An Introduction to Gregorian Chant.(Review)

An Introduction to Gregorian Chant. By Richard L. Crocker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. [248 p. + 1 CD. ISBN 0-300-08310-6. $30.]

This book is an intensely personal statement about singing and listening to plainchant by a well-known historian of medieval music: For me, Gregorian chant is first of all music to be sung: I find singing it to be a most rewarding musical experience.... I feel the Gregorian style to be in certain ways a very personal one, which is why I enjoy singing and listening to it outside a liturgical situation just as much. As a musical activity I find it so intrinsically meaningful that the question of what it means never comes up. I have no sense of distance from Gregorian chant, but still a profound sense of its mystery. (p.21)

Crocker's central concern is the balance between the remoteness of chant sensed by the uninitiated (expressed in the metaphor "from the back of the cathedral") and the understanding that comes from familiarity with its details. Experienced in teaching nonmusicians, he carefully explains technical aspects of the musical style and relates them to examples on the compact disc (included with the book). Chapters 2 and 3, dealing primarily with pitch and rhythm, often read like a superior music appreciation textbook. Ultimately, Crocker attributes the sense of mystery to extreme melodic variety: regular patterns are avoided, and the melodic direction and number of pitches per syllable change constantly.

In chapters 5 and 6, Crocker explores liturgy, emphasizing the development of early Christian music as "rational selection" from practices of pagan antiquity and examining the Mass using Ordo Romanus I, a Roman order of service from the early eighth century. Topics in chapters 4, 7, and 8 include the relationship between Gregorian and Old Roman chant, the Carolingian reform and development of music notation, the controversy over rhythmic interpretation led by Peter Wagner and Dom Mocquereau, and the nineteenth-century chant revival. While these chapters offer few new historical interpretations, they provide excellent summaries of the current state of research (without footnotes) and are liberally strewn with personal insights. For example, Crocker's discussion of monastic adoption of melismatic chants leads to his statement that, in a process similar to contemplation of the complex liturgical referents found in psalmody with antiphons, pitch relationships cause the mind to be ...