In his 1974 article Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant, Leo Treitler discusses the dissemination of chant through the Holy Roman Empire, which was prompted by Charlemagne’s desire for uniformity in liturgical practice. Charlemagne arranged for official chanters to teach far-lying dioceses the official chants, and viewed divergence from these as corruption of the music. The chants which we know as Gregorian were ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, which taught them to Pope Gregory the Great. Because these chants were believed in this way to be divinely prescribed, corruption was to be purged and the authoritative canon to be fixed. Treitler postulates that this is the first occurrence of our modern view on the musical canon, and points out that the co-incidence of the Carolingian reforms and the origins of notation for chant seems intentional (that Charlemagne resorted to notation in order to fix the correct repertoire for the entire empire and for future generations). This causality is complicated, however, by several factors. Elucidating these factors takes Treitler through an explanation of Bartlett’s theories on memorization, and an exploration of the process by which a chant is transmitted orally.
Oral transmission of chant has several important consequences: the workings of memory mean that chant remembered is not simply reproduced, but rather reconstructed, and if the method of transmission of chant is oral in the absence of scores, the method of composition is also oral (in some ways, similar to improvisation, but different in the details and purpose). Formulas and formulaic systems in chant both constrict and aid the singer in creating/recreating chants for various parts of the service. These conclusions are drawn from the studies of oral transmission which have their beginning in Homeric studies, yet another nested explanation in this article. Treitler’s necessary digressions and detours follow eachother seamlessly and without superfluity.
Treitler shows how Homeric epic, as presented by Parry, makes sense as seen within the tradition of oral epic, and how what we know/study about Homer helps our knowledge of chant and other oral repertoires. One major commonality is the use of formulas as both aide-memoires and compositional techniques: for instance, the beginning and end of lines tend to be memorized easily, and so this lends itself to formulas for these components. Treitler shows examples of chants (Gregorian and Old Roman) which start and end similarly or contain other melodic formulas, and similarity in single chants – Tracts, which are long antiphonal chants – where each strophe begins and ends the same way. A famous example from oral poetry is the Homeric epithet, a naming formula for the various gods, goddesses and heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey; e.g. gray-eyed Athena, or swift-footed Achilles.
Finally, Treitler speculates about the possible decline in oral composition and greater use of what we would normally consider memorization (with more tradition of specific melodies rather than general formulas), preceding the beginnings of notation. These melodies could have become more fixed with the passing of time, or in accordance with the prevailing tradition, becoming a prescribed canon for liturgical observance. Whether the Carolingian reforms caused this trend towards canon before notation, or used notation to bring about a unified canon is not clear.
The differences in style between the Gregorian and Old Roman chants are explored in light of oral transmission: Treitler presents three possible scenarios regarding the reliance of each tradition on oral transmission and concludes that it seems most plausible that Old Roman chant shows more evidence of oral transmission because it was oral longer, rather than that it was “more oral” or that the Gregorian chants had these aspects of oral transmission purged from them editorially. Other authors have concluded that Old Roman chant is “more primitive” and therefore older; Treitler does not rely on the duality of primitive and advanced to explain the relative age of these traditions. Treitler ends the analysis with three different angles from which to examine the uniformity of chant: 1) the Carolingian reforms caused uniformity; 2) the chants show this uniformity because of a common ancestor, so to speak, which can be traced; and 3) oral transmission causes and makes use of this uniformity in composition. It is difficult to examine Old Roman chant and Gregorian chant from before the Carolingian reforms, because the only notated examples we have of Old Roman postdate these reforms. For this same reason, it is difficult to obtain evidence of a common ancestor tradition of chant, either in written examples of the ancestor itself, or in older examples of Old Roman and Gregorian chant. The third angle is likely to be the most fertile for future study: oral transmission, though increasingly difficult to encounter in today’s world, is still present, as well as studies cited in Treitler’s article which rely on Eastern European traditions which may no longer be extant. Further study of oral transmission may give us textual analysis techniques which can probe Old Roman and Gregorian chant for their DNA, so to speak, and determine (as modern DNA testing can now tell us so much) details about their ancestry.
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