Sacred Music Borne Aloft for Centuries

Apart from the tolling of church bells, the sound most associated this week with the death of Pope John Paul II has been the singing of Gregorian chant.

Millions heard it Monday, when the Polish-born pontiff’s body was carried from the Apostolic Palace into St. Peter’s Basilica, and again Friday throughout the open-air papal requiem Mass on the steps of the church, which began with a Vatican choir chanting in Latin the centuries-old “Grant Him Eternal Rest, O Lord” and closed with a hymn to the Virgin Mary, “Salve Regina.”

Tradition has it that this music takes its name from the first Pope Gregory, “Gregory the Great,” who presided over the Roman Catholic faithful at the end of the 6th century. But almost everyone hearing it is arrested by its haunting, otherworldly, timeless character.

According to Father John Schiavone, pastor of St. Gregory the Great Church in Whittier, that’s because chant occupies a different sound world than most music.

“The music we’re used to hearing is written in major or minor keys, with a strong sense of closure or cadence,” he said, meaning that melodic lines come to a definite end.

Gregorian chant, by contrast, “is written in different kinds of scales, which don’t have those strong cadences. The resolutions are much more subtle, and they leave us feeling a little loose-ended as far as our instincts about where music goes.

“That slight reorientation means that when people hear chant, they feel prayerful, mystical.”

That was certainly the original intention.

“You could say Gregorian chant came about as a result of sung prayer or sung Scripture,” said Frank Brownstead, director of music at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. “The beginnings of it would have been in resonant buildings where people could not hear speech. That style of singing caught on. It was a way to be heard before amplification.”

Although some kind of chant is likely to have been used in church services from the beginning -- as in Jewish services before that -- what modern listeners recognize as Gregorian chant is generally regarded as a reworking of earlier forms that it supplanted over the course of the 8th to 11th centuries.

There was no established written notation for music, however, so it had to be learned aurally. Various methods of notation began to surface, but none was completely satisfactory. Some specified rhythms but not pitches. Others gave pitch notation but without rhythmic details. It took centuries to develop the modern system.

Tradition also has it that a tug of war developed over simple, direct styles of singing versus elaborate ones that extended syllables over a succession of notes, a practice known as melisma.

Periodic waves of reform attempted to restore simplicity.

“The simpler the chants, the older they are,” Schiavone said. “The more ornate ones -- the ones that have a lot of melismas -- are later.”

What most listeners today know as Gregorian chant derives from the Benedictine brothers of a monastery in the northern French town of Solesmes. In the 19th century, these friars went back to the earliest manuscripts they could find to create what they considered the most authentic versions.

No one knows for sure how these versions were sung. Scholars have always dissented from the Solesmes solutions, claiming that the singing was never so simple and never a single kind of thing.

To put an end to the squabbling, in the early 20th century Pope Pius X declared the “restored” Editions of Solesmes the approved Vatican versions of chant to be used by the Catholic Church. Those are what followers of this week’s rites have heard. The music has been drawn from the Roman Gradual (Graduale Romanum), an equally official book containing words and music for the Mass.

“In the old days,” Brownstead said, “people all over the world learned those chants. Europeans still know a lot of them. In this country we’ve kind of lost it, in terms of keeping up.”

The reason is that during the Second Vatican Council, which ran from 1962 to 1965, the face of Catholicism was reshaped. Among other changes, there was a move away from Latin toward celebrating the liturgies in the languages of worshipers.

“For a while, chant diminished each decade,” Brownstead said. “People associated Latin with the ‘old church,’ and they were interested in moving into the ‘new church.’ Now it’s going in the other direction. I include some Latin chant in some services, and nobody complains.”

In fact, ravishment of the ear would not run counter to devotion, according to Schiavone.

“The Catholic liturgy is something that involves all the senses,” he said. “Prayer is not just verbal or intellectual, for instance. It is very physical -- the placement of the hands, the bowing, the incense, even the exchange of the sign of peace shared at the end of the service. That’s the way we express the mystery of the faith.”