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Some years ago, Mary Berry contributed to this journal a history of plainchant on record (EM Apr 1979), which outlined some of the various ways in which chant has been performed. The subject of the present essay is to some extent complementary: work on the origins of chant and its development as a liturgical and musical repertory, where it came from and how it reached the differing states in which we know it. Inevitably such a survey will be somewhat distorted by my personal view of affairs, and by the superficiality and compression necessary for reasons of space. My hope is that readers will end up with at least an impression of the problems with which chant scholars are wrestling, be stimulated to investigate the specialist literature for themselves, and seek out and sing some of the music discussed. One impulse behind research into the early history of plainchant has been the desire to restore the music available in modern service books to something like its common medieval form, based on the earliest surviving music manuscripts of the late 9th and 10th centuries. The result is naturally a compromise: the various forms of the Roman liturgy in the twentieth century are not exactly those that the 9th-century books were designed to serve, and the earliest sources are not themselves identical, either in their selection of chants or versions of the melodies they transmit. So, one by-product of the restoration work has been a great deal of information about the earliest sources which is of immense value to those on whom the onus of producing practical editions does not rest. To many, plainchant seems the musical embodiment of the eternal values of the Christian Church, and there is perhaps a temptation to regard it as an unchanging form. But very few previously accepted views about the development of the repertory have escaped scrutiny, and a surprising number have been rejected or are at least hotly debated. Much recent writing is evidence of a healthy scepticism and abundant imagination, and the issues debated have implications beyond the study of plainchant itself: they concern the ways in which music is learned and performed from memory, how the structure of medieval compositions can be understood, and why musical notation was invented. As an example of recent changes in scholarly thinking we might take the fate of the traditional view that the liturgy of the Christian Church, and hence its music, has its roots in the Jewish synagogue. This was an idea so simple and appealing that it inspired numerous attempts to find musical correspondences between Jewish and early Christian melodies: for example, the resemblances between chants of the Jewish communities in the Yemen (published by Idelsohn) and Gregorian tones for singing psalms and lessons.1 If the book of Psalms was the fundamental source of texts for singing in Christian worship, then the Christians would surely have borrowed the manner of singing as well. While musical correspondences have yet to be reinvestigated fully, the notion that Christian psalm singing was based on a Jewish model has been strongly attacked. In complementary articles John Smith2 and James McKinnon3 have between them made the following crucial points: (1) no such established synagogue services existed which could have been taken over by the primitive Church in the decades following Jesus's crucifixion; (2) there is no documentary evidence of regular psalm singing in synagogues during the first 500 years of the Christian era; (3) although the recitation of the Hallel (Pss cxiii-cxviii) in the synagogue can be traced as far back as the second century AD, it functions as a scripture lesson rather than as 'chant' in any sense commonly understood; (4) the link between Jewish and Christian singing is rather at ceremonial meals in the home: the Jewish Passover seder, and the Christian agape ('love-feast'), descendent of the Last Supper, itself a Passover meal. The singing of psalms in Christian liturgies is rightly associated very strongly with monastic communities who performed them in cycles as a religious exercise. This is, however, a considerably later development commemoration of the Last Supper, the Mass, was eventually separated from the love-feast and its form developed over centuries to become that which we find reflected in the earliest music books of the Carolingian period. But the stages of that develop-

Recent research on the origins of Western chant