sources, including three graduals and two antiphoners from between 1071 and 1250. These are considerably later than many notated sources from other chant traditions, but scholars who studied them noticed something different. A cursory look shows that they are Roman chants, but they have noticeable differences from what is now considered the official chant of the Roman Church: what we know of as ‘Gregorian’ Chant - mostly in ornamentation and surface detail. Skips, even of thirds, are much less common in Old Roman chants than Gregorian. Gregorian chants often have a pentatonic structure, reinforced by their skips, while Old Roman chants are simpler in structure but more ornate, with more individual notes. Old Roman chants have intricate melodic motion within a narrow ambitus, with small repeating melodic motifs, which are common in Italian chant traditions such as Ambrosian and Beneventan chant. Old Roman chants are often highly melismatic, with melismas blending into one another and obscuring the underlying melodic structure.
There are several theories concerning the origins of Gregorian and Old Roman chant, but one prominent hypothesis posits that both chant traditions derive from a common Roman ancestor in use circa 750 AD. In order to consolidate ecclesiastical power and strengthen their political ties to the power of the Roman church, the Franks, especially under the Carolingian rulers Pepin and Charlemagne, brought this older Roman chant north, along with their adoption of the Roman liturgy. There it was subsequently modified, influenced by local styles and Gallican chant traditions, and categorized into the system of eight modes. This Carolingian, or Frankish-Roman, chant, became known as “Gregorian.” In the meantime, the local chant used in Rome gradually evolved into the form in which it was eventually notated, just at the time that Gregorian was supplanting it in Rome.
Another theory suggests that what we now call “Old Roman” chant reflected the use in the city churches in Rome, as opposed to the chants used in the Vatican for papal ceremonies, and that it was the latter that was brought north and evolved into Gregorian chant. This would explain the discrepancies between early Gregorian chant and the local Roman chant which were noticed even during the Middle Ages. However, this remains a minority view.
In the case of other defunct chant traditions, such as the Gallican, Mozarabic, and Beneventan, it is conceivable that Roman pre-eminence in the West would have tended toward the supplanting of non-Roman liturgies and chant traditions. The supplanting of the local chant of Rome itself would seem to require some other explanation. Several factors influenced this. In the 10th century, virtually no musical manuscripts were being notated in Italy. A pattern developed wherein Roman Popes imported chant from the German Holy Roman Emperors during the 10th and 11th centuries. For example, the Credo was added to the Roman rite at the behest of the German emperor Henry II in 1014. The local musical traditions in Rome had already been showing some Gregorian influence, and eventually the Gregorian was taken to be the authentic, original chant of Rome, a misconception that continues to this day.
Regardless, there are at least five ‘tones’ which make up the basis of solo-chant. It is used during the canon of a Latin Mass, outside the ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, etc.).
