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110 GREGORIAN CHANT
as the forerunners of those used in modern musical aesthetics (see pp.
223, 228). Medieval theorists who write about plainsong never trouble
to essay artistic analysis of the different parts of the chant: still less
are they interested in giving a scientific description of its forms.
Theorists and cantors copied the tonalia (the opening cues of litur
gical melodies), which were used in every country and school and are
most informative for the study of both modality and melody. They
merely classified the melodies, and in so doing followed a purely
and a few
practical, not a scientific, method, dividing the antiphons
other chants into groups according to their respective modality and
the liturgical order of the texts. Expressions in the old treatises about
the character or flavour of any one mode, or phrases of approbation,
have as a rule a value which is purely educational, devotional or
mystical.
So far no legacy from the ancient composers has been found to tell
us anything about their rules or practices in setting melodies to texts.
Yet we can perceive that Western composers seem to have followed
the same principles and rules as their Byzantine fellow-artists.
Ferretti, in his Estetica Gregoriana? studied exhaustively the
characteristics of every melodic form of liturgical chant, and divided
the melodies into three classes: original melodies, type melodies, and
melodies formed on the method which he calls centonique, that is to
say a mosaic of formulas. The first type is used for one text only,
emphasizing some typical character of the feast or of the place which
it occupies in the liturgy: for example, the antiphons of the Introits,
in which this type occurs repeatedly. The second class may be called
'prototypes', for their melody was typical and distinctive, and so dear
to the old composers that it served as a kind of model applicable to
different texts, even if they had an entirely different sense. This type
predominates in the antiphons of the Office. In the third group cento
or patchwork melodies are composed out of various fragments
(melodic formulas) of pre-existing tunes, logically fitted together into
a pattern, after the fashion of a mosaic pavement or a patchwork quilt.
The Gregorian texts were not written in classical but in ecclesiastical
Latin, with the established cursus as used from the end of the fifth
century to the middle of the seventh, making the declamation regular
and melodious. The Gregorian composers paid full attention to the
stress of the word : they did not give it a strong dynamic prominence,
but a melodic one. In Gregorian chant three styles can be recognized :
1 Rome, 1934, pp. 95 ff.: French edition, Esth&ique grtgorienne (Paris, 1938), pp.
86 ff.