among them—indeed, between any two of them. There are also distinct, recognized local or geographical
“dialects” within the tradition of Gregorian chant. East Frankish (that is, German) sources often turn the
semitones in West Frankish (that is, French) sources into minor thirds, possibly reflecting the habits of
ears and throats accustomed to a pentatonic (or, more precisely, an anhemitonic—that is, semitoneless)
folk idiom (see Ex. 2-15).
EX. 2-15 Incipit of the Gaudeamus Introit and the climactic phrase of the Haec dies gradual in West Frankish and East Frankish
versionsTo ignore these differences in favor of the uniformity (or, contrariwise, to deemphasize the uniformity
in favor of the differences) is a decision one makes depending on the kind of story one wants to tell.
Stories that emphasize sameness are, in the first place, shorter and more manageable than stories that
emphasize difference. The tendency in a book like this is to minimize exceptions and get on with things.
But one pays a price for the space or the time one saves. One can form the mental habit of looking for
sameness instead of difference, which can lead to an actual (perhaps unconscious) preference for
simplifying sameness, and a concomitant (equally unconscious) antagonism toward complicating
difference.
In the case of the history of Gregorian chant, such an antagonism toward difference recapitulates on
the apparently innocuous plane of historiography the ruthless political program of the Carolingians and the
papacy. (This seems to be one reason why the Old Roman chant, whose existence—or persistence—
makes for a pesky complication of an otherwise simple and triumphant narrative, has received from many
scholars a very negative “aesthetic” assessment.^5 ) To generalize even further, antagonism toward
difference implies sympathy with the interests of elites. This tendency is particularly characteristic of
histories of the fine arts, for the fine arts have always depended upon political, social, and religious elites
for support.
That is why it seems appropriate, as a way of ending a chapter about the propitious musical
achievements of the ninth- and tenth-century Franks who succeeded in establishing and canonizing one
particular repertory of plainchant, briefly to cast an eye at some pockets of resistance—chant repertories
that, like the Old Roman, managed to hold out (at least for a while) against the Gregorian tide.
The most successful of these was (or is) the liturgical chant of the archdiocese of Milan, which has
lasted to this day, although, like the Gregorian chant, it is falling out of use (or where still used, sung in
Italian translation) in the wake of the liturgical reforms instigated by the Second Vatican Council in the
1960s. Milan, as we know, was the fourth-century seat of St. Ambrose, a figure with a legend and an
authority equal to St. Gregory’s; and so the myth of Ambrose has legitimized the survival of the Milanese
(or “Ambrosian”) rite and sustained it even as the myth of Gregory legitimized the ascendency almost
everywhere else of the Franco-Roman.
Like the Old Roman chant, the Ambrosian entered the written tradition later than the Gregorian; most
manuscripts containing it were notated in the twelfth century or later. Whether because of its actual age or
because of its longer preliterate tradition, the Ambrosian chant tends to be more melismatic than the
Gregorian and, in the Mass propers, more given to responsorial psalmody, in which a soloist sings verses
in alternation with melismatic choral refrains, a practice largely confined to the Office in Gregorian