Liturgical offices for the patron saints of particular dioceses or individual churches often deliberately emphasise the saint’s importance for the place where they were venerated. The sets of chants for their feast days frequently refer to episodes in their life on earth and the miracles worked after their rebirth in heaven and culminate with a call for the saint’s intercession on the day of judgement. These cycles of chants, for Vespers, Matins, and Lauds, usually two or three dozen in number, were commonly called historia and complemented the writings about the saint in the passio, vita, and miracula. The chapter surveys the topographical references in some forty saints’ offices, across England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, and also comments on some musical features of their new composed chants.

‘ISTE LIBER EST S. petri de Burgo. Quem qui ei abstulerit uel titulum deleuerit anathema sit. Amen.’ So reads the colophon on fol. 8v of the late thirteenth-century antiphoner preserved in the Old Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, manuscript f.4.10. The kalendar later in the manuscript, and the Sanctorale, leave no doubt as to the provenance of the book: the Benedictine abbey of SS. Peter, Paul and Andrew at Peterborough. The apparent owner of the book whose name appears on fol. 1r ‘Antiph. Gilberti de Stanford’ written in red ink, and again on fol. 8r ‘Antiph. Gilberti’ and ‘Staynford’ , cannot yet be identified. These entries, like the colophon, date from the fourteenth century.

The Peterborough antiphoner has occasionally been consulted, but not described in detail. There is a brief entry for it in W. H. Frere's Biblioteca Musico-Liturgica, but Frere states that the sparse information he gives is borrowed from the description in M. R. James's catalogue of the Magdalene manuscripts. Manuscript f.4.10 has been quite overshadowed by the slightly earlier antiphoner from Worcester, manuscript f.160 of Worcester Cathedral Chapter Library, reproduced in Paleographie Musicale with a valuable introduction by the Abbess of Stanbrook, Dame Laurentia McLachlan, published in 1922. Few studies have referred to the Peterborough book, as will become clear from the following remarks.

From James's description it is nevertheless clear that the Peterborough antiphoner is a source of unusual interest, the more so since so few English medieval antiphoners have survived. The book is preserved practically complete. (There is one large lacuna in the Advent season: two leaves were extracted from the office for Thomas of Canterbury, and a leaf is lost which would have had the end of the Dedication office and the start of the Office of the Dead.)

Apart from the Temporale, Sanctorale and Commune Sanctorum, the manuscript includes an extensive hymnary. There is a complete kalendar (between Temporale and Sanctorale), the first folios give a set of Venites, and there is a supplement of chants for newer feasts, written by later hands. One of the most outstanding features of the antiphoner is the large number of chant cycles for the feast days of less well known saints, in particular those associated with Peterborough.

This chapter explains how church musicians built upon the Roman-Frankish foundation, responding to the changing and expanding needs of the church in the high Middle Ages, and how the newly composed chant often reflected different stylistic concepts. Most writers on chant would prefer not to think of the new music as ‘Gregorian’ at all. Of the types of chant discussed below, the new Office music might be called ‘neo-Gregorian’, because at least the forms of antiphon and responsory are traditional, even if the melodies become increasingly untraditional. But sequences, tropes, the new Latin songs and the representational ceremonies (‘liturgical dramas’) are categorically un-Gregorian.

Adapting the model to suit present needs: local enhancement of the repertory, new types of chant

However successful the Franks may have been in adopting Roman liturgical practice and its chant, they still had to supplement it with a considerable amount of new material. They venerated a number of saints unknown to the Romans, and needed to find chants to sing on the corresponding holy days. Other new festival days came into the calendar, such as All Saints' Day (1 November) and Trinity Sunday (a week after Whitsunday). Then there were a number of special ceremonies, which the Franks had used of old and which they wanted to retain. The chants for these occasions, if by good fortune they have been preserved in readable notation, sometimes look different in style from ‘classical’ Gregorian.

Gregorian chant was established as the chant repertory of the Carolingian Empire, the dominant political power in the late eighth and ninth centuries, and this ensured its survival through the rest of the Middle Ages and, in various transformations, down to the present. Which is how Gregorian chant comes to occupy a central position in this book. But it was not the only sort of medieval chant. In the Latin West other chant repertories were sung for Latin rites independent of Rome. And in the Eastern Roman Empire yet others – the chant of the rites of Jerusalem, Antioch and Constantinople, the Georgian and Armenian rites, and various types of Slavonic chant – achieved a greater or lesser degree of fixity, enabling us to study them today. Even if they cannot be described in detail in this short book, their existence should be borne in mind as a parallel to the Gregorian chant repertory dominant in the West.

The Christian church in the late Roman Empire; Rome and the Franks

The early centuries

Gregorian chant is the musical element in a rich ritual, a ritual developed and performed by a stable religious community. Instability threatens or destroys the tradition, if things cannot be remembered and repeated year after year. The stable conditions in which chant could flourish were achieved in principle (if not everywhere in practice) after Christianity was recognized as one of the official religions of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great (324–37).

Singing music in church in the Middle Ages; the function of Gregorian chant; levels of musical elaboration in the declamation of sacred texts; sacred sound for sacred space

Gregorian chant is the single-voice (‘monophonic’) music sung in the services of the Roman church. It was first recorded in writing, that is, with musical notation, in the ninth century. A great number of its Latin texts can be traced back for another century before that, but the melodies first become tangible, so to speak, in the ninth century. Gregorian chant is the earliest music preserved in such quantities – for we are talking about thousands of items. Much of the medieval corpus has dropped out of use, but it is still the music with the longest reconstructible history sung today. It is an inspiring thought that we can not only stand in an early medieval church like Charlemagne's Palatine chapel at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), built 792–805, but also perform the chant sung at the time the chapel was built or soon after. Inspiring in more ways than one: most obviously because something embedded deep in our history becomes audible. Admittedly, music does not survive in notation alone and there is, alas, no unbroken line of performance practice between then and now. When we sing Gregorian chant today we cannot ultimately be sure how close we are getting to the way it was done in Charlemagne's time. Nevertheless, the written link between then and now is longer than a millennium.

In this chapter the historical narrative continues roughly from the point where it was left at the end of section 3.iii. We are mostly concerned here with the cataclysm of the sixteenth century and the attempted restoration of medieval chant in the nineteenth. The restoration had a practical aim, that of improving the standard of music and performance in the Roman church. But the great fund of musicological knowledge which it created also provided the foundations of modern academic chant scholarship, much of which is not concerned with the practicalities of church worship at all. At the same time, Gregorian chant has also moved outside the church, or at least been co-opted for non-religious purposes. Because of its special associations it has often been used in modern non-sacred music, for example, opera and orchestral music in the nineteenth century, film music in the twentieth, and latterly even pop music.

The final section of this book is not, however, about the modern uses of chant but offers some observations on the difficulties in performing it. For not only the notes of medieval chant had to be restored, a way of performing it had to be reconstructed – or, rather, constructed, since no ‘hard’ evidence exists about matters like medieval voice production, tempo and dynamic exists.

Chant in the age of humanism; the ‘Editio Medicaea’; neo-Gallican chant

In the early sixteenth century most of the Gregorian repertory from the early Middle Ages was still being sung.