THE PREEMINENCE OF ROME

THE PREEMINENCE OF ROME

As imperial capital, the Rome of the first centuries of Of ours, it housed a large number of Christians, who gathered and celebrated Their rites in secret. 

  In 313 the emperor Constantine granted Christians the Rights and the same protection as for practitioners of other religions of the empire; From the outset the Church emerged from its underground life and during the course of the century Iv Latin replaced the Greek as the official language of the liturgy in Rome. 

   As you The Roman Emperor was declining, that of the bishop of Rome was increasing, and Gradually began to recognize the preeminent authority of Rome in Questions of faith and discipline.

   With an increasing number of converts and riches Church began to build large basilicas, and services could no longer be relatively informal, as they were in the early days. Between the fifth century and the seventh century many Popes engaged in the revision of the liturgy and from music. 

   The Rule of St. Benedict (c 520), set of instructions determining the Monastery, mentions a monk, but does not Their duties. In the following centuries, however, the monastic chantre became a Key figure in the musical landscape, since he was responsible for organizing the Library and the scriptorium and guided the celebration of the liturgy.   In the century saw existed Already in Rome a schola cantorum, a well-defined group of singers and teachers In charge of training boys and men for church musicians. 

   In the sixth century there existed A choir, and is attributed to Gregory I (Gregory the Great), pope from 590 to 604, an effort Of regulation and standardization of liturgical songs. The achievements of Gregory were the object of such admiration that in the mid-ninth century the Take form a legend according to which he would have been himself, under divine inspiration, Who composed all the melodies used by the Church. Its real contribution, Though probably very important, was undoubtedly less than what the Medieval tradition came later to impute to him. Recoding is attributed to it. 

   Of the liturgy and the reorganization of the schola cantorum; The designation of certain Parts of the liturgy for the various religious services throughout the year, according to a An order which remained almost unchanged until the sixteenth century; Besides, it would have been him The driving force behind the movement that led to the adoption of a uniform In all Christendom. Such a great and vast work could not, like It is evident, have been carried out in just fourteen years.

   The chants of the Roman church are one of the great treasures of Western civilization. Like romantic architecture, they stand as a Religious faith of medieval man and were the source and inspiration of much of the Western music until the sixteenth century. 

   They are one of the oldest Vocal repertoires still in use worldwide and include some of the most Notable melodic achievements of all time. Still, it would be a mistake Consider them purely as music to be heard, as it is not possible to separate them Its liturgical context and purpose.

THE PARENTS OF THE CHURCH

This perspective is in tune with the conviction of the Fathers Of the Church that the value of music resided in its power to raise the soul to contemplation Of divine things. They firmly believed that music could influence, For better or for worse, the character of the hearer. Philosophers and men Of the Church of the High Middle Ages never developed the idea - that in our Days we have for obvious - that the music could be heard having only in view The aesthetic enjoyment, the pleasure that provides the combination of beautiful sounds. 

   

   They did not deny, Of course, that the sound of the music is pleasant, but they defended that all pleasures Must be judged according to the Platonic principle that beautiful things exist for To remind us of the perfect and divine beauty; Consequently, the apparent beauties of the World that only inspire selfish delight, or the desire for possession, must be Rejected. 

   This attitude is at the origin of many of the statements about music that We find in the writings of the Fathers of the Church (and, later, of some theologians Of the Protestant Reformation).  More specifically, his philosophy dictated that music be the servant of the religion. It is only worthy to be heard in the church the music that through its charms opens the soul to the Christian teachings and predisposes it to holy thoughts. 

   An Since they did not believe that music without lyrics could produce such effects, excluded, Instrumental music of public worship, although it was Faithful to use a lyre to accompany the singing of hymns and psalms in their homes And informal meetings. At this point the Fathers of the Church were Difficulties, because the Old Testament, especially the Book of Psalms, is full Of references to the psaltery, harp, organ and other musical instruments. 

   As Explain these allusions? The usual feature was the allegory: "The tongue is the 'psaltery' of the Lord [...] by 'harp' we must understand the mouth, that the Holy Spirit, which plectrum, Makes us vibrate [...] the 'organ' is our body ... These and many other explanations of the The same order was typical of a time that pleased to allegorize the Scriptures.

   

    The exclusion of certain types of music from the religious services of the early church Also had practical reasons. The more elaborate vocal pieces, the great choirs, Instruments and dance were associated in the spirit of the converts, by means of a Long tradition, to the pagan spectacles. 

    While the sense of connected pleasure To such types of music could not, so to speak, be transferred from the theater and the square Of the market for the church, this music was the object of great distrust; before "To be deaf to the sound of the instruments" than to indulge in these "devil choirs" To these 'lascivious and pernicious songs'. "It would not be absurd for those who Heard the mystic voice of the cherub of the heavens expose their ears to the songs Dissolute and the melodious melodies of the theater? "But God, pitying himself for weakness Human, "added to the precepts of religion the sweetness of the melody [...] the melodies Of the psalms were introduced so that those who are still children They are, after all, forming their souls, even when they think they are just singing The music. "Some people say that I have bewitched people with the melodies of my hymns," he said. Saint Ambrose, adding with pride, "not the business." 

    Who despised music and tended to consider all art and culture as Of the religion, but there were also men who not only defended the art and the Pagan literature, as they themselves, so deeply sensitive to their beauty, Fearing the pleasure they felt in listening to music, even in church. At Famous words of St. Augustine express this dilemma (see vignette). In 387 d. St. Augustine began to write a treatise, Da Música, of which Completed six books. The first five, after a brief introductory definition of the Music, deal with the principles of metrics and rhythm. The sixth, revised around 409, Deals with the psychology, ethics and aesthetics of music and rhythm. Saint Augustine Had initially designed six other books dedicated to the melody.

   

    The conflict between the sacred and the profane in art is not exclusive to the Middle Ages. There has always been general agreement on the idea that certain types of music, by this Or that motive, are not fit to be heard in the church. The various churches, The various communities, the different eras, have drawn the frontier at different points, although this limit is not always clear. The reason why in the first Christian times it was sometimes fixed as close to asceticism more Extreme is related to the historical situation. 

    The Church, in its beginnings, was a group The task of converting the entire population of Europe Christianity. To do this he had to establish a clearly separated Christian community Of the pagan society that surrounded it and organized it in order to proclaim, for all The possible means, the urgency to subordinate all things of this world to the well- - eternal being of the soul. 

    

    Thus, in the opinion of many people, which army The battlefield, could not afford to take with In the form of music which was not strictly mission. In the great metaphor of Toynbee, the Church was "the chrysalis from which our Western society '. His "seed of creative power" 2 2 in the field of music had By incarnation the Gregorian chant. 

    The Christian missionaries who went through the Roman roads in the early Middle Ages took these melodies to all Regions of Western Europe. They were one of the sources that, over time, Came to give rise to Western music.

BOÉCIO

    The theory and philosophy of the music of the ancient world - or what Remained accessible after the fall of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions - Were collected, summarized, modified and transmitted to the West over Of the first centuries of the Christian.

    The authors who were most noted in this process Were Martianus Cappella, with his encyclopedic treatise entitled The Mercury and Philology (early fifth century) and Anicius Manlius Severinus Boetius (C. 480-524), with his De institutione music (early twentieth century). 

    Martianus' work was essentially a manual on the seven liberal arts: Grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic and harmony, in this order. 

    At The first three - the arts of the word - came to be grouped under the name of trivium (the triple path), while the last four received from Boethius the designation of Quadrivium (the quadruple way) and constituted the mathematical arts. Martianus resorted to the artifice of presenting his introductions to these subjects Like speeches of the bridesmaids in the marriage of Mercury with Philology. 

    The part Consecrated to harmony is to a large extent based on the Greek eclectic author of Century Aristides Quintiliano, who, in turn, sought his views Theoretical to Aristoxene, although introducing in his exposition neoplatonic ideas.

   Boethius was the most respected and influential authority in the Middle Ages in the Field of music. His treatise, written in the early years of the twentieth century, Of the author, was a compendium of music framed in the scheme of the Quadrivium, thus serving as the rest of the mathematical Preparation for the study of philosophy.     Little in this treaty was the fruit of Boethius, for it was a compilation of the Greek sources at his disposal, Special emphasis on a long Nicomachean treatise, which did not survive until the Our days, and for the first book of the Harmony of Ptolemy. 

    Boethius wrote Manuals for arithmetic (which survived, up to now) and For geometry and astronomy, which have disappeared. He also translated from Greek into The Latin four Aristotle's treatises on logic, which are collectively known By Organum. Although medieval readers may not have realized the Dependence on Boethius in relation to other authors, they understood that the authority Of Greek musical theory and mathematics was in what Boethius said about these Themes. 

    The contradictions of De institutione musica, whose Three books were decidedly Pythagorean, while the fourth contained elements From Euclid and Aristoxene, and the fifth, based on Ptolemy, was Partially antipathy. The message that most readers That music was a science of numbers and that numerical quotients determined The ranges allowed in the melody, the consonances, the composition of the scales And the tuning of instruments and voices. 

    In the most original part of the book, chapters Boethius divides music into three genres: worldly music Cosmic "), the fixed numerical relations observable in the movement of the planets, in the Succession of the seasons and in the elements, that is, the harmony in the macrocosm; music Human body, which determines the union of body and soul and their parts, the Microcosms, and instrumental music, or audible music produced by instruments, Including the human voice, which illustrates the same principles of order, particularly In the numerical quotients of the musical intervals. 

    In the image of the cosmos that Boethius And the other ancient writers delineated in their dissertations on worldly music And human music came to be reflected in the art and literature of the Middle Ages In the structure of the "Paradise" in the last corner of the Divine Comedy Of Dante. Traces of the doctrine of human music persisted throughout the Rebirth and even up to our days in the form of astrology.

    Boethius also underlined the influence of music on character and morals. In Virtue of this, gives music an important role, in its own right, in education Young people, and it is still an introduction to the philosophical studies more Advanced. By placing instrumental music - music as we understand it today - in Third, taking it, presumably, as the least important category, Boethius was well aware that, like his mentors, he conceived music more as an object of knowledge than as a creative art or a form of Expression of feelings. Music, he says, is the discipline he deals with to examine The diversity of the high and low sounds by reason and Directions.       Therefore, the real musician is not the singer or the one who does Songs by instinct without knowing the meaning of what he does, but the philosopher, the critic, The one who presents the faculty of making judgments, according to speculation or Appropriate to the music, about the modes and rhythms, the genre of the songs, the Consonances, of all things' concerning the subject23.

Bibliography

    Transcriptions of all known Greek melodies and fragments are presented in Egen Pohlmann, Denkmäler altgriechischer Fragmente und Fälschungen, Nuremberg, Carl, 1970. Most of the Greek texts referred to in this chapter exist in English translation. Strunk Includes a careful selection of excerpts from Aristotle, Plato, Aristotle and Cleonides in ch. 1 Of Source Readings in Music History, New York, Norton, 1950, pp. 3-4. Andrew Barker (Ed.), Greek Musical Writings, i, The Musician and His Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, contains texts by poets, playwrights and philosophers, including a new translation Of the work of Pseudo-Plutarch, Da Música. The following translations may also be consulted: Aristoxene, The Harmonics of Aristoxenus, trans., Notes and introd. 

     By Henry S. Macran, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1902; Euclid, Sectio canonis, trad, by J. Mathiesen, An annotated translation of Euclid's division Of a monochord, JMT, 19.2, 1975, 236-258; Sextus Empiricus, Against the Musicians, trad, And notes by Denise Davidson Greaves, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1986; Aristides Quintiliano, On Music in Three Books, trans., With introd., Comments and notes, from Thomas J. Mathiesen, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983; Bacchius Senior, trad, by Otto Steinmayer, "Bacchius Geron's Introduction to the Art of Music," JMT, 29.2, 1985, 271-298; Martianus Cappella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, trans, in Willian Harris Stahl et. 

    there, Martianus Cappella and the Seven Liberal Arts, New York, Columbia University Press, 1971; Boethius, Fundamentals of Music (De institution et musica libri quinque), trad., With introd. And notes, by Calvin M. Bower, ed. Claude V. Palisca, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989.

In-depth reading

Greek Music

    The most complete studies are the chapter by Isobel Henderson, «Ancient Greek Music », NOHM, vol. 1, and Edward Lippman, Musical Thought in Ancient Greece, New York, Columbia University Press, 1964; V. Also Reginald P. Winnington-Ingram, 'Greece, I', in NG, for questions concerning history, instruments, theory and practice, and Thomas J. Mathiesen, A Bibliography of Sources for the Study of Ancient Greek Music, Hackensack, NJ, Boonin, 1974. 

    On the fragments of Greek music recently discovered, v. Thomas J. Mathiesen, "New Fragments of Ancient Greek Music," AM, 53, 1981, 14-32. For the ethos question, v. Warren De Witt Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1966, and Thomas J. Mathiesen, "Harmony and Ethos in ancient Greek music, JM, 3, 1984, 264-279. For a more in-depth analysis of the Greek theory, see. 

    Richard Crocker, «Pythagorean Mathematics and Music, in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 22, 1963-1964. 189-198 And 325-335, Reginald P. Winnington-Ingram, Mode in Ancient Greek Music, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, John Solomon, Toward a history of the tonoi, JM, 3, 1984, 242-251, and André Barbera, "Octave species", ibid., 229-241. About other Greek texts on music, v. Andrew Barker (ed), Greek Musical Writings, Which also includes a description of the Greek musical instruments in the introduction. 

    About Oresteia and its dramatic and musical structure, v. William C. Scott, Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater, Hanover, NH, University Press of New England, 1984; about The role of the Greek choir, v. Warren Anderson, " 'What songs the sirene sang': problems and Conjectures in ancient Greek music ", in Royal Music Association Research Chronicle, 15, 1979, 1-16.

Hebrew Music

    On Hebrew music, v. A. Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in Its Historical Development, New York, Schocken, 1967. For a summary of the most recent studies and perspectives on the relationship between Jewish music and the music of the early Christian church, v. James W. Mckinnon, «The question of Psalmody in the ancient synagogue, EMH, 6, 1986, 159-191.

Byzantine Music

    V. Oliver Strunk, Essays on Music in the Byzantine World, New York, Norton, 1977, and Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnody, 2. ' Ed., Oxford, Clarendon, 1971, And Eastern Elements in Western Chant, Oxford, Byzantine Institute, 1947. About Byzantine iconography, v. Joachim Braun, «Musical instruments in Byzantine Illuminated manuscripts, EM, 8, 1980, 312-327.

Western liturgy

     For the study of the Mass and the office, v. Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright and Edward Yarnold, SJ, The Study of Liturgy, New York, Oxford University Press, 1978; On the corner Benaventine, v. Thomas Forrest Kelley, "Montecassino and the old Beneventan chant," EMH, 5, 1985, 53-83. 

    On the origins of Gregorian chant and the legend of St. Gregory, v. Leo Treitler, «Homer And Gregory: the transmission of epic poetry and plainchant, MQ, 55, 1974, 333-372, and GLHWM, 1, and Centonate chant: Flickwerk et al., JAMS, 28, 1975, 1-23, Willi Apel, "The central problem of Gregorian chant", JAMS, 9, 1956, 118-127, Paul Cutter, "The question of 'old Roman chant': the reappraisal *, AM, 39, 1967, 2-20, and Helmut Hucke, "Toward a New Historical View of Gregorian Chant," JAMS, 33, 1980, 437-467. The three Recent articles reflect the controversy over the origins of Gregorian chant, which also comes Summarized in Andrew Hughues, Medieval Music: the Sixth Liberal Art, Toronto, Univesity Of Toronto Press, 1980, Sections 605 et seq. Kenneth Levy, "Toledo, Rome and the Legacy of Gaul," EMH, 4, 1984, 49-99, and 'Charlemagne's Archetype of Gregorian Chant', JAMS, 40, 1987, 1-30, presents a new Date for the Gregorian chant written record (c. 900) and a new perspective on the 'Suppression' of the Gallican. On the role of the singer, v. Margot E. Fassler, «The office of the singer in early western Monastic rules and costumaries: a preliminary investigation, EMH, 5, 1985, 29-51. About Boethius, v. Calvin M. Bower, "Boethius and Nicomachus: an essay concerning the Sources of De institutione musica, Vivarium, 16, 1978, 1-45. About music under the trivium and the quadrivium, v. E. Lippman, "The place of Music in the liberal arts system ", in Jan LaRue (ed.), Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, New York, Norton, 1966, pp. 545-559. See also J. W. McKinon (ed.), Music in Early Christian Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, and M. E. Fassler, "Accent, meter and rhythm in medieval Treatises 'De rithmis', JM, 5, 1987, 164-190.