PLAIN
145
PLAIN
also participated to some extent in this melodic en-
richment. The Offertory verses were omitted in the
late ^Iiddle Ages, and now only the Offertory of the
requiem Mass shows one verse with a partial repeti-
tion of the antiphon.
After the time of St. Gregory musical composition suddenly began to flag. For the new feasts that were introduced, either existing chants were adopted or new texts were fitted with existing melodies. Only about twenty-four new melodies appear to have been com- posed in the seventh centurj' ; at least we cannot prove that they existed before the year (iOO. After the seventh century, composition of the class of chants we have discussed ceased completely, with the ex- ception of some Alleluias which did not gain general acceptance till the fifteenth century, when a new Alleluia was composed for the Visitation and some new chants for the Mass of the Holy Name (see "The Sarum Gradual and the Gregorian Antiphonale Missarum" by W. H. Frere, London, 1895, pp. 20, 30). It was different, however, with another class of ^^ass chants comprised under the name of "Ordinarium Missa;". Of the.se the Kyrie, Gloria, and Sanctus were in the Gregorian Liturgy, and are of very ancient origin. The .Agnus Dei appears to have been insti- tuted by Sergius I (687-701) and the Credo appears in the Roman Liturgy about the year SCO, but only to disappear again, until it was finally adopted for special occasions by Benedict VIII (1012-24). All these chants, however, were originally assigned, not to the schola, but to the clergy and people. Accord- ingly their melodies were very simple, as those of the Credo are still. Later on they were assigned to the choir, and then the singers began to compose more elaborate melodies. The chants now found in our books assigned to Ferias may be taken as the older forms.
Two new forms of Mass music were added in the ninth century, the Sequences and the Tropes or Proses. Both had their origin in St. Gall. Notker gave rise to the Sequences, which were originally meant to supply words for the Umgissimce melodicE sung on the final syllable of the Alleluia. These "very long melodies" do not seem to have been the melis- mata which we find in the Gregorian Chant, and which in St. Gall were not longer than elsewhere, but special melodies probably imported about that time from Greece (Wagner, op. cit., I, 222). Later on new melodies were invented for the Sequences. What Notker did for the Alleluia, his contemporary Tuotilo did for other chants of the Mass, especially the Kyrie, which by this time had got some elaborate melodies. The Kyrie melodies were, in the subsequent centuries, generally known by the initial words of the Tropes composed for them, and this practice has been adopted in the new Vatican edition of the "Kyriale". Se- quences and Tropes became soon the favourite forms of expression of medieval piety, and innumerable compositions of the kind are to be met with in the medieval service books, until the Missal of the Council of Trent reduced the Sequences to four (a fifth, the Stabat Mater, being added in 1727) and abolished the Tropes altogether. As regards the Office, Gevaert (La M61op(5e Antique) holds that one whole class of antiphons, namelj' those taken from the "Gesta Martyrum", belong to the seventh century. But he points out also that no new melodic type is found amongst them. So here again we find the ceasing of melodic invention after St. Gregory. The responses of the Office received many changes and additions after St. Gregory, especially in Gaul about the ninth century, when the old Roman method of repeating the whole response proper after the verses was replaced by a repetition of merely the second half of the re- spon.se. This Gallican method eventually found its way into the Roman use and is the common one now. But as the changes affected only the verses, which XII.— 10
have fixed formulae easily applied to different texts,
the musical question was not much touched.
St. Gregory compiled the Liturgy and the music for the local Roman use. He had no idea of extending it to the other Churches, but the authority of his name and of the Roman See, as well as the intrinsic value of the work itself, caused his Liturgy and chant to be adopted gradually by practically the whole Western Church. During his own lifetime they were intro- duced into England and from there, by the early missionaries, into Germany (Wagner, "Einfiihrung", II, p. 88). They conquered Gaul mainly through the efforts of Pepin and Charlemagne, and about the same time they began to make their way into Northern Italy, where the Milanese, or Ambrosian, Liturgy had a firm hold, and into Spain, although it took centuries before they became universal in these regions. While the schola founded by St. Gregory kept the tradition pure in Rome, they also sent out singers to foreign parts from time to time to check the tradition there, and copies of the authentic choir books kept in Rome helped to secure uniformity of the melodies. Thus it came about that the MS. in neumatic notation (see Nedm) from the ninth century forward, and those in staff notation from the eleventh to the fourteenth cen- tury, present a wonderful uniformity. Only a few slight changes seem to have been introduced. The most important of these was the change of the reciting note of the 3rd and 8th modes from b to c, which seems to have taken place in the ninth century. A few other slight changes are due to the notions of theorists during the ninth and following centuries.
These notions included two things; (1) the tone system, which comprised a double octave of natural tones, from A to a' with G added below, and allowing only one chromatic note, namelj' b flat instead of the second 6; and (2) eight modes theory. As some of the Gregorian melodies did not well fit in with this theo- retic system, exhibiting, if ranged according to the mode theory, other chromatic notes, such as e flat, / sharp, and a lower B flat, some theorists declared them to be wrong, and advocated their emendation. Fortu- nately the singers, and the scribes who noted the tradi- tional melodies in staff notation, did not all share this view. But the difficulties of expressing the melodies in the accepted tone system, with b flat as the only chromatic note, sometimes forced them to adopt curious expedients and slight changes. But as the scribes did not all resort to the same method, their differences enable us, as a rule, to restore the original version. Another slight change regards some melodic ornaments entailing tone steps smaller than a semi- tone. The older chant contained a good number of these, especially in the more elaborate melodies. In the staff notation, which was based essentially on a diatonic system, these ornamental notes could not be expressed, and, for the smafl step, either a semitone or a repetition of the same note had to be substituted. Simultaneously these non-diatonic intervals must have disappeared from the practical rendering, but the transition was so gradual that nobody seems to have been conscious of a change, for no writer alludes to it. Wagner (op. cit., II, passim), who holds that these ornaments are of Oriental origin though they formed a genuine part of the sixth-century melodies, sees in their disappearance the complete latinization of the plain chant.
A rather serious, though fortunately a singular, interference of theory with tradition is found in the form of the chant the Cistercians arranged for themselves in the twelfth century (Wagner, op. cit., II, p. 286). St. Bernard, who had been deputed to secure uniform books for the order, took as his adviser one Guido, Abbot of Cherlieu, a man of very strong theoretical views. One of the things to which he held firmly was the rule that the compass of a melody should not exceed the octave laid down for each mode
