“OLD ROMAN” AND OTHER CHANT DIALECTS
The reintroduction of the Frankish redaction, or adaptation, of the Roman chant back to Rome was to have
marked the final stage in the musical unification of Western Christendom. It also entailed the importation
of the Frankish neumes, which were soon adapted to the staff and became a universal European system of
notation. Once neumatic chant manuscripts began to be produced in Rome, however, some surprising
anomalies appeared. The most surprising consists of a small group of graduales and antiphoners,
produced in Rome between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, containing a repertory of chants for
the Mass and Office that, while clearly related to it, differs significantly from the standard Franco-Roman
“Gregorian” chant. It is, generally speaking, both more formulaic and more ornamental than the standard
redaction.
Most scholars agree that this variant repertory, which has been nicknamed the “Old Roman” chant,
shares with Gregorian chant a common origin in the Roman church singing of the eighth century. The
basic, as yet unanswered, question is whether the Old Roman chant, despite the late date of its sources,
represents this original tradition, which later Roman singers (perhaps under Pope Vitalian, who reigned
from 657 to 672) or even the Franks themselves radically edited and streamlined; or whether the Old
Roman chant is the evolutionary result of three hundred years of oral tradition in Rome itself that took
place after the original eighth-century version had gone north.
To put these matters in terms of a bald “either/or” is very much to oversimplify a complicated
situation. Yet of the two alternatives just described, the second seems to accord better with what is known
of the nature of oral transmission. Repertories, even those available in written form, are never wholly
stable but are in a constant, indeed daily state of gradual incremental flux that comes about inescapably
with use. Any living tradition, whatever its ostensible aims, is an engine of change.
Thus, although it is much more common, and certainly appropriate, to pay tribute to the Carolingians’
centralizing achievement by remarking on the high degree of uniformity among the earliest Frankish
manuscripts containing the Gregorian chant, the fact remains that there are also many small discrepancies