PLAIN
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PLAIN
Plain Chant. — By plain chant we understand the
church music of the early Middle Ages, before the ad-
vent of polyphony. Having grown up gradually in
the service of Christian worship, it remained the ex-
clusive music of the Church till the ninth century,
when polyphony made its first modest appearance.
For centuries again it held a place of honour, being,
on the one hand, cultivated side by side with the new
music, and serving, on the other hand, as the founda-
tion on which its rival was built. By the time vocal
polyphony reached its culminating point, in the six-
teenth century, plain chant had lost greatly in the
estimation of men, and it was more and more neg-
lected during the following centuries. But all along
the ChiU'ch officially looked upon it as her own music,
and as particularly suited for her services, and at last,
in our own days, a re\dval has come which seems
destined to restore plain chant to its ancient position
of glory. The name, cantus planits, was first used by
theorists of the twelfth or thirteenth century to dis-
tinguish the old music from the ymisica tnensurata or
mensurabilis, music using notes of different time v.alue
in strict, mathematical proportion, which began to be
developed about that time. The earliest name we
meet is cantilena romana (the Roman chant) , probably
used to designate one form of the chant having its
origin in Rome from others, such as the Ambrosian
chant (see Gregori.\n Chant). It is also commonly
called Gregorian chant, being attributed in some way
to St. Gregory I.
History. — Although there is not much known about the church music of the first three centuries, and although it is clear that the time of the presecu- tions was not favourable to a development of solemn Liturgy, there are plenty of allusions in the writmgs of contemporary authors to show that the early Chris- tians used to sing both in private and when assembled for public worship. We also know that they not only took their texts from the psalms and canticles of the Bible, but also composed new things. The latter were generally called hymns, whether they were in imita- tion of the Hebrew or of the classical Greek poetic forms. There seem to have been from the beginning, or at least very early, two forms of singing, the respon- sorial and the antiphonal. The responsorial was solo singing in which the congregation joined with a kind of refrain. The antiphonal consisted in the alterna- tion of two choirs. It is probable that even in this early period the two methods caused that differentia- tion in the style of musical composition which we ob- serve throughout the later history of plain chant, the choral compositions being of a simple kind, the solo compositions more elaborate, using a more extended compass of melodies and longer groups of notes on single syllables. One thing stands out very clearly in this period, namely, the exclusion of musical instru- ments from Christian worship. The main reason for this exclusion was perhaps the associations of musical instruments arising from their pagan use. A similar reason may have militated in the West, at least, against metrical hymns, for we learn that St. Ambrose was the first to introduce these into public worship in Western churches. In Rome they do not seem to have been admitted before the twelfth century. (See, how- ever, an article by Max Springer in "Gregorianische Rundschau", Graz, 1910, nos. 5 and 6.)
In the fourth century church music developed con- siderably, particularly in the monasteries of Syria and Egypt. Here there seems to have been introduced about this time what is now generally called antiphon, i. e., a short melodic composition sung in connexion with the antiphonal rendering of a psalm. This anti- phon, it seems, was repeated after every verse of the psalm, the two choir sides uniting in it. In the West- ern Church where formerly the responsorial method seems to have been used alone, the antiphonal method wa8 introduced by St. Ambrose. He first used it in
Milan in 386, and it was adopted soon afterwards in
nearly all the Western churches. Another importa-
tion from the Eastern to the Western Church in this
century was the Alleluia chant. This was a peculiar
kind of responsorial singing in which an Alleluia
formed the responsorium or refrain. This Alleluia,
which from the beginning appears to have been a long,
melismatic composition, was heard by St. Jerome in
Bethlehem, and at his instance was adopted in Rome
by Pope Damascus (36S-84). At first its use there
appears to have been confined to Easter Sunday, but
soon it was extended to the whole of Paschal time,
and eventually, by St. Gregory, to all the year except-
ing the period of Septuagesima.
In the fifth century antiphony was adopted for the Mass, some psalms being sung antiphonally at the beginning of the Mass, during the oblations, and dur- ing the distribution of Holy Communion. Thus all the types of the choral chants had been established and from that time forward there was a continuous development, which reached something like finality in the time of St. Gregory the Great. During this period of development some important changes took place. One of these was the shortening of the Gradual. This was originally a psalm sung responsorially . It had a place in the Mass from the very beginning. The alternation of readings from scripture with responso- rial singing is one of the fundamental features of the Liturgy. As we have the responses after the lessons of Matins, so we find the Gradual responses after the lessons of Mass, during the singing of which all sat down and listened. They were thus distinguished from those Mass chants that merely accompanied other functions. As the refrain was originally sung by the people, it must have been of a simple kind. But it appears that in the second half of the fifth century, or, at latest, in the first half of the sixth century, the re- frain was taken over by the schola, the body of trained singers. Hand in hand with this went a greater elaboration of the melody, both of the psalm verses and of the refrain itself, probably in imitation of the Alleluia.
This elaboration then brought about a shortening of the text, until, by the middle of the sixth century, we have only one verse left. There remained, how- ever, the repetition of the response proper after the verse. This repetition gradually ceased only from the twelfth century forward, until its omission was sanctioned generally for the Roman usage by the Missal of the Council of Trent. The repetition of the refrain is maintained in the Alleluia chant, except when a second Alleluia chant follows, from the Satur- day after Easter to the end of Paschal time. The Tract, which takes the place of the Alleluia chant during the period of Septuagesima, has presented some difficulty to liturgists. Prof. Wagner (Intro- duction to the Gregorian Melodies, i, 78, 86) holds that the name is a translation of the Greek term elptj.6s, which means a melodic type to be applied to several texts, and he thinks that the Tracts are really Graduals of the older form, before the melody was made more elaborate and the text shortened. The Tracts, then, would represent the form in which the Gradual verses were sung in the fourth and fifth cen- turies. Of the antiphonal Mass chants the Introit and Communion retained their form till the eighth century, when the psalm began to be shortened. Nowadays the Introit has only one verse, usually the first of the psalm, and the Doxology, after which the Antiphon is repeated. The Communion has lost psalm and repetition completely, only the requiem Mass preserving a trace of the original custom. But the OfTertory underwent a considerable change before St. Gregory; the psalm verses, instead of being sung antiphonally by the choir, were given over to the soloist and accordingly received rich melodic treat- ment like the Gradual verses. The antiphon itself
