The Gregorian Sacramentary and the Gregorian chant,
according to John the Deacon, whose testimony is most reliable,
what we call Gregorian Chant today is definitely attributed to Pope
St.Gregory the Great. This type of chanting has been used for
centuries up to and including today. Going back before St. Gregory,
it was called Roman Chant, and even Ambrosian chant. But St.
Gregory put it together in a formalized Church Chant.
As for his contribution to music, “we have the epitaph of Pope
Honorius, which dates back to his death in 638: “Gifted with divine harmony the shepherd leads his sheep to
life....for while following the footsteps of holy Gregory you have
won your reward.”
“According to this it was thought in Rome, less than forty
years after the death of St. Gregory, that the greatest praise for a
music-loving Pope was to compare him to his predecessor Pope
Gregory.”
What that meant in effect, was that the music developed by St.
Gregory became the barometer for magnificent Church Chant. He
developed it to a point where everyone aspired to achieve what he
gave the Church in Sacred Music.
“Further proof of Pope St. Gregory’s involvement with the
Gregorian Chant and other chants used in the Mass:
“The feasts known to have been introduced after St. Gregory use
the main melodies borrowed from older feasts.
“The texts of the chants are taken from the ‘Itala’ version, while as
early as the first half of the Seventh Century St. Jerome’s correction
had been generally adopted.
“The frequent occurrence in the plain-chant melodies of cadences
molded on the literary cursus
shows that they were composed
before the middle of the Seventh Century, when the cursus went out
of use.”
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