“There are two kinds of people in the world—those who love Neil Diamond and those who don’t. My ex-wife loves him.”
—Bill Murray, in What About Bob? (1991, dir. Frank Oz)
A notable feature of our community life at a residential seminary is the cycle of daily prayer according to the rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer: Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Holy Eucharist. Most of these liturgies involve at least some singing, and one of my principal duties as the faculty member in church music is planning and leading the music for these services, highlighting the breadth and depth of our Anglican musical heritage.
Among the liturgical items most commonly sung in our community, mirroring the historic practice of the Church, are the Psalms. And in the span of less than one year in this role, I have quickly learned one surprising truth, which is that there appear to be, not unlike Bob’s assessment of Neil Diamond, two kinds of people in seminary: those who love chant, and those who don’t.
Some members of the community have even attempted to discern a pattern in my musical decision-making and predict which days of the week will involve plainchant psalmody, and find a convenient unavoidable conflict for those days (not unlike the statistical phenomenon that more English cathedral choristers mysteriously fall ill on the 15th day of each month than on any other day).
In response, I eschew pattern, and migrate the plainsong offerings around without any noticeable predictability. To noble (but unsurprising to me) effect: during the course, again, of a single short year, seminarians have shared with me their growing appreciation (in some cases), or even affection (in many others) for the place of plainchant in our liturgical life.
Chant is the native musical language of the Christian Church. It is our original lyric, and along with Holy Scripture, the Creeds, and the Sacraments, one of the elements of shared identity between Oriental and Eastern Orthodoxy and Western churches. Like any language, Christian Chant possesses many dialects, and accents within those dialects: on its surface, the Syriac Abun d’bashmayo (Lord’s Prayer) chant bears little correspondence to a Byzantine kontakion, nor either again to a Gregorian Marian antiphon such as the Regina Cæli, let alone the austere declamations of the (Great) Litany.
Yet all indelibly maintain the same focal point: the primacy of the prayerful text. Christian chant serves two simultaneous purposes, which it shares with non-Christian religious chant more broadly across the globe: it serves a practical purpose in projecting, sustaining, and making more intelligible the human voice in a large, resonant acoustic; and it serves a ritual and doxological purpose in accentuating, setting apart as special, and elevating sacred texts used in worship. To these two purposes we can add a third, composite purpose that results from their blending together: chant also serves a beautifying purpose in creating a sound that is emotionally stirring and aesthetically pleasing: an acoustical incense.
Wolfgang Mozart once remarked that he thought the Sursum corda Anaphora chant to be the most perfect and beautiful melody in the world. It is certainly one of the most ancient melodies still being intoned by humans today: to quote the late Bruce Ford, its “universality bears witness to [its] antiquity.”[1] Probably of at least third-century origin, this chant predates the modal system described by Carolingian musical theoreticians (who, in turn, based their work on the earlier musical writings of Hellenistic Late Antiquity), and recognizable versions of the chanted anaphora melody, with its iconic ascending major third, are to be found in the chant dialects of both East and West.
Other items of the catholic chant repertoire bear the stamp of “pre-modal” deep antiquity and serve to highlight how this living tradition grows out of the earliest roots of Christianity: the psalm tones. Among the formulary tones for the chanting of Psalmody, one tone stands apart from the rest: the so-called Tonus peregrinus, or “Pilgrim Tone,” named thus because, unlike the other eight, it possesses two reciting notes, one for each half of the psalm verse.
In the Divine Office, Tonus Peregrinus has long been associated with Psalm 114 (In exitu Israel). Contemporary chant scholars, in step with contemporary liturgical scholars, continue to debate the extent to which early Christian liturgical practice grew out of (as opposed to parallel to) synagogue worship (with a common ancestry in the Second Temple before its destruction), but it is undeniable that the Tonus peregrinus bears clear melodic affinity to the B’tset Yisrael, the ancient Jewish intonation formula for … Psalm 114.
This melody is found in the living tradition of Sephardic communities, and corresponds with a scholarly reconstruction of ancient Masoretic cantillation symbols devised by Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura in the late 20th century. Other Psalm tones (notably tones I, IV, and VIII) also bear striking parallels to chant tones found particularly among Yemenite and Persian Jewish communities.
Similarly, the Exsultet chant of the Great Vigil of Easter possesses an indelible connection with the melodies of Yotzer for Sabbath and festival Kaddish prayers found in early attested (and still living) Jewish musical traditions. It is patently unlikely that, in early medieval Europe and the Levant, Jewish ritual chants would have borrowed musical formulas from a Christian Easter ritual, so the musical genealogy must certainly have flowed from the other direction.[2]
In both of these cases, as well as the Anaphora chants, we have as part of our living musical inheritance literal melodies that have been sung—prayed—by our ancestors in the Faith from the very foundation of the Church. Singing these prayers places the same melodies on our lips and in our hearts that generations of the faithful have sung.
Chant—call it plainsong, plainchant, Gregorian chant, what you will—is also by its very nature the music of supreme flexibility. It adapts itself to myriad liturgical contexts just as readily as do the reading of Scripture or the administration of the Sacrament. Its very fluidity means that it is not tied to any one form of exposition, and the liquid nature of chant means that it is supremely and essentially adaptable to a multiplicity of contexts and expressions. The singing of liturgical chant is just at home in a basement coffee-shop Emergent congregation as it is in a Gothic Augustinian abbey, as it is again in a colonial Tidewater wood-framed church with box pews. It works with grand organ accompaniment, with acoustic instruments—clarinets, violins, whatever (even, if you’re so inclined, handbells)—and of course, with the unadorned, unaccompanied human voice alone.
Chant is equally effective with a single voice, with a choir, and with a congregation. Chant melodies adapt to any language in which prayers are offered. It should be prayerful, but never maudlin; meditative, but never boring. The lines of the music interweave with the syllables of the words being prayed in a way that wants to heighten the texts, not obscure them. The cadence of chant is the cadence of voiced prayer. When I worked with young choristers in churches, I made sure that they all knew Rule Number One by heart: “Chant is never slow!”
When we sing chant, we are not playing at monasticism. Although monastic communities are responsible in many ways for the preservation and survival of chant in the West, it is not something that belongs to them. Chant is not just for monks and nuns, and not just from monks and nuns, either. It is the possession of the entire Church, and has been so since its inception. I offer a modest proposal for us all to stop referring to both the Daily Offices, and particularly their recitation by way of chant, as “monastic.”
Chant is also an inherent part of the Anglican tradition. Liturgical scholars such as John Harper have shown that, at the introduction of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, in the absence of any new instructional ordo or customaries, presbyters would have simply adapted the ritual actions they knew from the Latin Rite to the new forms and texts of the English liturgy, and cues within the prayer book suggest that this would have extended to music as well.
John Marbeck’s Booke of Common Praier Noted of 1550 was a thoroughgoing attempt to underscore this practice—and a close analysis of his musical settings of the prayer book texts reveals that, rather than composing his simple chants from scratch, he adapted and syllabified existing Gregorian and Sarum melodies more often than not.
Even as Marbeck’s work was obviated with the publication of the 1552 and subsequent prayer books, and the English Church took a decidedly more Reformed turn on liturgical practice, chant never completely vanished: Marbeck’s setting of the Litany (possibly adapted by Cranmer from pre-Reformation melodies) remained in use for solemn and state occasions straight through until the “rediscovery” of chant by Anglicans from the 1830s and ’40s.
The intonation of the Suffrages at Mattins and Evensong likewise continued apace “in quires and places where they sing,” and that most classically Anglican of musical practices, the so-called Anglican Chant, is an outgrowth of the medieval art of fauxbourdon, falsobordone, and faburden: improvising vocal harmonies to decorate psalm tone chants.
In an age of aesthetic anxiety and of the performative politicizing of musical style, chant can offer a complete sidestep to the pitfalls of the worship wars between so-called classical and popular music: it is neither. Chant is the bedrock foundation of Western classical music, but it is not classical music, despite what the music industry may tell us. Although the written repositories of notated chant melodies do indeed come to us from European manuscripts beginning in the ninth century, these manuscripts point to an inherited tradition passed down from musical forbears already considered ancient in the year 800, and composers who added new melodies to that corpus did so with full consciousness of being in a tradition that was far larger than they.
Chant, like our Christian faith, has its roots in Judaism, and is an inheritance that speaks to our grafting into the tree of Israel. At its core, therefore, Christian chant is non-Western music, which is one of the key secrets to its transcendent and adaptive nature. It is the possession of the entire Church. Chant, connecting us to Asian musical roots, readily transcends cultural specificity: it can sidestep the pitfalls of “-ism” that can too easily distract and plague so many other forms of music in worship.
Part of our inheritance from Judaism is what some call the mysticism of the word. John’s Gospel capitalizes that word, the Logos—the Word of God is Incarnate, among us and between us and within us. Perhaps Tolkien was not so far off in his mythical account in the Silmarillion wherein creation was sung into existence.
Abbé J.Y. Hameline wrote concerning chant that “it is not a question of adding music to the words, nor even of setting words to music … instead, it is a question of making the words bring forth the music they already contain.”[3] Chant has had in most cases over 1,000 years, and in many cases closer to 2,000 years, to shape and refine the sonic reality that words and music are inextricably linked.
Chant is ultimately effective in that it is—can be, should be—the musical expression of the Church’s very mission: it is able to speak to the world, in the world, but yet is not quite of the world. Chant stands as a countercultural witness in song of the simultaneously transcendent and immanent love of God in Christ. If Frank Oz had the first word in this essay, so St. John Chrysostom has the last: “Nothing elevates the soul, nor gives it wings, nor liberates it from earthly things, as much as a divine chant.”
[1] Raymond Glover, ed., The Hymnal 1982 Companion, Volume II, p.87
[2] See Eric Werner’s groundbreaking book The Sacred Bridge: The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in Synagogue and Church during the First Millennium (Dobson, 1959) for an in-depth examination of these musical connections. Although elements of Werner’s work have been challenged by liturgical scholars in recent decades, his musical analysis is without reproach.
[3] Quoted in Jacques Hourlier, Reflections on the Spirituality of Gregorian Chant. Paraclete Press, 1995, 27.
Mark Ardrey-Graves, DMA, is assistant professor of church music and organist-choirmaster of the Chapel of the Apostles at the School of Theology of the University of the South (Sewanee). Before his post at Sewanee, he served parishes in North Carolina and Virginia as organist and choirmaster. He served on the Task Force for Prayer Book and Liturgical Revision during the 2018–20 triennium, and is active in the Association of Anglican Musicians and the Royal School of Church Music in America.
