CHAPTER

3

ROMAN LITURGY AND CHANT

Gregorian chant is one of the great treasures of Western civilization. Like Romanesque architecture, it stands as a memorial to religious faith in the Middle Ages, embodying the community spirit and artistic sensibility of the time. This body of chant includes some of the oldest and most beautiful melodies, and it served as the basis for much later music.

As beautiful as the chants are, they cannot be separated from their ceremonial context. We saw in Chapter 2 how Gregorian chant was codified and notated after centuries of development as an oral tradition and how it played a unifying role in the Western Church. In this chapter, we will relate chant to liturgy and see how each chant is shaped by its role, text, and manner of performance. We will also see how new chants and types of chant were added to the authorized liturgical chant during a wave of creativity around the margins of the repertory.