Gregorian and Old Roman Eighth-Mode Tracts: A Case Study in the Transmission of Western Chant (review)

Emma Hornby's study, developed from her Oxford doctoral thesis of 1998, addresses an important set of chants which have already attracted a lot of scholarly attention but which undoubtedly repay the more detailed analysis Hornby offers. The 'core repertory' consists of eleven tracts and four Easter Eve cantica: not many, one might think, but sufficient to constitute a base for engaging with some of the most difficult questions facing chant research. As is well known, the tracts are composed by drawing upon a pool of typical phrases or melodic formulas, and have thus been regarded as windows into the world of oral chant transmission. Knowledge of the formulas and the rules that govern their deployment should have been sufficient to enable the singer to declaim the text of the tract in the traditional manner, the manner deemed to be the right one for tracts. The rules one may uncover for tracts may not, of course, account for other types of chant, in fact in many cases they do not. But with tracts one feels to be on firm ground. The strongly formulaic character of the melodies has been taken as evidence of particular antiquity, always a strong stimulus to research, the feeling being that chant repertories have simple beginnings, with limited amounts of musical material, whereas in later ages knowledge of the old traditions weakens and the repertory is corrupted by foreign matter.

On the other hand, the late Helmut Hucke pointed out, with reference to a group of graduals, that repeated employment of a limited amount of musical material might have been occasioned by the need to produce a new body of chant in a short time. And in 1966, in the first edition of MGG, he cast doubt on several previous arguments for the antiquity of the tracts, one of them being what heperceived to be the occasional failure of the Gregorian and Old Roman traditions, respectively, to agree on their strategy for the deployment of the formulaic material. Many readers will be familiar with Willi Apel's brief account of the Gregorian melodies, together with an analytical table displaying the deployment of the stock phrases; this was considerably extended by Xaver Kainzbauer (in Beiträge zur Gregorianik, 11 (1991), 1-132), who explained how the choice of musical phrase was determined by syntactic features of the text to be sung. For the Old Roman melodies Edward Nowacki (in Early Music History, 6 (1986), 193-226) had anticipated Kainzbauer's study by several years, in setting out the standard procedures followed and explaining deviations from it as being motivated by the text. Furthermore, Nowacki pointed out examples where the Gregorian melody followed a different strategy. Despite obvious differences in style and content, both Nowacki's and Kainzbauer's articles include transcriptions of all the typical phrases in all the eighth-mode tracts in their respective traditions. A simple analytical table of the type Apel offered can easily be constructed from Kainzbauer's examples. Nowacki's study offers one. (Another significant item in the recent tract bibliography is Olivier Cullin's Sorbonne thesis of 1991, 'Le Trait dans les répertoires vieux-romain et grégorien, témoin de la psalmodie sans refrain'.)

Hornby's book covers similar ground to that in the articles of Kainzbauer and Nowacki, but brings the Gregorian and Old Roman melodies into direct comparison with each other, discusses them at greater length, and adopts a different manner of presentation. The main text covers over 220 pages, which are followed by over 160 pages of appendices, mainly photographic reproductions of tracts from medieval sources, not transcriptions.

In her first chapter, 'Introduction', Hornby sketches the historical background to the establishment of ostensibly Roman chant in Francia in the eighth and ninth centuries, explains the nomenclature for her musical analyses, surveys previous writing, and makes clear why further study is necessary. Correct...