Antiphonary - History

History

The plainsong melodies found in the Roman antiphonary and the "Graduale" have received the general title of "Gregorian Chant", in honour of pope Gregory the Great (540-604), to whom a tradition, supported by internal and external evidence, ascribes the work of revising and collecting into the various texts and chants of the liturgy. Doubtless the ancient missal contained only those texts which were appointed for the celebrant, and did not include the texts which were to be chanted by the cantor and choir; and the "Antiphonarium Missæ" supplied the omitted texts for the choir as well as the chants in which the texts were to be sung. The importance of the Gregorian Antiphonary is found in the enduring stamp it impressed on the Roman liturgy.

Other popes gave, a medieval writer assures us, attention to the chants; and he specifies St. Damasus, St. Leo, St. Gelasius, St. Symmachus, St. John I and Boniface II. It is true, also, that the chants used at Milan were styled, in honour of St. Ambrose (called the "Father of Church Song"), the Ambrosian Chant.

But it is not known whether any collection of the chants had been made before that of St. Gregory, concerning which his ninth-century biographer, John the Deacon, wrote: Antiphonarium centonem … compilavit. The authentic antiphonary mentioned by the biographer has not as yet been found. What was its character? What is meant by cento? In the century in which John the Deacon wrote his life of the Saint, a cento meant the literary feat of constructing a coherent poem out of scattered excerpts from an ancient author, in such wise, for example, as to make the verses of Virgil sing the mystery of the Epiphany. The work, then, of St. Gregory was a musical cento, a compilation (centonem … compilavit) of pre-existing material into a coherent and well-ordered whole. This does not necessarily imply that the musical centonization of the melodies was the special and original work of the Saint, as the practice of constructing new melodies from separate portions of older ones had already been in vogue two or three centuries earlier than his day. But is it clear that the cento was one of melodies as well as of texts? In answer it might indeed by said that in the earliest ages of the Church the chants must have been so very simple in form that they could easily be committed to memory; and that most of the subsequently developed antiphonal melodies could be reduced to a much smaller number of types, or typical melodies, and could thus also be memorized.

And yet many say that it is scarcely credible that the developed melodies of St. Gregory's time had never possessed a musical notation, had never been committed to writing. What made his antiphonary so very useful to chanters (as John the Deacon esteemed it) was probably his careful presentation of a revised text with a revised melody, written either in the characters used by the ancient authors (as set down in Boethius) or in neumatic notation. We know that St. Augustine, sent to England by the great Pope, carried with him a copy of the precious antiphonary, and founded at Canterbury a flourishing school of singing. That this antiphonary contained music we know from the decree of the Second Council of Cloveshoo (747) directing that the celebration of the feasts of Our Lord should, in respect to baptism, Masses and music (in cantilenæ modo) follow the method of the book "which we received from the Roman Church". That this book was the Gregorian antiphonary is clear from the testimony of Egbert, Bishop of York (732-766), who in his "De Institutione Catholicâ" speaks of the "Antiphonarium" and "Missale" which the "blessed Gregory … sent to us by our teacher, blessed Augustine".

It is impossible to trace here the progress of the Gregorian antiphonary throughout Europe, which resulted finally in the fact that the liturgy of Western Europe, with a very few exceptions, finds itself based fundamentally on the work of St. Gregory, whose labour comprised not merely the sacramentary, and the "Antiphonarium Missæ", but extended also to the Divine Office. Briefly, the next highly important step in the history of the antiphonary was its introduction into some dioceses of France where the liturgy had been Gallican, with ceremonies related to those of Milan and with chants developed by newer melodies. From the year 754 may be dated the change in favour of the Roman liturgy. St. Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, on his return from an embassy to Rome, introduced the Roman liturgy into his diocese and founded the Chant School of Metz. Subsequently, under Charlemagne, French monks went to Rome to study the Gregorian tradition there, and some Roman teachers visited France. The interesting story of Ekkehard concerning Petrus and Romanus is not now credited, but a certain Petrus, according to Notker, was sent to Rome by Charlemagne and at the Abbey of St. Gall trained the monks in the Roman style. Besides Metz and St. Gall, other important schools of chant were founded at Rouen and Soissons. In the course of time new melodies were added, at first characterized by the simplicity of the older tradition, but gradually becoming more free in extended intervals. With respect to German manuscripts, the earliest are found in a style of neumatic notation different from that of St. Gall, while the St. Gall manuscripts are derived not directly from the Italian but from the Irish-Anglo-Saxon. It is probable that before the tenth and eleventh centuries (at which period the St. Gall notation began to triumph in the German churches) the Irish and English missionaries brought with them the notation of the English antiphonary.

It would take too much space to record here the multiplication of antiphonaries and their gradual deterioration, both in text and in chant, from the Roman standard. The school of Metz began the process early. Commissioned by Louis the Pious to compile a "Graduale" and antiphonary, the priest Amalarius of Metz found a copy of the Roman antiphonary in the monastery of Corbie, and placed in his own compilation an M when he followed the Metz antiphonary, R when he followed the Roman, and an I C (asking Indulgence and Charity) when he followed his own ideas. His changes in the "Graduale" were few; in the antiphonary, many.

Part of the revision which, together with Elisagarus, he made in the responsories as against the Roman method, were finally adopted in the Roman antiphonary. In the twelfth century the commission established by St. Bernard to revise the antiphonaries of Citeaux criticized with undue severity the work of Amalarius and Elisagarus and withal produced a faulty antiphonary for the Cistercian Order. The multiplication of antiphonaries, the differences in style of notation, the variations in melody and occasionally in text, need not be further described here. In France especially, the multiplication of liturgies subsequently became so great, that when Dom Guéranger, in the middle of the 19th century, started introducing the Roman liturgy into that country, sixty out of eighty dioceses had their own local breviaries. Of the recourse had to medieval manuscripts, the reproduction of various antiphonaries and graduals by Père Lambillotte, by the "Plain Song and Medieval Music Society" and especially by Dom André Mocquereau in the "Paléographie Musicale", founded eighteen years ago (which has already given phototypic reproductions of antiphonaries of Einsiedeln, of St. Gall, of Hartker, of Montpellier, of the twelfth-century monastic antiphonary found in the library of the Chapter of Lucca, which in course of publication illustrates the Guidonian notation that everywhere replaced, save in the school of St. Gall, the ambiguous method of writing the neums in campo aperto, as well as the proposed publication in facsimile by the Benedictines of Stanbrook, of the thirteenth- century Worcester antiphonary (Antiphonale Monasticum Wigarniense) it is not necessary to speak in detail. This appeal to early tradition has resulted in Pius X taking away its official sanction from the Ratisbon edition. The Ratisbon "Graduale", founded on the Medicean (which gave the chants as abbreviated and changed by Anerio and Suriano), and the "Antiphonarium" (which was based on the Antiphonale of Venice, 1585, with the responsories of Matins based on the Antwerp edition of 1611), would be replaced by the chants as found in the older codices.

That the word antiphonarium is, or was, quite elastic in its application, is shown by the remark of Amalarius in his Liber de ordine Antiphonarii, written in the first half of the ninth century. The work which in Metz was called "Antiphonarius" was divided into three in Rome: "What we call 'Graduale' they style 'Cantatorius'; and this, in accordance with their ancient custom, is still bound in a single volume in some of their churches. The remainder they divide into two parts: the one containing the responsories is called 'Responsoriale'; while the other, containing antiphons, is called 'Antiphonarius'. I have followed our custom, and have placed together (mixtim) the responsories and the antiphons according to the order of the seasons in which our feasts are celebrated" (P. L., CV, 1245). The word "cantatory" explains itself as a volume containing chants; it was also called "Graduale", because the chanter stood on a step (gradus) of the ambo or pulpit, while singing the response after the Epistle. Other ancient names for the antiphonary seem to have been Liber Officialis (Office Book) and "Capitulare" (a term sometimes used for the book containing the Epistles and Gospels).

The changes in the antiphonary resulting from the reform of the Breviary ordered by the Council of Trent and carried out under Pius V is treated under Breviary. The term antiphonarium, printed as a title to many volumes, is made to cover a very varied selection from the complete antiphonary. Sometimes it means practically a "Vesperale" (sometimes with Terce added; sometimes with various processional chants and blessings taken from the "Processionale" and "Rituale"). These volumes meet the local usages in certain dioceses with respect to Church services, and offer a practical manual for the worshipper, excluding portions of the Divine Office not sung in choir in some places and including those portions which are sung. (See also names of Antiphonaries, as Armagh, Antiphonary of Bangor etc.)