Liturgical chants with Greek texts – neumed and unneumed – occur in Western manuscripts from at least the 8th century onwards.1 Among these, the so- called “Missa graeca” (i.e., the ordinary chants Gloria / Doxa /
A great number of theories, hypotheses, and time frames regarding the Missa graeca have been raised during the last 150 years. Until now there have only been separate studies on individual aspects of the topic in question. Therefore, the present book aims at presenting the first comprehensive synopsis of the phenomenon of the Missa graeca chants as a starting point and reference work for further research. On the one hand, the book re-evaluates the various disputed issues surrounding the Missa graeca and on the other hand offers new approaches regarding, among other things, the geographic centres of the chants, the time frame of their emergence, their function, texts, and above all their melodies.
The book is divided into six chapters: the first chapter presents a detailed overview of the chants, their denomination, and their significance as well as an exhaustive record of the research history from the 18th century until the present day. This is the most complete survey of the literature on the Missa graeca that has yet appeared.
More than sixty manuscripts from the 8th to the 14th centuries are known today that contain the Missa graeca chants, of which approximately fifty are neumed. The chants are primarily contained in music-liturgical manuscripts, but can also be found in psalters, grammars, and diverse other collections, of which the majority are tropers and graduals. It became apparent during my work on the Missa graeca that the provenance and dating of these codices is vital not only to assessing the impact of these chants, but above all to unravel the history of their emergence and development. Therefore, chapter 2 provides an in-depth description of the manuscripts containing Missa graeca chants, taking into account the most up-to-date information on their dating and origin. Thus, it can be shown that the geographic focal points of the Missa graeca lie in southern and central France, St Gall, today’s Bavaria, and the lower Rhine area. From these areas the chants “travelled” up to middle and northern France and as far as England. From St Gall, the Missa graeca spread north along the Rhine to Bavaria and to the lower Rhine area.
Chapter 2 not only deals with the geographic localisation of the Missa graeca but also with its chronological time frame: it shows that the chants primarily flourished between the years approximately 950 until 1050, i.e. not much more than one century. The earliest documents with Missa graeca chants, however, appear almost a hundred years earlier (during the second half of the 9th century). Chapter 2 provides a thorough discussion as to why this gap might have occurred and offers new answers looking at the connection between the Missa graeca chants and the emergence of tropes during the 10th century.
The chapter also presents a new hypothesis as to why these chants emerged in the first place: looking at the monasteries where the manuscripts in question were primarily copied, a close connection to the Benedictine order becomes apparent. It was the Benedictines who not only possessed the biggest scriptoria, but who also had the means to distribute these chants, as their monasteries covered the continent like a network. The Benedictines were and are still famous for their close connection to music: they spent a significant part of their day chanting their elaborate liturgy, which was being more and more embellished and enlarged with the help of tropes and sequences. Thus, the inclusion of Greek-texted chants might have been seen as a chance to make their liturgies even more elaborate and festive.
Chapter 2 also discusses the placement and order of the Missa graeca chants, showing that the manuscript tradition rather points to an arbitrary, selective inclusion of these hymns and not to the development of a unified “set.” The analyses presented here explain the geographic differences regarding both the placement and function of the chants and their connection to certain feasts. This leads to the final section of chapter 2, where an answer is given to the prominent question of whether the Missa graeca chants could have functioned as tropes or not.
Chapter 3 adds a new viewpoint to the Missa graeca: for the first time in research history, the Missa graeca chants in non-musical manuscripts are discussed. Here, a new dating is offered for the ninth-century sacramentaries which are the earliest witnesses of the chants. Especially interesting is the assessment of non-musical manuscripts such as glossaries, grammars, anthologies, and above all psalters: on the basis of a thorough discussion of these manuscripts it can be proved that liturgical texts in Greek were not uncommon at all before and during the emergence of the Missa graeca chants. The texts and the method of transliteration with Latin letters employed in these codices closely resemble the way in which the texts appear in the musical manuscripts. This can be taken as proof that the texts were not specifically translated/transliterated for the Missa graeca as the secondary literature has hitherto suggested. On the contrary, the texts were already in existence and ready to be used and to be set to music when needed for specific liturgical occasions. Thus, the Missa graeca itself seems to have developed from the insertion of Greek-texted ordinary chants in the appendices of psalter manuscripts.
Chapter 3 is rounded off by an analysis of the All-Saints litany and its connection to the Missa graeca because in a handful of manuscripts the chants are accompanied by this litany either in Greek or Latin or both. Although the All-Saints litany is one of the most popular and widespread litanies in the West, its origins are shrouded in vague speculations and hypothetical assumptions. Analysing closely the manuscripts containing the litany, I came to the conclusion that the history of the Western All-Saints litany has to be re-written: as no early Syriac model for the litany exists (as was hitherto assumed) the theory for a Roman origin seems more plausible than a Greek-Syriac origin.
As Charles M. Atkinson has already shown in his articles, the texts of the Missa graeca chants contain many answers to the questions surrounding the Missa graeca. Therefore, chapter 4 presents a collation of the texts of all four chants: for the first time the texts are not only compared across the neumed manuscripts but also with those found in the unneumed ones. The extensive collations will thus provide a thoroughly researched basis for further studies on Greek in the West in various contexts. An important part of the chapter is also made up of the description and analysis of the transliteration and its peculiarities according to the geographical areas and/or monasteries. It can thus be shown that the features and idiosyncrasies of the Missa graeca texts reproduce the Greek pronunciation as it had been since Late Antiquity and are therefore already quite similar to Modern Greek. The type of “errors” found in the transliterations also leads to the conclusion that the scribes of the manuscripts were mostly completely ignorant of Greek or had only a very limited knowledge of the language. Thus, many errors were often passed on from codex to codex through copying.
Chapter 5 then embarks on the most prominent of all questions surrounding the Missa graeca: have the melodies of the chants been taken from Byzantine models or not? So far, the studies conducted on the Missa graeca melodies were undertaken from a primarily Western point of view. In this chapter, however, the Byzantine viewpoint is the prevalent one, discussing the difficulties (time-gap between Western and Byzantine sources, no Byzantine melodies for the Pisteuo and the Amnos tu theu) of comparing these chants as well as providing solutions for the Doxa and the Hagios. In a first step, all Missa graeca melodies are analysed which is then followed up by a direct comparison of the Doxa and Hagios melodies found in Latin and Byzantine sources.
The final part (chapter 6) is made up of two sections which also round off the book: as the St Gall manuscripts are the most numerous ones that contain Missa graeca chants, it was only logical to include Notker Balbulus’s famous greetings of the ellinici fratres; logical too, because this raises the questions as to the sojourn of Greek monks at the monastery during the 9th century. Chapter 6 presents the different viewpoints and hypotheses surrounding these “Greek” brothers up to the present day and offers a new theory on the basis of the analysis of the word ellinici and its meaning as found in contemporary glossaries by taking into account what Byzantine Greeks would have called themselves in the Middle Ages. The last section of the book is made up of a summary of the topics discussed therein, providing a concise overview of the new insights gained by the analyses. Thus, the book aims at getting a significant step closer to solving the numerous questions and conflicting theories regarding the origins, the development, and formation of the Missa graeca as well as becoming a standard reference work for further studies on one of the most compelling and challenging topics of medieval musicology.
This research was funded in whole by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [P27115].