one does not “call upon God” in the kind of voice one uses to converse with one’s neighbor). The words
of the Roman liturgy could be imported easily enough in books, but in the absence of a way of writing
down the tunes, the only means of accomplishing the required “emendation” was to import cantors
(ecclesiastical singers) from Rome who could teach their chant by laborious rote to their Frankish
counterparts. Difficulty was compounded by resistance. Each side blamed the other for failure. John the
Deacon, an English monk writing on behalf of the Romans in 875, attributed it to northern baseness and
barbarity. Notker Balbulus (“Notker the Stammerer”), the Frankish monk who wrote Charlemagne’s first
biography around the same time, attributed it to southern pride and chicanery.
THE LEGEND OF ST. GREGORY
From these squabbles we can guess at the reason for a venerable legend that became attached to the
Roman chant around the time of its advent into written history. It was then widely asserted that the entire
musical legacy of the Roman church was the inspired creation of a single man, the sainted Pope Gregory I,
who had reigned from 590 until his death in 604. John the Deacon’s complaint about Frankish barbarism
actually comes from his biography of the presumed author of the chant. “St. Gregory compiled a book of
antiphons,” John wrote, using the contemporary term for a kind of liturgical singing. “He founded a
schola,” the chronicler continued, using the contemporary term for a choir, “which to this day performs
the chant in the Church of Rome according to his instructions; he also erected two dwellings for it, at St.
Peter’s and at the Lateran palace, where are venerated the couch from which he gave lessons in chant, the
whip with which he threatened the boys, and the authentic antiphoner,” the latter being the great book
containing the music for the whole liturgical calendar.
That book could not have existed in St. Gregory’s day, because there would have been no way of
putting music into it. As Gregory’s contemporary St. Isidore, Bishop of Seville (ca.560–636), put it in his
great encyclopedia called Etymologiae (or “Origins”), “Unless sounds are held in the memory by man
they perish, because they cannot be written down.” By the ninth century, however, the legend of Pope
Gregory as composer of what has been known ever since as “Gregorian chant” was firmly in place. It was
propagated not only in literary accounts like that of John the Deacon but also in an iconographic or
pictorial tradition that adapted a motif already established in Roman illuminated manuscripts containing
Gregory’s famous Homilies, or sermons, on the biblical books of Job and Ezekiel. According to this
tradition, the pope, while dictating his commentary, often paused for a long time. His silences puzzled the
scribe, who was separated from Gregory by a screen. Peeping through, the scribe beheld the dove of the
Holy Spirit hovering at the head of St. Gregory, who resumed his dictation only when the dove removed
its beak from his mouth. (It is from such representations of divine inspiration that we get our expression,
“A little bird told me.”)