The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (44 page)

He recalled how in Milan the music of his mentor Saint Ambrose had affected him. “How did I weep, in Thy Hymns and Canticles.… voices flowed into mine ears, and the Truth distilled into my heart, whence the affections of my devotion overflowed, and tears ran down, and happy was I therein.”

Ambrose, the defender of the faith against the Arian heresies from Alexandria, had embellished the Milanese services on the Oriental model by prescribing music for the church festivals and introducing the antiphonal singing of the Psalms. So he created the Christian hymn. At least four of the hymns he wrote still survive and he became the legendary author of many more. The singing of hymns then became part of the Rule of Benedict for the canonical hours. The famous Te Deum, the Ambrosian Hymn of Praise, was said to have been composed responsively and spontaneously at the baptism of Augustine. When Ambrose began singing “Te Deum Laudamus,” Augustine replied, “Te Dominum confitemur,” and Ambrose continued with the words that became the hymn. In his cathedral in Milan, Bishop Ambrose introduced metrical hymns that were widely imitated
across the West, and his four-line stanzas of iambic dimeter came to be known as Ambrosiani.

The liturgy of the Catholic services, the Music of the Word, would become the main vehicle of the art of music in the West during the next centuries. Ambrose’s own form of the chant would retain its character and remain a Milanese liturgy into modern times. Saint Augustine’s treatise focused on how rhythm and meter were applied to “long and short noises, including syllables, spoken or sung.”

The Gregorian chant, fertile creation of the medieval church, would be the enduring monument in the West of monophonic music—that is, music that consists of a single line or melody without any accompaniment as part of the work. This first Christian music would bear the name of Saint Gregory the Great (c. 540–604; pope, 590–604), who deserves to be known as its compiler and promoter. The Christianizing of music, however, limited the independence of music, along with that of poetry, philosophy, and architecture.

Gregory himself was both the symbol and the agent of the new Europe-wide power of the Church and especially of the papacy. In the struggles between the Eastern and Western Roman empires and between Roman and barbarian, of which Boethius had been a victim, Gregory would play a leading role. Born in Rome in 540, only sixteen years after the death of Boethius, Gregory came of a wealthy family that had already produced other popes. He received a good classical education, was at home in Latin but did not know Greek. After the Lombard invasions he became
praefectus urbis
, chief administrator of Rome at the age of thirty-two.

When Gregory gave up the government of the turbulent city, he retreated to the peace and piety of the monastery. He made his own home on the Coelian hill into a Benedictine monastery of St. Andrew, and he gave away his large landed inheritance to establish a half-dozen other monasteries. In 579 Pelagius II sent him as papal nuncio to Constantinople, where for seven years he sought reinforcements against the barbarian Lombards. Soon after he returned to Rome, the plague carried away the pope. And in 590, according to the custom of the time, the Senate, clergy, and people of Rome chose him pope by acclamation. The unwilling Gregory still had to be confirmed by the emperor in Constantinople, to whom his name was sent. Committed to the monastic life, Gregory wrote to Emperor Maurice begging him not to confirm the election, but the letter was intercepted. Gregory fled the city but was captured after three days and had the papacy imposed on him. Still complaining of “the lowly height of external advancement,” and pleading to remain a monk, he finally “undertook the burden of the dignity with a sick heart,” and was “so stricken with sorrow that he could scarcely speak.”

Never was reluctant power exercised more effectively. Gregory became the architect of the medieval papacy, the people’s pope, and purifier of the Church. He seized the opportunity of the Lombard invasions and the impotence of the Byzantine exarch in Ravenna to extend the Church’s power over thought, culture, and morals. An effective administrator, he gave the Church a coherence that survived through the Middle Ages. The Napoleon of the papacy, master of Machiavellian politics, he used the turbulence of the Byzantine empire, the struggles between the Eastern and Western churches, and the influx of barbarian tribes to make the papacy supreme in Western Christendom. In 596 he sent forty monks to England with the Augustine (died 604) known as Apostle to the English, who became the first archbishop of Canterbury. Borrowing from the earlier Augustine, Gregory conferred on himself the title Servant of God’s Servants, and was canonized by popular acclaim. In the eighth century he was named one of the doctors of the Church, the last of the Latin fathers.

Just as the most enduring of the versatile Napoleon’s achievements was not his empire but the Napoleonic Code, so the most enduring achievement of Gregory the Great would be the Gregorian chant. And just as Napoleon was not the author of his code, so Gregory did not compose the Gregorian chants. He did write a vast work on Job and on other books of the Bible, and issued a widely used Pastoral Rule. But, as he cautioned Augustine of Canterbury, he was wary of an imposed uniformity. His concern was unity in Christian faith, and his musical scheme for the Roman service laid a foundation for the music of the West. Out of the Gregorian chant, a renaissance of the monophonic music inherited from the ancients, Western polyphony would grow.

Christianity had set the stage for Gregory’s leadership and the creation of this wonderfully fertile Music of the Word. The fear of graven images (Exodus 20:4,5) at first had excluded the pictorial arts from the churches, for the faithful remembered the wrath of Saint Paul on seeing statues in the Greek temples. “Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device” (Acts:17:16–17, 23–24, 29). But music was part of the Christian service from the beginning. Since the first Christians were Jews, they naturally borrowed and adapted the music of the Hebrew divine service. That service featured singing the Psalms of David in either responses or antiphony. New Christian congregations made psalm singing a part of their service that would survive in the Gregorian chants. But since the ancient Hebrews had no musical notation, their melodies for recitation were preserved only by memory. Their accents for cantillation became the “neumes,” the original notation for medieval Christian music. So the early
Church music combined the inheritances of Jewish temple music with ancient Greek musical theory.

“Hymns,” songs of praise of God, had often been mentioned in the Bible. Jesus and his companions had sung a hymn before going to Gethsemane. Bishop Ambrose of Milan was credited with introducing hymns into the service. At first these were new Latin poems, such as “Deus creator omnium,” which lived on as religious folk song. But the Council of Laodicea (
A.D
. 363), which established the canon of the Scriptures, decreed that in the Church service only the words of the Bible should be admitted. As a result, although Saint Augustine himself and others wrote Ambrosian hymns, these were not introduced in the divine service until the twelfth century. Centuries later the Reformation churches of France and Switzerland would purify their service, too, by excluding anything but the Bible.

The psalmody of the Christian churches naturally adapted the Jewish styles of antiphony (the dialogue of a double chorus) or responsorial (the response of a chorus to a solo singer). Augustine had tried to justify the wordless alleluia singing of the Jewish service because “one who is jubilant does not utter words but sounds of joy without words … a joy so excessive that he cannot find words for it.” Still, the tradition that prevailed was the singing of psalms. The fear of “wordless” music, the “lascivious” music against which Plato had warned and which had once misled Augustine himself, was so great that the early Church forbade instruments.

The human voice was something else. “Song awakens the soul to a glowing longing for what the song contains;” urged a fourth-century author, “song soothes the lusts of the flesh; it banishes wicked thoughts, aroused by invisible foes; it acts like dew to the soul, making it fertile for accomplishing good acts; it makes the pious warrior noble and strong in suffering terrible pain; it is a healing ointment for the wounds suffered in the battle of life … for ‘the Word of God’ if sung in emotion has the power to expel demons.” And Thomas Aquinas explained, “Instrumental music as well as singing is mentioned in the Old Testament, but the Church has accepted only singing on account of its ethical value: instruments were rejected because they have a bodily shape and keep the mind too busy, induce it even to carnal pleasure. Therefore their use is unwise, and consequently the Church refrains from musical instruments in order that by the praise of God the congregation may be distracted from concern with bodily matters.”

When Gregory set about reforming the Church, he made music one of his targets. Wary of wordless music, he set about establishing a uniform liturgy to inspire the faithful and unite them in the Word. Suspicious of secular learning, he saw music only as a devotional art. When he found the clergy wasting time cultivating their singing voices, he condemned in his
decree of 595 the “singing deacons” “who enrage God, while they delight the people with their accents.” To leave the higher clergy free to administer the sacraments, to visit the sick and distribute alms, he ordered deacons to sing only the Gospel. The musical part of the services would be performed by the lower clergy. To supply professional singers he fostered the Roman Schola Cantorum. By the ninth century there was a uniform body of chant in the Western Church, for which Gregory was given credit and which bore his name.

The chastening of Church music would produce some surprising consequences in the next centuries. While Gregory’s aim was not aesthetic, the chanted liturgy offered fantastic opportunities for creation and variation. These would be richly explored in the Mass, the sacred daily reenactment of the Last Supper and in the Divine Office, which consisted of eight daily prayer services for assigned hours of the day. Every day of the ecclesiastical year acquired its own Mass and Office, which varied according to two cycles, one celebrating the fixed feasts (Proper of the Saints) and another celebrating the movable feasts (Proper of the Time). And if there was a conflict between two designated festivals, a table indicated which took precedence. The chants repeated every day were set to many different melodies. For example, some 267 settings have been found for the Agnus Dei.

Then textual and musical accretions called “tropes” offered opportunity for personal or even whimsical embellishment of the Mass. While textual tropes served as a gloss interpreting the ancient text, musical tropes elaborated the music. But the reforming Council of Trent (1545–63) would cut out the tropes, which had long delighted the faithful.

We would make a great mistake, then, to think of the Gregorian chant (plainsong or plainchant) as monotonous or simply repetitive. More than eleven thousand tunes or texts of medieval chants survive in manuscript form, “graduals” for the Mass, and antiphonaries for the Office, along with notated missals and breviaries. While the Gregorian chants are monophonic music with a single melodic line, their words invited countless variations. Parts of the liturgy became chants in which each syllable was pronounced to a single musical note. Others became “neumatic” chants, with clusters of notes in series, sometimes as many as a dozen accompanying a single syllable. And then the subtly florid “melismatic” chants would set a single vowel to two hundred or more notes.

The misnamed “plainsong” has thus mystified students of music for a millennium. While the Gregorian chant in its afterlife has flourished as the authentic music of the Roman Church, its original character still remains in doubt. Not until the twentieth century did the Gregorian chant come
back into its own. The old melodies had been mutilated into a monotonous plainchant to facilitate organ accompaniment. In 1889 the scholarly Benedictine monks of Solesmes in France undertook to rediscover the medieval practice. Their product was numerous volumes of “Gregorian chants” in a free-flowing nonrhythmic style. By 1903 they had recaptured the Gregorian chant to the satisfaction of Pope Pius X, himself a scholar of musical history, who established their versions of the Gregorian melodies by his encyclical
motu proprio
. But the rhythms still remain a puzzle. Pius X’s purified Gregorian chant banned the “theatrical style” of recitation, forbade the use of instruments, replaced women by boys in the church choir, and restricted the use of the organ. A Vatican Edition provided an authorized corpus of plainchant, which would prevail in the modern Catholic world. Even a Pius X lacked the power to dam up musical creations, as he gave bishops some latitude to vary the music of the liturgy within his guidelines.

While music was preserved through the liturgy, and the Church had a near monopoly of literacy, the Church of course had no monopoly on music in the Middle Ages. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in southern France the troubadours, composers who performed their own works, were producing a rich music to accompany their singing of the first vernacular lyric poetry in a European tongue, in the Provençal language. Eleanor of Aquitaine brought this art to the north, where the trouvères flourished. About twenty-five hundred troubadour poems and many more of the trouvère songs survive, some with their music. These monophonic songs, though sung by men of all classes, were part of the ritual of courtly love. Their counterparts in Germany were the minnesinger (from
minne
, Middle Dutch for love) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries whose work was perpetuated by the meistersinger (members of city singing guilds) after the fourteenth century. Chivalry and courtly love produced thousands of love lyrics, which are echoed by Wagner in
Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde
, and
Parsifal
.