Alleluia, Offertory, Communion), which vary according to the season or feast, were
undoubtedly introduced singly over a period of time. What is presumably the earliest
Mass chant, a responsorial psalm sung between the Scripture readings—predecessor of
the musically more elaborate Gradual—existed by the end of the 4th century. Though the
custom of singing during the reception of communion dates back to about the same era, a
variable cycle of communion chants did not yet exist. The choice always fell on Psalm
34, chosen because of the line “taste and see that the Lord is good.” The Offertory chant
was probably the last of the Proper chants to be introduced.
A simple explanation of the origin of Gregorian chant is complicated by the existence
of a body of music known to modern scholars as “Old Roman” chant. Both share the
same texts and the musical traditions are obviously related, but the musical styles rest on
different aesthetic foundations. As far as we know, Old Roman chant was sung only in
Rome, its oldest witness being a graduale copied there in 1071. Scholars have not arrived
at a consensus about where and when the Gregorian repertoire received the shape found
in the earliest notated manuscripts. Some argue that what we know as Gregorian chant
preserves essentially intact the musical repertoire brought from Rome in the late 8th
century as part of the Carolingian liturgical reforms and scrupulously guarded by
Frankish musicians. Others maintain that the Franks reshaped and adapted the Roman
music to their own native idiom. The latter process is difficult to assess in detail, because
the earlier Gallican chant, which would presumably have reflected that idiom,
disappeared with virtually no trace. Manuscripts from France and elsewhere attest to the
uniformity and stability of the Gregorian musical tradition throughout the Middle Ages.
Some of the earliest and best manuscript sources of chant originated in French territory:
four of the Sextuplex manuscripts and several of the earliest notated gradualia from the
10th century (Laon, Bibl. mun. 239; Angers, Bibl. de la Ville 91; and Chartres 47). The
first and third of these have been published in facsimile in the series Paléographie
musicale.
The repertoire may be divided into two large categories: chants for the Mass and those
for the Office. The Book of Psalms provides most of the texts. The psalm text can be
sung in one of three musical forms: (1) direct, (2) responsorial, or (3) antiphonal. Each
has more than one possible realization, but in general it can be stated that (1) involves the
continuous recitation of the psalm text by a soloist or chorus, (2) calls for a choral
response to the solo singing of a psalm, and (3) implies an alternation between the two
choral groups, possibly in conjunction with a soloist. These performance practices were
also used with nonpsalmic texts, like hymns, chants of the Ordinary of the Mass, and
responsories of the Office.
Eventually, the Proper chants of the Mass consisted of a repertoire of about 600 chants
for all feasts of the Lord and Sundays of the year (temporal cycle) and for the
commemoration of the saints (sanctoral cycle). Some feasts of the saints had unique
chants, while others were supplied from the “common”—chants with texts chosen
because of their appropriateness to the category of saint (martyr, virgin, confessor, etc.)
being honored. Later in the Middle Ages, this core repertoire was expanded by additions
of various types: new compositions in the traditional genres for new feasts; tropes, new
musical material—usually with text—prefaced to and inserted between phrases of the
preexistent Gregorian melody; prosae or prosulae, new texts fitted to already existing
melismas; and independent compositions like the sequence, the Aquitanian versus, and
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