How Plainsong was Midwife to Europe

This is revised from pages 245-247 of Beethoven’s Anvil, Basic Books, 2001.

Medieval Europe was inhabited by a collection of tribes and states, shot through with tendrils of Christianity following the remains of the Roman Empire and with the Islamic world pushing up in Spain. European culture, considered as a specific constellation of ideas, modes of expression, and forms of organization, hardly existed, nor did any of those people think of themselves are European. Europe, as such, originated in Christendom, and the core institution of Christendom, the Christian Church, was held together, not only by religious doctrine, but by religious ritual and practice.

Plainsong was at the center of that ritual, and much religious practice as well. During the medieval period most plainsong was used within religious communities as a daily aspect of their religious life, rather than being performed with a congregation on Sundays. While this body of music has its roots in pre-Christian music of the Jewish service, it is generally known as Gregorian chant, after Pope Gregory I, who played a major role in organizing and codifying the chants late in the 6th Century CE. These chants are generally regarded as the fountainhead of Western classical music, all of whose forms have some link to this Gregorian lineage, though many other musics will eventually be put to classical use. For this reason we can think of the classical music as developing under a Gregorian Contract.

Plainsong is pure melody, sung in unison, utterly without pulse and meter. It is, in effect, spirit without body. That is the core conception that over the course of centuries becomes stretched and modified, both by extending its own devices (e.g. the development of parallel vocal lines and then polyphony) and by assimilating other types of music, including various dance styles, whether the courtly minuet of the Baroque and Classical periods or the mazurkas beloved by Chopin.

Plainsong is also the source of Western musical notation. The earliest notation appears in manuscripts from the ninth century and makes no use of the staff that became typical of later notation. The symbols representing the notes are called neumes and appear to be derived from hand gestures used to indicate the direction of melodic flow. Neumes indicate only relative pitch, rather than the absolute pitch of contemporary notation, and note durations are not clearly represented. We must regard this notation as a mnemonic aid, signs to help one remember melodies one has heard and sung. Without that prior experience, the neumes are deeply ambiguous. It would take several centuries for neumes to evolve into modern notation.

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The various tribes, cities, and states of Medieval Europe were all, in some measure, under the sway of the Roman Catholic church, and thus of its plainsong-based ritual. Europe was dotted with communities of chanting religious, and congregations would hear chanting at church services. Plainsong thus has geopolitical implications. While Europe’s various cultures each had their own local musics, they all had plainsong as a common musical practice.

European tribes first began to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world as Christians. As such they deemed themselves superior to all infidels—such as the Arabs, who showed their inferiority by studying mathematics and drinking coffee rather than alcohol. It wasn’t until the 17th century, after the Western Church had been split by the Reformation, that the secular concept of Europe replaced the sacred concept of Christendom as a touchstone of identity.

Just as humankind originated through music-making somewhere in Africa, so Europe begins to unify through the sacred music-making of the chanting religious. As that body of music begins to differentiate and develop, it moves into secular contexts and mingles with vernacular musics. From this process, over a course of centuries, emerges the high art known as classical music—at least within the Western nations. Some of that music was written to sacred ends—for instance, the cantatas and masses of Johann Sebastian Bach. Some was written for the opera in its various forms. And some was written for aristocratic patrons, a state of affairs that continued well into the 19th century.

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Without plainsong, no church. Without the church, no Europe. Without Europe, no Western culture. Without Western culture . . . What?

Could all of those tribes have been unified under a different musical regime, one based, for example, on the musics of West Africa? In a way, of course, that’s what’s been happening since the early 20th century, when jazz and blues migrated out of America and make its way to the rest of the world, to be followed by rock and hip-hop. But that’s now, more or less. What about back then? Would it have been possible then? Or were the states of mind, the modes, engendered by plainsong necessary to the intellectual work that was central to the European enterprises of trade, commerce, technology, and science?