[58] Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, Jeffe, 2d ed., Leipzig, 1881.
[59] Vita S. Gregorii Magni, in Mabillon, Acta sanctorum ordinis benedicti, Paris, 1668.
[60] Les origines du chant liturgique de l’église latine.
[61] The Alleluja is not really a word but a sort of shrilling effect of great antiquity among the Hebrews and other people of the Orient. It was produced by choruses of women in triumphal processions and other joyous celebrations, and seems to have been about half way between a song and a cheer. The early Christians used it in songs of joy and praise, and perhaps sang it to take the place of the instrumental prelude of the psalms. ‘Laudes, hoc est alleluia canere, canticum est Hebræorum,’ says Isidore of Seville. (De off., I, 13.)
[62] See ‘History of Irish Music,’ W. H. Grattan Flood, Dublin, 1906. Notker was the author of the famous Antiphona de Morte, beginning Media vita in morte sumus (In the midst of life we are in death), which was quickly adopted as a funeral anthem throughout Europe. Miraculous effects were attributed to it, and its use was so much abused that the council of Cologne (1316) forbade anybody to sing it who was not specially authorized by a bishop.
[63] Here should be noted one of the ways in which the Christian theorists misapplied the system of the Greeks. In Chapter IV we have seen that the Greeks did not consider pitch as in any way related to the character or ethos of the modes. This ethos was determined solely by the arrangement of the steps in the scale. The Christian theorists, on the other hand, though they still recognized the variety of character obtained by varying the distribution of steps in the scale, evidently allotted to the different modes a different final or pitch, and thus pitch came to influence the character of the modes. The modes might, however, still be transposed and sung at any pitch.
[64] This dreaded interval was called by churchmen diabolus in musica, and as such studiously avoided.
CHAPTER VI
THE BEGINNINGS OF POLYPHONY
The third dimension in music—‘Antiphony’ and Polyphony; magadizing; organum and diaphony, parallel, oblique—Guido d’Arezzo and his reputed inventions; solmisation; progress of notation—Johannes Cotto and the Ad organum faciendum; contrary motion and the beginning of true polyphony—Measured music; mensural notation—Faux-bourdon, gymel; forms of mensural composition.