Last week in my parish, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of a book, but not just any book. It is one of the most glorious treasures of true art that the Church ever produced. It is the Graduale Romanumof 1908, reconstructed after several hundred years, and displaying the fullness of Gregorian chant for the whole world to see and sing. Following a Mass where the schola and the people sang music from deep in history, we gathered for a social and had a cake, wore silly party hats, and tooted party horns.
Why all the fuss? Here is music that is holy, beautiful, and uni-versal in way that is beyond compare to music you will hear in your lifetime. It is also timeless: it sounds as fresh today as it must have sounded in the 8th century. The next time someone asks what music the Catholic Church uses for Mass, you can answer it in one
word: Graduale (or Gradual in English). The Graduale is the music book of the Roman Rite. It has been this way from the very early in our history.
The story of how this modern edition begins at the Council of Trent, and the period of reform that follow it. There was a revised Missal, Breviary, Catechism, and even Vulgate. It was inevitable that Trent would spawn a revision of the Graduale too. G.A. Palest-rina of polyphonic fame was put in charge of assembling a team that would adapt medieval chant books to modern times. It turns out that though he was a great composer of polyphony, he was not a specialist in chant. He thought better of it and passed it on to others.
The fundamental principle of this reform was to let the text drive the music, so the music was adapted in every way under the view that this would make the text ever more clear. They took out the extended note passage on off-accent syllables. They rearranged words. They reconstructed musical phrases to be more pre-dictable, going from low to high and back to low again.
Unfortunately, the application of rationalist principles to art almost always leads to egregious error. So it was in the late 16th century when the first Medicean Graduale was being produced.
The process had been successfully and mercifully stopped by the intervention of the Spanish court, but it was picked up again later.
The first edition of the Medici Graduale appeared in 1614. Some glorious art was in the process of being lost to fashion.
Meanwhile, there was a different trend taking place within the religious orders, which have often been spared the main trends in the Church at large. They all had their own chant books. There was monastic chant, Dominican chant, Cistercian chant, Norbertine chant, Franciscan chant. Here we had an uninterrupted chant tra-dition at work—preserving the past and continuing to develop it in continuity.
In the main Roman Church however we saw a long period of decline taking place. This was due to two main factors: the devel-opment of polyphonic music apart from its chant roots, and the corruption of that chant tradition in a manner that had little to do with its long tradition.
But let us be clear what we are speaking of here. We are not speaking about the chants of the Ordinary. We are not speaking about chants of the celebrant. Nor are we talking about the main
chant hymns, though all those were affected to some extent. The main area affected were the propers, which is to say the chants that are mostly sung by the choir alone. This is the core of the Grego-rian repertoire and its most elaborate and rooted part. The chants most profoundly affected are five: Introit, Gradual or Tract during Lent, Alleluia, Offertory, and Communion.
In the 19th century, two trends were at tension with each other.
Scholars and monks all over Europe undertook the serious effort to restore chant manuscripts. What would become the fountain-head of the reform effort was the newly founded monastery of Solesmes, which attained a high status because of the liturgical writings of Dom Gueranger. This monastery was refounded in 1833 and over the years attracted many of the greatest scholars. In addition, they accumulated manuscripts that permitted the chant to be restored.
At the same time, the Vatican was being pushed to authorize a single version of chant for the whole Church. In 1883, the Vatican settled on the Medici edition now being printed in Germany, so it became known as the Ratisbon edition. This was the corrupted edition that came out of Trent.
For Solesmes to prevail against the approved edition was a daunting task. It had to repeal the official status of the Ratisbon edition, and it had to overcome an entrenched practice in Cathe-drals and parishes all over the world. The main musical establish-ment at the time was dominated by the growing Cecilian move-ment, which was attempting to purge music of its classical and operatic influences and replace it with reduced versions of Renais-sance polyphony and chant, and the version of the Graduale to which they were deeply dedicated and firmly attached was the Ratisbon edition.
Impetus for reform came with Pius X’s Motu Proprio on Sacred Music called Tra le Sollecitudini. It was (and is!) a wonderful docu-ment. Despite the fact that that Pope was also personally attached to the old Ratisbon Graduale, it was this document that gave to energy to the movement for new and restored chant books for the Roman Rite, with the goal that the chant would be heard and sung in every parish.
The main players at Solesmes were Dom Joseph Pothier and Dom Andrew Mocquereau. They worked diligently, using 9th
through 12th century manuscripts, to build on the prior work of Dom Pothier to produce a new Vatican Graduale to replace the one that emerged after Trent. The Pope himself, now convinced that Solesmes was the institution to lead the effort, had imposed an extreme deadline for publication. The two great scholars split on what many people today would consider minor issues before the Graduale came to print. These splits and differences manifested themselves in long battle over copyright that wasted fantastic amounts of time and resources and delayed progress.
The new Graduale benefited greatly from technology and eco-nomic development, which allowed the wide circulation of printed books. After the Graduale appeared, Solesmes went ahead with its own version under the direction of Dom Mocquereau, and this one included rhythmic signs. More publications began to cir-culate, including the Liber Usualis. Eventually the reformed chant displaced the old Medicean edition. Progress in chant mastery continued through Vatican II, which took further steps to place chant at the center of Catholic liturgy.
The story of this reform effort belies certain stereotypes. It is not the case that older is better in this case. The further we look back to Trent, the more ahistorical the emergent chant is likely to be.
The restorationist effort—to return to pre-Tent chant—was a 20th century phenomenon.
Nor is it the case, as is usually assumed, that “we used to sing chant in Latin but now we sing hymns in English.” The Latin chant that prevailed for hundreds of years was deeply flawed and was only restored 100 years ago, and the effort to bring chant to the people met with a long tradition of vernacular hymnody that had largely displaced chant.
Vatican II, in at least its musical intention, hoped to further this progress for chant against vernacular hymnody. This hope was fulfilled in 1974 with a new Graduale, rearranged for the ordinary form of Mass. The chants themselves were largely unchanged. The edition we use today is largely unchanged in its musical formation from the 1908 edition, which in turn reflects first millennium prac-tice. The tradition lives!
We can learn from the Vatican edition that progress towards authenticity and liturgical ideals is a struggle that has existed in every age and will continue. The patience, scholarship, integrity,
and evangelistic efforts that were part of Solesmes’s restoration should serve as a model for reformers today.
At the party, we sang the communion song Simile Est from the Graduale. It tells the story of the merchant who sold all he own to acquire the pearl of great price, which is the kingdom of heaven.
The chant too gives us a glimpse of this kingdom here on earth. L