This is a story I’ve never told, an important one because it affects the very foundation of Western music and really all music everywhere. It doesn’t matter the style—classical, rock, rap, country, or electronic dance music—they all owe something to Gregorian chant. This foundational music is about far more than spiritual oozings during hard times. Each chant is structured to tell a story; their presence and eventual ubiquity became the whole story of how mankind came to understand his place in the universe.
It’s that important.
Gregorian chant emerged from the earliest years of Christianity as a blending of rabbinical texts fused with Greek musical styles and theories. It was deployed in the form of psalm singing in the early centuries and added texts from the Christian liturgy gradually for centuries. We know this from archeological work in musicology and looking at the earliest attempts at scratching out notes and patterns. The body of work was mostly completed by the eighth century, even before we had a clear method of writing it out. It was developed and sustained by an oral tradition of training mostly centered in monasteries and great cathedrals.
The invention of notation in the 11th century was a turning point, as the creation of any great technology necessarily is. The inventor was Guido d’Arezzo (991–1033), a monk and musicologist. His innovation profoundly disturbed choirmasters across Europe who worried for their jobs. If music could be written out and read by anyone, the teacher’s essential role is thereby diminished, or so they feared. Nonetheless, his psalter came to be published, and it recruited students across Europe to write up the chants from various monastic traditions, which is why we have so many manuscripts emerging from the 11th century onward.
Speeding up the story a bit here, the Council of Trent following the Reformation turned out to be a disaster for church music because, as would prove typical, the clerics who reformed the liturgy did not give a thought to the musical tradition behind it. An entire century would go by before the music books of the liturgy came out, and by then, a new theory was in fashion. Melismatic, swirling, complex music was to be replaced by a didactic theory focused wholly on the understandability of the texts. All the music books of the church came to be profoundly bowdlerized.
Let’s fast forward again to the 19th century, when a Romantic intellectual movement swept through every major religious tradition. In Judaism, this produced Zionism, and in Islam, it generated a fundamentalist push, and it was the same in Protestantism in all countries. All these movements longed for a forgotten past of purity and rigor and tried to recreate it from old books and nostalgia. In Catholicism, this manifested itself in a longing for a purer version of liturgy, including restored Gregorian chants.
The first institution to undertake this effort was of course the Vatican. The pope vowed to restore what was lost. The first real gradualum (song book) with integrity appeared under Vatican sponsorship.
By the 1880s, however, a new obsession with copyright swept through all publishing circles. The first product of these reform efforts was copyrighted by the Vatican. This proved to be a problem because monasteries around the world were being overcharged for manuscripts of music that they had long sung.
The Solesmes monastery in France came up with a novel solution: They would produce their own books with slight differences from the Vatican edition by the addition of a little mark called the ictus, the details of which are best examined in another venue. The books were so good that they outsold the Vatican editions. Eventually the Vatican acquiesced and, after a bitter and protracted battle, proclaimed the Solesmes editions to be the official chants of the church.
This only made the problem worse. Now Solesmes controlled its own copyright and did so doggedly because it was so hard won. They held on to the chants of 2,000 years as a private possession, variously tapping publishers in numerous countries to be the official distributors of their private treasure. These publishers saw a chance to make bank and did. They sold expensive books to parishes and schools the world over, institutions that could hardly afford them.
Generations went by as resentments grew and a kind of cartel of musical elites stood guard over the great tradition, while pocketing millions in profits and preening as essential protectors of the chant. Pretty much, these distributors came to be feared and loathed by nearly everyone as copyright police would roam parishes looking for pirated chants to litigate. It’s not clear that the Solesmes monastery knew this was going on. They were too busy praying and doing monk stuff to see what was actually going on around the world.
Then came the Second Vatican Council, which once again sent the stable tradition of music into upheaval. With the new vernacular, populists seized on the moment to overthrow the musical cartel. Down with Latin! Down with these dreary tunes! Out came the folk music and the guitars in parish after parish. This time coincided with a new fashion for folk music in popular culture anyway. The entire market for Gregorian chant collapsed almost overnight like some kind of grassroots revolt.
There matters sat until the turn of the 21st century. I had fallen in love with the chant tradition and wanted to see it revived. But everywhere I and others turned, we found an aging and extremely stodgy remnant of the old guard, still seething with resentment about their cultural losses but unwilling to do much about it. We had new scanning technologies available, so I scoured the law books to discover that the old Vatican chants had fallen into the public domain. I had them scanned and put online—the first of what would become some 70 or so books I had scanned and distributed.
The moment finally came when I confronted the core problem: the copyrights of Solesmes. I wrote the monastery and told them what I had done with so many other books. Could I do their books too? Then an email came back with one magic word: “Oui.” That was it. Clearly no one had an appetite for the old battles. Everyone was sick of it. My team and I got to work.
The next step was to convince the Vatican itself to put the chants into the commons. This was a harder ask. I was at an event where I saw a curial official of the church ordering a drink, and I introduced myself. I showed him my phone with PDFs of the chants and said we really should do the same to the Vatican books and all its ownership rights. He agreed and arranged for me to go to the Vatican to speak, where I gave an impassioned speech on the topic to a group of gathered bishops and cardinals. How could they not agree? These chants belonged to everyone. It made no sense for the church to retain them as a private possession. There was widespread agreement, and the deed was done.
Very soon after, we saw the unfolding of a new enthusiasm for this great repertoire. Books and journals came out everywhere, and new choirs came to be founded across the country and the world. At long last, after more than a century of struggles, and, really, a thousand years of confusion and disorientation, clarity had finally arrived. No one doubted it: This tradition belonged to everyone. It was the technology that made it possible but also, and crucially, a change in the copyright status of the chants themselves.
