Gregorian Chant - History

History

Gregorian chant was organized, codified, and notated mainly in the Frankish lands of western and central Europe during the 10th to 13th centuries, with later additions and redactions, but the texts and many of the melodies have antecedents going back several centuries earlier. Although popular belief credited Pope Gregory the Great with having personally invented Gregorian chant (in much the same way that a biblical prophet would transmit a divinely received message), scholars now believe that the chant bearing his name arose from a later Carolingian synthesis of Roman and Gallican chant.

During the following centuries, the chant tradition remained at the heart of Church music and served as the dominant platform for new performance and compositional practices. Newly composed music on new texts was first introduced within the context of existing plainchant. The late medieval style known as organum, where one or more voices have been added to a plainchant (acting as a cantus firmus) to form a new composition, marked the birth of polyphony in Western music. The Parisian composers Léonin and Pérotin, chief exponents of the Notre Dame school of the late 12th century, continued to end their organum compositions with passages of monophonic chant, so that continuity with the older tradition remained explicit. Although it had mostly fallen into disuse after the Baroque period, Gregorian chant experienced a revival in the 19th century in the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Anglican Communion.