FIG. 1-2 Two Carolingian manuscript illustrations showing divinely inspired authors at work. (a) In this illustration, from the so-
called Gospel Book of Ebbo (first quarter of the ninth century), St. John is receiving the Gospel from the Holy Spirit in the
guise of a dove. (b) This illustration, dating from about half a century later, is one of the earliest representations of Pope
Gregory I (Saint Gregory the Great), who is receiving the chant from the same source. It comes from a sacramentary, a book
containing the prayers recited by the celebrant at a solemn Mass. Charlemagne is known to have requested and received just
such a book from Pope Hadrian I in 785.
These pictures are again found in early written antiphoners, or chant books, which began appearing in
the Carolingian territories during the eighth century. Such books were generally headed by a prologue,
which in the ninth century was occasionally even set to music to be sung as a “trope” or preface to the
first chant in the book. Gregorius Praesul, it read in part, composuit hunc libellum musicae artis
scholae cantorum: “Gregory, presiding [over the Church], composed [or, possibly, just ‘put together’]
this little book of musical art of the singers’ choir.” Thus the legend of St. Gregory’s authorship was
closely bound up with the earliest notation of the chant, suggesting that the two phenomena were related.
In fact both inventions, that of the legend and that of musical notation in the Christian west, were
mothered by the process of musical migration decreed by the Carolingian kings. The legend was a
propaganda ploy contrived to persuade the northern churches that the Roman chant was better than theirs.
As a divine creation, mediated through an inspired, canonized human vessel, the Roman chant would have
the prestige it needed to triumph eventually over all local opposition.
Gregory I was chosen as the mythical author of the chant, it is now thought, because many of the
leading intellectual lights of the Carolingian court—like Alcuin and his predecessor St. Boniface (675–
754), the reformer, under Pepin, of the Frankish church—were English monks who venerated St. Gregory
as the greatest Christian missionary to England. (It was Alcuin’s teacher, Bishop Egbert of York, who first
referred to the Roman liturgy as “Gregory’s antiphoner.”) To this great figure, already reputed to be a
divinely inspired author, these English writers may have attributed the work of his successor Pope
Gregory II (reigned 715–731), who, it seems, really did have something to do with drawing up the
standard Roman liturgical books some decades before their export north.
THE ORIGINS OF GREGORIAN CHANT
But of course neither did Gregory II actually compose the “Gregorian” chants. No one person did. It was
a huge collective and anonymous enterprise that seems to have achieved standardization in Rome by the
end of the eighth century. But what were its origins? Until very recently it was assumed as a matter of