Happy Christmas! Puer natus est.

The Nativity depicted in an English liturgical manuscript, c. 1310–1320
National Library of Wales

Happy Christmas!

Over Advent I've been posting on the responsories.

Chant 'dialects'

For Christmas day though, I thought it might be nice to provide a  Mass proper that serves as a reminder that the versions of the chants that we are used to represent (mostly nineteenth and twentieth century) reconstructions of the style of chant of the high middle ages, namely what we call Gregorian chant.

Musicologists though, tend to prefer the term Franco-Roman chant for the style that came to dominate in the middle ages, to reflect the fact that this particular 'dialect' of chant is most probably the result of the interaction of at least two different chant traditions, that of Rome, and Gallic. 

So today, one of Ensemble Organum's beautiful reconstructions of 'Old Roman' chant, which may be closer to the style of chant sung in Rome in St Benedict's time.

The chant is the Introit for the midnight Mass of Christmas:

St Benedict

Though Benedictines in Rome from the sixth century onwards almost certainly used this style of chant, whether St Benedict's monks at Subiaco and Monte Cassino did in his time is an open question.  

Indeed, one of the dimensions of the Rule rarely emphasised these days is its various non-Roman character - St Benedict's Rule doesn't follow the Roman custom of fasting on Saturdays for example; sets a summer reading pattern for Matins that is certainly at odds with the Roman as we know it; and includes hymns and other elements in his Office that are not in the Roman.

Monte Cassino at least at some later points certainly used Beneventan chant (a term actually embraces all surviving Italian chant outside of Rome or Milan), at least until it was forbidden to do so by a tenth century Frankish pope!  Other styles St Benedict may well have encountered include Ambrosian and Gallican, and perhaps even Syrian and other Eastern rites (given that both Norcia and Rome had populations of Eastern refugee monks in the fifth and sixth centuries). 

And of course, Benedictines down the ages have often adopted the chant traditions of their locale, such as the Mozarabic, Ambrosian and many others.