Old Roman chant
- Helmut Hucke
- , revised by Joseph Dyer
Extract
Old Roman chant is a liturgical repertory of melodies that survives in certain manuscripts dating from between the 11th and 13th centuries, but it must have existed in some form or other centuries before. Because of the nature of the source material, musical and historical, most scholarly discussions of Old Roman chant have related the repertory to the better-known Gregorian chant. Recognising that both are ‘dialects’ of the same textual and liturgical tradition, it has been proposed to call the chant sung in Rome up until the 13th century simply ‘Roman’ and coin a term like ‘romano-frankish’ for the music of the Gregorian tradition.
Three graduals and two antiphoners survive: one gradual from the church of S Cecilia in Trastevere in Rome written in 1071 (CH-CObodmer C 74); one gradual perhaps from S Giovanni in Laterano, Rome, from the 11th or 12th century (I-Rvat lat.5319); one gradual from S Pietro in Rome from the 13th century (...
