[Intonation=Bar 1. Recitation=Bar 2. Mediation=Bar 3, Bar 4.
Recitation=Bar 5. Termination=Bar 6, Bar 7, Bar 8.]
Gregory arranged the mass in its present form, and prescribed a special introit for each psalm, and probably one for each division of the mass. The famous old anonymous hymns, the Te Deum, Magnificat, Benedictus, etc., had taken their place in the church service in its very earliest days; and the mass had gradually been formed by selection and arrangement of these. Another form which gradually grew up in the Church was the Sequence. This had its origin in a desire to allow the congregation more opportunity to take part in the musical service. In their oldest and purest form these sequences consisted of ornamental passages intoned on a single vowel,—as the final "a" of "jubila." These sequences illustrate in a striking manner that freedom from control of text which came so conspicuously into music in Gregory's time. This freedom, while it led to abuses of the church ritual, gave music a certain amount of independence as an art, and enabled it to develop more rapidly than it could have done had it been tied fast to the text. Nokter Balbulus, a monk of the famous convent of St. Gall, Switzerland, is said to have popularized the sequences in the ninth century by writing thirty-five special ones. Some of these are still used in the Roman Church. The convent of St. Gall, to which Nokter belonged, was a famous centre of musical culture in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. The writing of special words for sequences was followed by others than Nokter; and in the end these reduced themselves to these five well-known texts: Dies Iræ, Stabat Mater, Victimæ Paschali, Veni Sancte Spiritus, and Lauda Sion.
The Roman chant soon spread through Europe. The successor of Gregory was acknowledged by the Western nations as the Supreme Head of the united Church, and this, of course, tended to a general use of the same ritual. In 604 Roman singers were sent to England, and in 660 monks went to teach the Gregorian chant in Brittany. Paris had become the capital of France not long before that, and the Gallic service was now remodelled on that of Rome. The Roman ritual was introduced into Germany by Saint Boniface in 744, and it was probably made known at St. Gall about the same time. Charlemagne, in the eighth century, founded schools of music on Gregory's plan at Dijon, Cambray, Lyons, Orléans, and other French cities, and also at Regensburg, Würzburg, Mainz, and other German places.
The general introduction of the Gregorian chant established the melodic basis of modern music. It will be well for the reader to bear in mind that the three elementary constituents of music are melody, harmony, and rhythm. Melody is produced by the successive sounding of single tones of different pitch. Harmony is produced by the simultaneous sounding of single notes of different pitch. When those notes are united according to rule we call the result a chord. Rhythm is the regular recurrence of long and short beats. Now, if the reader has comprehended the account given of the early Roman chant, he will perceive that it embodied only one of the elements of music, namely, melody. There was no harmony, because everything was sung in one part. It was simply a plain chant; and when the organ first came into use to accompany it, the instrument played the same succession of single notes as the voices sang. This fact must be kept clearly in mind in order to understand the next steps in the development of modern music. In the beginning there was only melody; and that was like the earth before the creation, without form and void. There was no musical rhythm in either the Ambrosian chant, which followed the prosodial quantity of the words, nor in the Gregorian, which did not follow it. The text was prose; consequently it did not have a regular recurrence of long and short syllables, as poetry does, and therefore the music, following the text, could not have rhythm. All that existed in the beginning of the modern tone art was the raising and lowering of the voice through a certain number of intervals. How harmony and rhythm made their appearance in the early stages of the art, and what forms they took, must next be related.
[Chapter II]
Harmony, Notation, and Measure
The Organum of Hucbald—Use of combinations disagreeable to modern ears—Appearance of rhythm—Work of Franco, of Cologne—Establishment of Dual and Triple Measure—Introduction of notes to represent sounds of different duration.
IN the growth of modern music the second step was the introduction of harmony. The simultaneous sounding of notes of different pitch in combinations called chords is so essential a part of the music of today that even the uneducated mind has difficulty in conceiving a tune as wholly dissociated from the coloring influences of its harmony. Every schoolboy is accustomed to hearing melodies with what he calls a "bass" (an accompaniment founded on chords), and in the commonest music-hall songs the familiar harmonies are the results of centuries of experiment among the ecclesiastical fathers of modern music. It is difficult for us to understand that there was a time when harmony was unknown to musicians, but such is the case; and the first experiments resulted in the use of combinations which sound intolerable to our ears, while some of those which we regard as the most familiar and useful were deemed unbearable by some of the early authorities. For example, no modern chord can be formed without the third, i.e., the third whole note above the key-note. In the key of C that is E; in G it is B, thus:—