h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...my Music History teacher said that Gregorian Chants were named so because it was Pope Gregory the whatever-th who first said that these chants should be written down and catelogued. But I may have misheard her.

Overall, I love chants like these... sometimes I leave them on while I sleep, and they're just beautiful praises all over. But then I like harmonies in fourths and fifths and octaves... the sounds are very pure and natural to my ears, especially against drones. Very .

You may very well have heard your music teacher tell you this, but she is mistaken. Gregorian chants are based primarily on the gaulish chants available to Charlemagne, adapted from those he requested from Rome to fill in liturgical gaps.

Of interest, there are lots more chants out there than are public, the Vatican keeps them for itself.

*wonders idly if said pope and Charlemange were both involved -- ie, Charlemange asked the pope to organize the chants*

I've got a feeling we both have half the story here..

At the centuries of history in question, you needed papal dispensation to vary the rite in any way, no matter how itsy bitsy small. This is why Sarum, Mosarabic, and usage Lyonnais (whose name I forget) chant is so remarkable, and one of the (many)
reasons why Hildegarde got herself in trouble. You just can't say that Hildegarde of Bingen's work is Gregorian chant-it's too unique.

Sometimes, the pope himself would need to visit certain cities for certain feast days so that chants proper for that city's particular saint could be allowed to be sung.

The Italian church was very insular and felt that cultures outside of Italy were barbaric. The obviously Gaulish elements of Gregorian chant wouldn't have been gladly accepted, and for many years later, there wasn't anything like it in Italy. It is unlikely indeed that Charlemagne and the pope collaborated. If the pope did collaborate with Charlemagne, then he was overtly insulting him because it was the intent of Charlemagne to make the church's rites universal once again; Charlemagne's clerics supposed that there were more propers than currently existed-they thought they were lost, but in fact they never existed and needed to be created. (they had drifted quite a bit during the fall of the Roman Empire).

*bows down to obvious greater knowledge*