Monks and Music

...Thus Rome early became the centre of a conscious musical development which was to receive its impetus from Pope Gregory the Great and, through him, lend its pervasive aid in spreading the gospel among the savage tribes of Germany, Gaul and Britain...

...November 18, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 47 MONKS AND MUSIC By THORNTON DELEHANTY HE middle-ages have come in for a good deal of maltreatment from more enlightened generations...

...Long before then, however, the Ambrosian psalmody had lent an exotic coloring to the liturgy of the church at Milan, where Saint Ambrose had instituted the practice of singing hymns after the manner of the Eastern church...

...England was quick to see the superiority in this new style of church music and to make the most of it...

...They proved not to be so, however, and the Gregorian chant was adopted both at Canterbury and York, In his Short History of the English People, Green gives an interesting description of Augustine and his forty colleagues entering Canterbury "bearing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in concert the strains of the litany of their church...

...The greatness of Gregory I in his services to liturgical music was largely due to his insistence on uniformity...

...He established a community of monks at Rome whose sole duty it was to devote themselves to its study...

...A great deal has been said and written about Charles the Great for he was one of those provocative characters who achieve big ends by a diversity of means...

...The missionary monks, trained under the scrupulous eye of the Holy See, went forth with a well inculcated knowledge of their duties and practices...

...When Augustine went to England to convert the Saxons he was enjoined by Pope Gregory not to insist on implanting the Roman chant there if he found that the older British churches were hostile to it...

...They were warmly welcomed and given quarters, and soon they had established a singing school which trained its pupils for the famous papal choir...

...The savage breast was verily in need of soothing, and the Roman chant, echoing the austere majesty of Rome herself, prepared the dark forests of the north and west for the guerdon of a triumphant Christianity...

...He was sufficiently tutored to recognized in Gregorian music that quality of exalted and unworldly beauty which must have revealed to his proselytizing spirit a heaven-sent means for securing the spiritual autonomy of the Church among his subjects* His interest and activity in the cause of church music, as Montalembert says, has never been equaled before or since...

...and he is known to have conducted the choir at Aix-la-Chapelle...

...Their voices produce tones only fit to be compared to the clatter of a heavy wagon, and instead of touching the feelings of the hearer, only fill him with disgust...

...The task of changing the local style was, however, a different matter...

...Yet to dismiss the virtues of the age is to have eyes and not see...

...A number of English monks, the Venerable Bede among them, became authorities in liturgical music...

...So prevalent and deep rooted was the realization of the importance of liturgical music in the missionary work of the mediaeval church that, as Professor Edward Dickinson says, "familiarity with church song became an indispensable part of the equipment of every clergyman, monastic and secular...

...How did I weep," he says in the Confessions, "in Thy Hymns and Canticles, touched to the quick by the voices of Thy sweet-attuned Church...

...He established singing schools at Soissons, Orleans, Sens, Lyons, Cambrai, Toul, Dijon, and a number in Germany...

...Saint Boniface introduced it in Germany when he went there from England on his famous mission, toiling unsparingly in the effort to inject some of the ecclesiastical refinement of the Gregorian chant into the throats of his willing but inelegant catechumens...

...Gall, in Switzerland, was especially noted for the piety and learning of its monks and it was a happy circumstance—as well as accident—that landed the monk Romanus in their midst, for he was on his way from Rome to Metz with the official Gregorian antiphonary, and falling ill at St...

...or rather, in this case, to have ears and not hear, since the middle-ages produced a form of music that was not only perfectly adapted to the needs of the time (the propagation of the faith) but which survived the later assaults of secular music and maintained, down to the present day, a purity and integrity comparable only to those of the liturgy with which it was evolved...

...He organized a choir in his own chapel, taking the members of it on one occasion to Rome that they might imbibe at the sacred font—his ardor led him at times to join in the singing of his choir, "in a low voice...

...A singing school was founded at Wearmouth by a Roman monk named John, and similar institutions were successfully established at York, Glasgow and other places...

...The congregation joined in the singing, and Saint Augustine records the emotion with which he heard it...

...It was in Charles's time also that Gregorian music was introduced by Romanus into St...

...It may be due to their native wildness or because, out of frivolity, they always insert something of their own invention...

...The monastery later became one of the most renowned in Europe for the excellence of its standard in the teaching and practice of the Roman song...

...King Pepin induced Pope Paul to send two delegates to instruct the Franks in the Gregorian chant, and nearly a hundred years before that time Pope Vitalian had permitted certain monks to instruct it in Brittany...

...And not only the missionaries but the secular rulers as well...

...But it is doubtful if the cumulative efforts of the missionaries of Gregory's time could have accomplished for the Roman song what Charles the Great brought about in a few swift, enthusiastic strokes...

...An idea of the Roman missionary's lot during the Gregorian age may be gleaned from an account by John the Deacon in his biography of Gregory I— "Among all the people of Europe," he says, "the Gauls and the Germans are the least capable of comprehending the Gregorian song in its purity...

...To make semi-barbarians who had never been in Rome do as the Romans did, required delicacy and skill...

...In 803 the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle enjoined the use of the Roman song upon all the monasteries of the empire, thus bringing to fruition the labors of the past two centuries...

...In the acquisition of his vast domains he was, as H. G. Wells invidiously observes, an imitation Caesar, a savage and bloodthirsty playactor ; but to submit that as the whole picture, or even as threefourths of it, is to be insensible to the incalculably benign influence which Charlemagne exerted on the art of music— for one cannot expect to catch the pure and limpid strains of the Gregorian chant if one's taste inclines to the hubbub of the fife and drum...

...Gall was persuaded to remain there and instruct in church song...

...Their rough, bellowing voices are incapable of modulation, and their intemperate habits render it impossible for their hoarse throats to sing delicate melodies properly...

...How thoroughly the fibre of Anglo-Saxon Christianity was permeated with the spirit of Roman song is illustrated in the story of that early poem, the Paraphrase of the Scriptures, one of the first literary fruits of Augustine's mission, wherein the monk Caedmon, having been miraculously endowed with an angelic voice, recounts the Biblical stories in a song of rapturous beauty...

...The monastery of St...

...The seed, so ably sown, was quick to flourish...

...Gall...

...In the following century Pope Celestine introduced the Milanese music into the divine office at Rome, but it remained for Leo I, who died in 461, to take the first step toward organizing the practice of liturgical music...

...Throughout the middle-ages the far-flung missionaries of the Church were frequently appealing to Rome for more singers...

...At his request Pope Adrian let him have two papal singers, one of whom was sent to Metz and the other to the Schola Cantorum at Soissons...

...The monasteries that sprang up in Germany, Gaul, Britain, and Spain followed the Roman style of chanting—the Romanus cantus—rather than adapting the local style which in some cases prevailed...

...In the meantime, the influence of the latter was spreading in all directions, and monastic centres in distant parts were achieving an independent distinction in its practice...

...The period is regarded in history as the black sheep of epochs—an unruly interloper that dammed up the elegant stream of Hellenic culture and turned the fertile plains of progress into stagnant pools that were little better than breeding places for coarseness and credulity and superstition...

...But the Gregorian music was eloquent in its own behalf, and though it was not until Charles the Great imposed its usage throughout his dominions that its adoption became general, the results were foreshadowed from the beginning...

...A little more than a hundred years later the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino was destroyed by the Lombards and the monks, who had done distinguished work with church music, sought refuge at Rome...

...On a visit to Rome he first heard the magnificent singing of the Papal Choir, and thenceforth he was like an impresario who had stumbled across the "find" of the age...

...The style of church music known today as the Gregorian chant came into being by a slow process of growth which took definite and authentic form at about the time of Gregory the Great...

...The work of Paul's missionaries so impressed Pepin that he abolished the Gallic service which prevailed in Paris and Metz and superseded it with the Roman style...

...No missionary might go forth from Rome who was not adept in it...

...In Spain, Saint Ildefonso was active in the promotion of liturgical music and was himself deeply versed in its lore, while further east, Saint Adalbert, the apostle of the Slavonic races, in a strenuous life which ended in his martyrdom, had composed the words and music of a Slavonic hymn which was to become, posthumously, the national song of the Bohemians...

...With such unpromising material one can well imagine that a worse fate than martyrdom awaited the missionary with too sensitive ears...