The Spirit of Gregorian Chant - Church Music Association of America

INTRODUCTION 9
a notable part, from those which the Church has inherited from the
Ancient Law, and principally from the royal prophet; others are
borrowed by her from the inspired writers of the New Law, or
again from apostolic tradition; others, lastly, are those which the
Church herself, in the course of ages, has produced under the
breath of the Spirit which was promised to her to teach all truth;
we still have these texts, of which the greater part expose them'
selves to us with the majesty of a tradition so many centuries old,
in the Breviary, the Missal and the other books of the sacred liturgy.
"To accompany these texts, so venerable and so sacred, the
Church has also received from antiquity, or produced herself by
the genius of her Pontiffs—and most particularly of St. Gregory
the Great—incomparable melodies which the ancients did not fear
to call inspired by God; melodies assuredly more appropriate to the
texts and more intimately united with the sacred rites than com'
positions, even the most vaunted, of modern art, more apt especially
for expressing religious thought and sentiment, more intelligible all
the while to the mass of the people and more powerful in moving
souls, more grave lastly and more sacred, precisely because of these
hieratic forms which can appear strange at first, but which are for
the initiated a source of beauty of a superior order . . .
"... The word here has the art of saying simply that which
the soul thinks, of expressing spontaneously that which the heart
feels: and it is in that that great art resides. Does not true grandeur,
in fact, lie in simplicity? Veritable art in the natural? Real
force in gentility?
"But in order that the Chant in our churches may conserve,
and if need be reconquer, that preponderance over all other music
which belongs to it, it is necessary that it should be or become
again as St. Gregory in the seventh century, after having collected
it from antiquity, regulated and completed it, handed it down to
tradition, which preserved it intact during long centuries with a
truly marvelous fidelity.