Alright, I’m gonna music nerd on you for a second because I have a lot of feelings on this. I was listening to some chant while I was washing dishes, and a couple of the songs on my playlist were titled “gregorian”. I’m going to tell you why that’s wrong and what Gregorian actually *is*. I’m also going to flex on those trad-types that don’t know this, because I’m sick of people pointing to obviously-not-gregorian chant to be Gregorian. Please note, I don’t have sources on here directly because this is what I learned in both my high school and college music theory/music history classes.
A lot of people think any chant in a romantic language is Gregorian. Which is…. alright there is a lot wrong with that idea. For one, that’s very westernized thinking. Sure, the Gregorian style was penned in Europe, but a LOT of chant was made in German. Like, a lot. The Germans were music FIENDS up until relatively recently (like, half of the composers I know of that are one of the greats are German or Austrio-Hungarian).
What Gregorian Chant Isn’t:
What Gregorian Chant IS:
I can’t embed any more videos into the post, so from here on out it will be links to other songs.
Now, I know if you haven’t studied music, or been trained in singing, you probably can’t tell the immediate difference between some of these. Which is totally fine! I understand completely. So we will take the most easily comparable ones from each group, that is the Miserere mei, Deus and the Tantum Ergo.
Now, all three of the ones that are in the “not Gregorian” category are purposefully trying to sound like Gregorian chant. And Song of Kings comes very close, but definitely only captures the spirit of what we think Gregorian sounded like nowadays.
The Miserere does have some Gregorian themes, in which they have a melodic line above pedal notes (notes that do not change and are part of a chord). But for the most part, every line is mostly moving at/near the same time to different notes in the different chords. Gregorian chant is characterized by being monotone, having only one voice(s) do the melody the entire time, and any other voices matching the pitch perfectly or else doing pedal tones in one or two chords the entire time. It does not allow for men and women to sing together (generally speaking), because the notes that are sung have to be the exact same across everyone singing. That means a tenor and a bass cannot sing together, unless the bass is just doing pedal tones, or the bass can sing high enough to sing the melody. It requires every member of the body that is singing to be able to sing the exact notes that are in the melody. If the highest note in the chant is an A4, and one of them cannot sing it, they cannot just go to an A3 (the octave lower). If you can’t tell by just watching the video (if you don’t know music), there are several lines going on, and the singers are largely moving at different times and singing different melodies, though all within the same chords of each other. I’m not going to go into it, but this is called 4-part harmony, where each “voice” has a different line. It looks like this:
Now, if we take the Tantum Ergo, you can see there is just one line of notes the entire time (though it looks different because they wrote music down a little differently prior to the 1600s). There is also only one voice doing the singing, rather than multiple, but even if there was multiple, it is just one line of music, rather than the four that you see above. This is where the Veni Creator Spiritus is a better example, since you can hear there are multiple people singing, despite them all singing the same thing.
Now this brings me Mass parts. The part that the priest sings, absolutely Gregorian, even if he is doing it in English, because Gregorian is not characterized by language, there is only one melodic line, and there is no instruments. (Did I mention that Gregorian chant predates the organ? And the organ was initially not allowed in churches because it wasn’t using the human voice?) But the parts that are normally “chanted” by the congregation? That was not, and still often is not, Gregorian.
Gregorian was the default for Mass because it was considered more reverent. When Baroque, Classical, and even sometimes Romantic composers looked at chant, they saw that it was lacking, and added instruments (even creating the organ to use in a church since harpsichords were dissallowed). And actually made is musical. But that doesn’t make it Gregorian just because it is chant and is in Latin.
