The Chant Revival of 1903

In 1903 a papal decree made the Solesmes restoration of chant the model for the whole church.

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MedievalMode

Chant was once a way of singing handed down in churches. After 1903 it had editions, a method and examinations, and therefore a right and a wrong.

Time and place

Rome, 22 November 1903. Pius X issued the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini, while the abbey of Solesmes had already spent half a century on manuscripts and had been publishing facsimiles and studies in the Paleographie musicale since 1889.

What happened

From the 1830s the French abbey of Solesmes worked to restore Benedictine liturgy and chant. Dom Mocquereau used facsimiles and comparison of medieval manuscripts to reconstruct how the melodies should be read, and proposed phrasing based on word accent and grouping. The 1903 document made chant and polyphony the models for church music, gave the Solesmes books quasi-official standing, and led to liturgical editions such as the Roman Gradual. The method turned equal note values, the ictus and phrasing into rules that could be taught.

What changed

Chant moved from local parish habit to an authorised repertoire with a pedagogy and examinations. It entered two tracks at once, liturgical and scholarly-musical. Conservatories opened chant classes, composers treated chant as material, and record catalogues began to distinguish the Solesmes manner from other ways of singing. After the liturgical reforms of the 1960s Latin chant withdrew from parishes but survived on record and in the early music movement. The argument over rhythm did not end either; later semiology questioned the equal-value reading.

Listen for the turn

Begin with the hymn Come Ye Souls by Sin Afflicted, where a chant-like melody is wrapped in four-part harmony, the sound of chant entering ordinary singing. Then Victoria's Pange lingua, where the chant moves slowly in a middle voice while the others gather around it. Finally Respighi's preludes, where chant becomes a harmonic experiment at the piano. None is a liturgical recording, yet each shows where chant went after leaving the church.

Related

This turn belongs to Medieval and connects 格里高利圣咏, Mode and 弥撒曲.

Sources

• Grove Music Online, entry "Solesmes" — restoration, publications and papal documents checked, not quoted
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Gregorian chant" — notation and rhythm checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.