Chant in the monasteries

The teaching

As the monastic tradition of the Rule of Benedict and the chant books teaches it.

The work of God

Saint Benedict calls the sung prayer of the monastery the work of God, opus Dei, and says that nothing is to be preferred to it. When the signal is given the monk leaves whatever he is doing and goes at once, with haste but with dignity. The day is built around it, so that the monastery's whole life is prayer punctuated by work and reading, rather than work interrupted by prayer.

Seven times a day and at midnight

Benedict takes his hours from the psalm: “Seven times a day do I praise thee,” and “At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee.” In the night comes Vigils, the long night office of psalms and readings. At first light comes Lauds, the morning praise, which ends with a song from the Gospel, the Benedictus of Zechariah. Then four little hours mark the day's work: Prime at its start, Terce in mid-morning, Sext at midday and None in mid-afternoon.

At evening comes Vespers, ending with the Magnificat, the song of Mary. Last comes Compline, the completion, said before sleep, with the same three psalms every night, the fourth, the ninety-first and the hundred and thirty-fourth; the Roman use adds the song of Simeon, the Nunc dimittis. After Compline the house keeps the great silence until morning.

The whole Psalter each week

Benedict lays out the psalms so that all hundred and fifty are sung in the course of each week, beginning again at Sunday Vigils. He notes that the holy fathers sang them all in a single day, and asks that his lukewarm monks manage it at least in a week. Each hour of the day opens with a cry from the seventieth psalm, Deus in adiutorium meum intende, Domine ad adiuvandum me festina: O God, come to my aid; O Lord, make haste to help me. The night office opens instead with another verse, said three times: “O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.”

How a psalm is sung

A psalm is sung on a psalm tone, a short formula of melody fitted to every verse. It begins with a rising intonation; settles on a reciting note, the tenor, on which most of the words are sung at the pace of speech; bends at the middle of the verse in a small cadence called the mediant; returns to the reciting note; and ends with a closing figure, the termination. At the mediant, marked in the books with an asterisk, the singers make a full pause and take a breath before the second half.

The two sides of the choir sing the verses in turn, one side answering the other across the aisle. An antiphon, a short chant, is sung before and after the psalm and sets its mode and its mood. Each psalm ends with the doxology, in many houses with a bow: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

The eight modes

The chant is built on eight modes, each a scale with its own final, the note on which the melody comes to rest, and its own reciting note. They come in four pairs: the first and second end on D, the third and fourth on E, the fifth and sixth on F, and the seventh and eighth on G. In each pair the odd mode, the authentic, ranges up from its final, and the even mode, the plagal, lies lower, around it. The psalm tones follow the modes, so that each antiphon has its matching tone.

A medieval verse gave each mode a character: the first grave, the second sad, the third mystical, the fourth harmonious, the fifth joyful, the sixth devout, the seventh angelic, and the eighth perfect. The Eastern churches keep eight tones of their own, the octoechos, which turn week by week through the year, sung over a held drone note, the ison.

The kinds of chant

Chant moves between three styles. In syllabic chant each syllable has one note, as in the psalm tones and the simplest hymns. In neumatic chant each syllable has a small group of notes. In melismatic chant a single syllable carries a long flowing line, as in the Alleluia of the Mass, whose last vowel opens into the jubilus, a wordless song of joy. The Mass has its own chants: those that change with the day, the introit, gradual, alleluia, offertory and communion, and those that stay the same, the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei.

Reading the notation

The chant books are written on a staff of four lines in square notes, with a clef that marks where do or fa lies, so that the notation gives the shape of the melody and not a fixed pitch: the cantor sets the first note where the voices sit easily. The note groups have names. A single note is a punctum or a virga; two rising notes are a pes and two falling a clivis; three rising are a scandicus and three falling a climacus; low, high and low make a torculus, and high, low and high a porrectus.

Ut, re, mi

The names singers still use for the notes come from a chant. In the hymn to Saint John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis, each of the first six phrases begins one step higher than the last: Ut queant laxis, Resonare fibris, Mira gestorum, Famuli tuorum, Solve polluti, Labii reatum, Sancte Iohannes. Guido of Arezzo took the first syllables, ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, to teach singers to find any note by its place in a pattern of six, a pattern that could begin on more than one note. Ut later became do, and si, from the initials of Sancte Iohannes, was added for the seventh.

Mind and voice together

Benedict asks one thing above all of the choir: that the mind be in harmony with the voice. The words are sung slowly enough to be prayed, and the even pace, the pause at each mid-verse and the answering of the two sides keep anyone from rushing ahead. Prayer outside the office he asks to be short and pure, unless grace draws it out. In most monasteries today the day ends after Compline with an antiphon to Mary that changes with the season: Alma Redemptoris Mater in Advent and Christmastide, Ave Regina caelorum until Holy Week, Regina caeli in Eastertide, and Salve Regina for the rest of the year.