Focus on Plainchant

With churches reopening for services many of us are looking to experience services via personal attendance rather than via streaming services such as Facebook. However, don't expect services near you to return to normal any time soon, and there will, sadly, be absolutely no choral or congregational singing for the foreseeable. Thus the best option currently is for an organist, priest and cantor to be present (the latter two roles may obviously be combined) with a focus on plainchant.

Plainchant, or plainsong is a type of early church music consisting of a single line (monophonic) of unaccompanied vocal melody in free rhythm, with no regular bar lengths. It has been present in Christian worship since its earliest days, possibly influenced by Judaism and certainly by the Greek modal system. It was initially the only type of music allowed in the Christian church. It was believed that music should make the listener receptive to spiritual thoughts and reflections, to achieve this the melody was kept pure, repetitive and unaccompanied.

Plainchant is usually either responsorial (where the cantor/soloist sings a series of verses, each one with a response from the congregation) or antiphonal (verses are sung alternately by soloist and choir, or choir and congregation). For now, I suspect most churches will adopt a cantor only approach. A key feature in plain chant is the use of the same melody for various texts. This is similar to ordinary psalms in which the same formula (the "psalm tone") is used for all the verses of a psalm, just as in a hymn or a folk song the same melody is used for the various verses.

Gregorian chant is a variety of plainsong named after Pope Gregory I (C6th AD). He compiled all known types of chants into one collection, named after him. This compilation was known as Gregorian Chant, which later became a term used to describe this variety of music in general. Gregorian chant originally developed around 750 AD from a synthesis of Roman and Gallican chants, and was commissioned by the Carolingian rulers in France, with standardisation only occurring around the C12th AD.

The Frankish Carolingian dynasty of the C7th-C8th AD exerted increasing power over the Roman church, in an interdependent relationship. Their support of plainchant contributed to the development of the core liturgy of the Roman Mass with plainchant included. Gregorian chant appeared in a remarkably uniform state across Europe within a short time. Charlemagne, once elevated to Holy Roman Emperor, aggressively spread Gregorian chant throughout his empire to consolidate both religious and secular power, requiring clergy to use it on pain of death. From English and German sources, Gregorian chant spread north to Scandinavia, Iceland and Finland. In 885, Pope Stephen V banned the Slavonic liturgy, leading to the ascendancy of Gregorian chant in Eastern Catholic lands including Poland, Moravia and Slovakia.

Early plainchant notation

Plainchant represents the first revival of musical notation after knowledge of the ancient Greek system was lost. Plainsong notation differs from the modern system in having only four lines to the staff and a system of note shapes called neumes. The earliest notated sources of Gregorian chant (written c.950) used these symbols to indicate tone-movements and relative duration within each syllable. It's a sort of musical stenography that seems to focus on gestures and tone-movements but not the specific pitches of individual notes, nor the relative starting pitches of each neume. (Given the fact that chant was learned in an oral tradition in which the texts and melodies were sung from memory, this was obviously not necessary.) It reminds me of my autistic son's attempts to invent his own musical notation, it works in the context he requires it to, with the necessary appreciation of the stenographic system!

Modern plainchant is still written in the C13th form, where the neumes are written in square notation on a four-line staff with a clef. Small groups of ascending notes on a syllable are shown as stacked squares, read from bottom to top, while descending notes are written with diamonds read from left to right. When a syllable has a large number of notes, a series of smaller such groups of neumes are written in succession, read from left to right.