Old Roman Chant

I recently purchased a beautiful CD called "Chants de l'Eglise de Rome: Période Byzantine." It is a recording of hymns from a period in history when the Eastern style of worship had a strong influence on the Church of Rome.

Historically, Rome was always kind of the oddball of the Christian world. They used a different language, had different liturgical practices, and the bishop of the Roman church was the only Orthodox patriarch in the west. These and other differences contributed to the slow drifting apart of the Eastern and Western halves of the Church, and eventually led to the tragic split that became formal in the middle of the eleventh century.

About four hundred years before that split, the Italian peninsula was heavily populated by Eastern Christians (Greek, Arab, etc) whose influence is apparent in the art, architecture, and music of that era.

The liner notes from the CD tell the story in more detail:

OLD ROMAN CHANT 7th-8th CENTURIES

Byzantine period

The repertory to which the works on this record belong is commonly called the "Old Roman." It is the early chant of the Church of Rome, anterior to that which is today called the "Gregorian," which came into existence in the Carolingian Empire, probably in the region of Metz, deriving its structure from the Roman chant, but completely modifying its ornamentation.

The early chant of the Church of Rome took shape during the 7th and 8th centuries. Its distinctly Oriental character, which gives it the aspect of an ornamented cantilation, is by no means surprising when one remembers that at this period Italy was dependent not only on the Byzantine Emperor, but was also a land of asylum for a large Greek colony which had sought refuge there.

In fact, after the invasion of Palestine by the Persians, the number of Syrian and Greek monasteries multiplied in Italy from the South as far as inside Rome itself. And the iconoclast quarrel was all the more reason for the monks to flee from the Orient and re-assemble in the Italian peninsula. Between 726 and 775 nearly fifty thousand monks took refuge in Southern Italy. Many popes of Syrian or Greek origin presided over the destinies of the Church of Rome at the period (fourteen out of twenty popes between 644 and 772 were Greek-speaking). The "Liber pontificalis" mentions, besides their Oriental origins, the musical competence of three of them: Leo II, Sergius I, and Gregory III. It was under the influence of these popes that the Roman liturgy became profoundly Eastern in character.

Introduced into Gaul by Pepin the Short and then under Charlemagne, the Old Roman chant gave birth to the Carolingian chant, similar in musical structure, but very different in ornamentation.

Paradoxically the Carolingian chant later became the official "Gregorian" chant, even to the point of supplanting in Rome itself the Old Roman, which finally disappeared in the 13th century.

Although a number of Roman popes were speakers of Greek, the lingua franca of the western Church at the time was Latin. So, while the hymns on this CD all sound very Byzantine, they are all in Latin rather than in Greek. That's just fine with me, as Latin, in my opinion, is a far prettier language than Greek.

Here is a sample from the CD. It is a hymn called "Terra Tremuit" ("the earth trembled") which is based on Psalm 76:



Terra tremuit et quievit
dum resurgeret in iudicio Deus, alleluia.
Notus in Iudea Deus in Israel magnum nomen eius, alleluia,
dum resurgeret in iudicio Deus, alleluia.
Et factus est in pace locus eius et habitatio eius in Sion, alleluia,
dum resurgeret in iudicio Deus, alleluia.
Ibi confregit cornua arcum, scutum, gladium et bellum,
iluminans tu mirabiliter a montibus aeternis, alleluia.
Terra tremuit et quievit, dum resurgeret in iudicio Deus, alleluia.

(The earth trembled and was still,
when God arose in judgment, alleluia.
In Judah is God known: His name is great in Israel, alleluia,
when God arose in judgment, alleluia.
His dwelling is in peace and in repose, and in Sion is His habitation, alleluia,
when God arose in judgment, alleluia.
There He broke bow arrows, shield, sword, and war weapons,
you are glorious, more wonderful than eternal mountains, alleluia.
The earth trembled and was still,
when God arose in judgment, alleluia)