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Introducing Gregorian Chant

St. Michael’s parish, Gorey

5 Sept 2025

Patrick O’Beirne

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Secular chant

OLÉ

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Basics

Words spoken to music: primacy of text
Plain chant straight tone, later a single melodic line
Choir and congregation
May be introduced by a cantor singing the first words
Cantor/choir and congregation may sing in alternation (‘antiphon’)

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Pope Gregory I

St. Gregory the Great, 540-604

Patron saint of musicians

and teachers. Feast day 3rd Sep.

The mainstream form of Western

plainchant, standardized in the

late 9th century, was attributed

to Pope Gregory I and so took the

name of Gregorian chant.

St Gregory. Image: Antiphonary of Hartker

Image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gregory_I_-_Antiphonary_of_Hartker_of_Sankt_Gallen.jpg

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_I

He is known for instituting the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome, the Gregorian mission, to convert the then largely pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity.^[2] Gregory is also well known for his writings, which were more prolific than those of any of his predecessors as pope.^[3]

Gregory is honored, along with Augustine, Jerome and Ambrose, as one of the four Great Latin Church Fathers,^[7] and is a Doctor of the Church.^[8] He is considered a saint in the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Anglican Communion, various Lutheran denominations, and other Protestant denominations. Immediately after his death, Gregory was canonized by popular acclaim.^[9] The Protestant reformer John Calvin admired Gregory greatly and declared in his Institutes that Gregory was the last good pope.^[10]^[11] He is the patron saint of musicians and teachers.^[12]

He knew Latin authors, natural science, history, mathematics and music

The circumstances in which Gregory became pope in 590 were of ruination. The Lombards held the greater part of Italy. Their depredations had brought the economy to a standstill. he seat of government was far from Rome in Constantinople and appeared unable to undertake the relief of Italy.

In 590, Gregory could wait for Constantinople no longer. He organized the resources of the church into an administration for general relief.

The mainstream form of Western plainchant, standardized in the late 9th century,^[55] was attributed to Pope Gregory I and so took the name of Gregorian chant. The earliest such attribution is in John the Deacon's 873 biography of Gregory, almost three centuries after the pope's death, and the chant that bears his name "is the result of the fusion of Roman and Frankish elements which took place in the Franco-German empire under Pepin, Charlemagne and their successors".^[56]

A dove is his attribute, from the well-known story attributed to his friend Peter the Deacon,^[j] who tells that when the pope was dictating his homilies on Ezechiel a curtain was drawn between his secretary and himself. As, however, the pope remained silent for long periods at a time, the servant made a hole in the curtain and, looking through, beheld a dove seated upon Gregory's head with its beak between his lips. When the dove withdrew its beak the pope spoke and the secretary took down his words; but when he became silent the servant again applied his eye to the hole and saw the dove had replaced its beak between his lips.^[1]

Non Angli, sed angeli, si forent Christiani.– "They are not Angles, but angels, if they were Christian".^[75] Aphorism, summarizing words reported to have been spoken by Gregory when he first encountered pale-skinned English boys at a slave market, sparking his dispatch of St. Augustine of Canterbury to England to convert the English, according to Bede.^[76]

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Notation

Neumes were based on hand gestures

9^th century

"Iubilate deo universa terra"

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Square Notation

11^th century Guido of Arezzo

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.

Kyrie VIII

Solesmes

https://gregobase.selapa.net/chant.php?id=1184

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_chant

Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainchant, a form of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song in Latin (and occasionally Greek) of the Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed mainly in western and central Europe during the 9th and 10th centuries, with later additions and redactions. Although popular legend credits Pope Gregory I with inventing Gregorian chant, scholars believe that he only ordered a compilation of melodies throughout the whole Christian world, after having instructed his emissaries in the Schola cantorum, where the neumatical notation was perfected, with the result of most of those melodies being a later Carolingian synthesis of the Old Roman chant and Gallican chant.^[1]

Gregorian chants were organized initially into four, then eight, and finally 12 modes.

By the 13th century, the neumes of Gregorian chant were usually written in square notation on a four-line staff with a clef, as in the Graduale Aboense pictured above. In square notation, 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.

This system of square notation is standard in modern chantbooks.

Common modern practice favors performing Gregorian chant with no beat or regular metric accent, largely for aesthetic reasons.^[59] The text determines the accent while the melodic contour determines the phrasing.

The other plainchant repertories of the Christian West faced severe competition from the new Gregorian chant. Charlemagne continued his father's policy of favoring the Roman Rite over the local Gallican traditions. By the 9th century the Gallican rite and chant had effectively been eliminated, although not without local resistance.^[24] The Gregorian chant of the Sarum Rite displaced Celtic chant.

Gregorian chant eventually replaced the local chant tradition of Rome itself, which is now known as Old Roman chant. In the 10th century, virtually no musical manuscripts were being notated in Italy. Instead, Roman Popes imported Gregorian chant from (German) Holy Roman Emperors during the 10th and 11th centuries. For example, the Credo was added to the Roman Rite at the behest of the Emperor Henry II in 1014.^[25] Reinforced by the legend of Pope Gregory, Gregorian chant was taken to be the authentic, original chant of Rome, a misconception that continues to this day. By the 12th and 13th centuries, Gregorian chant had supplanted or marginalized all the other Western plainchant traditions.

Gregorian chant has in its long history been subjected to a series of redactions to bring it up to changing contemporary tastes and practice. The more recent redaction undertaken in the Benedictine Abbey of St. Pierre, Solesmes, has turned into a huge undertaking to restore the allegedly corrupted chant to a hypothetical "original" state. Early Gregorian chant was revised to conform to the theoretical structure of the modes.

Liturgical functions

Gregorian chant is sung in the Office during the canonical hours and in the liturgy of the Mass. Texts known as accentus are intoned by bishops, priests, and deacons, mostly on a single reciting tone with simple melodic formulae at certain places in each sentence. More complex chants are sung by trained soloists and choirs. The Graduale Romanum contains the proper chants of the Mass (i.e., Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Tract, Offertory, Communion) and the complete Kyriale (the collection of Mass Ordinary settings). The Liber usualis contains the chants for the Graduale Romanum and the most commonly used Office chants.

Proper chants of the Mass

The Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Tract, Sequence, Offertory and Communion chants are part of the Proper of the Mass. "Proprium Missae" in Latin refers to the chants of the Mass that have their proper individual texts for each Sunday throughout the annual cycle, as opposed to 'Ordinarium Missae' which have fixed texts (but various melodies) (Kyrie, Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei).

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Mensural notation 15-16^th c.

Manuscript page with the five-voice "Kyrie" of the Missa Virgo Parens Christi by Jacques Barbireau (ca.1420-1491)

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Modern notation

Post 16^th c.

Chant uses no time signature or barlines

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Later developments

Polyphony – more than one line sung simultaneously
Palestrina b.1525 (Missa Papae Marcelli )
Reformation, introduction of native language
Bach and Common Practice Era up to the present day
Wesleyan hymns, Victorian, folk, pop
Vatican II: "full, conscious, and active participation of the faithful“ is the first priority
Chant in English – ICEL, Anglican

https://uscatholic.org/blog/great-achievements-of-vatican-ii-liturgical-music/

Musicians after Vatican II took on a massive project. Here is what they produced:

Vernacular settings of the psalms for the lectionary and the liturgy of the hours, bringing the psalter to the faithful to an extent not seen since the patristic age

Setting after setting of service music (Kyrie, alleluia, Holy, memorial acclamation, great amen, lamb of God) that can easily be sung by any assembly

Hymns inspired by scripture, sometimes taken directly from scripture, again bringing scripture to the faithful in a new way

Inspired and creative music in multiiple languages, which allows multilingual assemblies to sing the same songs

Accessible music that untrained choirs and assemblies can sing well and beautifully

For the first time, a council document stated with great clarity that the music of the Roman Rite is Gregorian chant, with polyphony occupying a high status, and other music permitted (thinking here of new compositions, organ works, and solemn hymns for recessionals and the like).

https://npm.org/formation/chants-of-the-roman-missal/chant-faq/

Can you sing Gregorian Chant in English?

You can, and many people have attempted to do so, but most experts would advise against it. The reason is that the chant melodies are intrinsically tied to the Latin language. The melodies grow out of the Latin language, and in more ways than you might imagine. Gregorian chant melodies reflect the all of the following in the Latin language: accents; syllable length; variation in stress between heavy and light syllables; sounds of vowels and consonants; syntax, grammar, and sentence structure; and spiritual/theological meaning of individual words and phrases. Gregorian chant psalm tones, although they are musical formulas repeated for varying texts, are designed for the Latin language, where accents almost never fall on the final syllable. English is very different from Latin in that the last syllable of a line is oftentimes accented with a one-syllable word such as “Lord” or “God.” For this reason, Gregorian psalm tones do not work very well with English, unless if one takes great freedom in adjusting the musical formulas and applying them to the English text.

For Gregorian Chant melodies to work well in English, one would have to employ great sensitivity to the English text, and be prepared to take all the necessary freedoms in adapting the Latin melody to English. While this can be done, it might be more advisable to compose new melodies which grow out of the English language just as the chant melodies grew out of the Latin language.

An important exception to all of this is strophic hymnody. Here, the same melodic formula is intended for many stanzas of text without respect to the accentuation and meaning of the words in each stanza. Gregorian chant hymns (e.g., “Conditor alme siderum,” “Veni, Creator Spiritus”) can be sung quite well in English.

https://media.musicasacra.com/books/simple_english_propers.pdf

https://icelweb.org/musicfolder/openmusic.html

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Mass chants

The Graduale Romanum contains the Ordinary and Proper chants of the Mass
The Mass Ordinary settings (Kyriale) are:� Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus & Benedictus, Agnus Dei.
The Proper of the Mass is the set of individual texts for each Sunday or feast day during the year. They are:

Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Tract, Sequence, Offertory and Communion

Antiphons, hymns: Marian, Benediction

(Salve Regina 01:37 )

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You know this already

Alleluia

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Chant Choices

18 Latin settings of the Ordinary of the Mass
Most popular are:

VIII – de Angelis – For Second Class Feasts
XI – Orbis Factor – For Sundays throughout the year

At least 12 English settings

English Propers example

The Lord will bestow his bounty (1:55 )

http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/wtnews/220619.pdf

There are 18 chant settings of the

Ordinary of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria,

Sanctus, Agnus Dei). Some have names

as well as numbers. Although some are

meant for certain liturgical occasions, in

practice they are often used outside of

their intended purposes:

I – Lux et Órigo – For Paschal (Easter) time

II – Kyrie Fons Bonitátis – For First Class Feasts (rarely heard)

III – Kyrie Deus Sempitérne – For First Class Feasts (rarely heard)

IV – Cunctípotens Génitor Deus – For Second Class Feasts

(customarily used on Feasts of the Apostles)

V – Kyrie Magnæ Deus Poténtiæ – For Second Class Feasts

(rarely heard)

VI – Kyrie Rex Génitor – For Second Class Feasts (rarely heard)

VII – Kyrie Rex Splendens – For Second Class Feasts (rarely

heard)

VIII – de Ángelis – For Second Class Feasts (very popular)

IX – Cum Júbilo – For Feasts of Our Lady

X – Alme Pater – For Feasts of Our Lady (rarely heard)

XI – Orbis Factor – For Sundays throughout the year (popular)

XII – Pater Cuncta – For Third Class Feasts (rarely heard)

XIII – Stelliféri Cóndítor Orbis – For Third Class Feasts (rarely

heard)

XIV – Jesu Redémptor – For Third Class Feasts (rarely heard)

XV – Dominátor Deus – For Christmas Commemorations &

Ferias (rarely heard)

XVI – For Ferias throughout the year (rarely heard)

XVII – For Sundays in Advent and Lent

XVIII – Deus Génitor Alme – For Advent, Lent, and, in modified

form, for Requiems (popular and commonly used in the Novus

Ordo)

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2013/03/05/the-renaissance-of-the-mass-propers/

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Mass Ordinary settings (Kyriale)

Kyrie 02:15 (9x)

Gloria 02:26

Credo 04:03

Sanctus 01:26

Agnus Dei 01:06

Recording by Corpus Christi Watershed (Texas) choir with music score:

https://archive.ccwatershed.org/video/903983349

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Learn to sing the Kyrie

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Pontificio Istituto di Musica Sacra – YouTube�https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnYuhXXhC5s

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Thank you – discussion

First question – the participation of the congregation
First steps – the Ordinary. Then Communion & recessionals?
Where, when, how often to rehearse
Latin or English or Irish or mixed
Antiphons, hymn
All Sunday masses ? One? High Mass? Feast days?
Rotation of settings over the Church year