son and successor Louis I (known as Louis the Pious, reigned 814–840), was devoted to the consolidation
of centralized power within the Carolingian domains. In 812, two years before his death, Charlemagne
had the satisfaction of being formally recognized as an equal by the Byzantine Emperor Michael I, whose
imperial lineage, unlike Charlemagne’s, reached back into antiquity.
This interval of stability enabled a spectacular rebirth of the arts of peace, particularly at
Charlemagne’s courts at Aachen (or Aix-la-Chapelle), now in westernmost Germany, and Metz (or
Messins), in northeastern France. This happy period for learning and creativity, purchased by a period of
endless battles, forced migrations and conversions, and genocidal massacres, is known as the Carolingian
Renaissance.
THE CHANT COMES NORTH
The importing of the Roman chant to the Frankish lands was one of the many facets of that Renaissance,
during which all kinds of art products and techniques, from Ravenna-style architecture to manuscript
illumination, were brought north from Italy to France and the British Isles, and all kinds of administrative,
legal, and canonical practices were standardized. The central figure in this process was an English
scholar, Alcuin or Albinus of York (ca.735–804), whom Charlemagne invited to Aachen around 781 to set
up a cathedral school.
A great proponent of literacy, Alcuin instituted one of the earliest systems of elementary education in
Europe. He also devised a curriculum for higher education based on the seven “liberal arts” of the
ancients, so named because they were the arts practiced by “free men” (men of leisure, which is to say the
rich and the well-born). They consisted of two basic courses: the three arts of language (grammar, logic,
and rhetoric), known as the trivium, which led to the Bachelor of Arts degree, and the four arts of
measurement (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), known as the quadrivium, which led to the
Master of Arts. (Doctoral studies were devoted to canon law and theology.) Within the quadrivium, music
was conceived in entirely theoretical terms as an art of measurement: measurement of harmonic ratios
(tunings and intervals) and of rhythmic quantities (the classical poetic meters). This made possible its
academic study in the absence of any form of practical musical notation. As a university subject music
continued for centuries to be studied in that generalized and speculative way, quite unrelated to actual
singing or playing. And yet Alcuin’s zealous emphasis on writing things down became a Carolingian
obsession that was eventually extended to practical music as well.
The reason the Roman chant needed to be imported had to do with the stress the Carolingians laid on
centralization of authority, both worldly and ecclesiastical. The Carolingian territories were vast,
incorporating peoples speaking many languages and a large assortment of local legal systems and
liturgies. With the establishing of the Roman pope as spiritual patron of the Carolingian Empire, the
liturgical unification of the whole broad realm according to the practices of the Roman See became
imperative. It would symbolize the eternal order that undergirded the temporal authority of the
Carolingian rulers and established their divine mandate.
This meant suppressing the so-called Gallican rite, the indigenous liturgy of the northern churches, and
replacing it with Roman liturgical texts and tunes. “As King Pepin, our parent of blessed memory, once
decreed that the Gallican be abolished,” Charlemagne ordered the Frankish clergy on 23 March 789, in a
document known as the Admonitio generalis (“General advisory”), “be sure to emend carefully in every
monastery and bishop’s house the psalms, notes, chants, calendar material, grammars, and the Epistles and
Gospels. For often enough there are those who want to call upon God well, but because of poor texts they
do it poorly.” The texts in question, of course, were texts to be sung, as all liturgical texts are sung (for