Greco-Byzantine chant

In the early centuries of the Christian era the comparative independence of individual communities encouraged, at the expense of any tendency to centralisation, the uninhibited development of local liturgies and their gradual coalescence in regional groups, distinguished further from one another by the use of different languages. We have already considered the position of the liturgy in the Christian East with its numerous rites. Each rite also developed its own musical tradition, and the variety and richness of these traditions is visible evidence of the extraordinary vitality of Christianity. Taken as a whole, they not only have certain functional characteristics in common – in that the several liturgies are variant forms of the same worship – but also reveal a more or less striking uniformity in their musical structure itself. Nowadays it is usual, quite rightly, to call Christian chant ‘plainchant’; and it is true that the name cantus planus or musica plana does not appear before the twelfth century, and then only in contrast to musica mensurata. But the expression has gradually taken on a more specific and yet a broader meaning, so that, for example, the French plain-chant, the Italian canto gregoriano (‘Gregorian chant’) and the English ‘plainchant’ cover the whole of monodic church music. Since this latter name is used nowadays in a more precise and technical sense, it is better to use the expression ‘plainchant’ (‘plainsong’) to denote the entire range of the music of the Christian churches in West and East alike, emphasising thereby certain common elements implicit in the name itself.