Apart from the tolling of church bells, the sound most associated this week with the death of Pope John Paul II has been the singing of Gregorian chant.
Millions heard it Monday, when the Polish-born pontiff's body was carried from the Apostolic Palace into St. Peter's Basilica, and again Friday throughout the open-air papal requiem Mass on the steps of the church, which began with a Vatican choir chanting in Latin the centuries-old "Grant Him Eternal Rest, O Lord" and closed with a hymn to the Virgin Mary, "Salve Regina."
Tradition has it that this music takes its name from the first Pope Gregory, "Gregory the Great," who presided over the Roman Catholic faithful at the end of the 6th century. But almost everyone hearing it is arrested by its haunting, otherworldly, timeless character.
According to Father John Schiavone, pastor of St. Gregory the Great Church in Whittier, that's because chant occupies a different sound world than most music.
"The music we're used to hearing is written in major or minor keys, with a strong sense of closure or cadence," he said, meaning that melodic lines come to a definite end.
Gregorian chant, by contrast, "is written in different kinds of scales, which don't have those strong cadences. The resolutions are much more subtle, and they leave us feeling a little loose-ended as far as our instincts about where music goes.
"That slight reorientation means that when people hear chant, they feel prayerful, mystical."
That was certainly the original intention.
"You could say Gregorian chant came about as a result of sung prayer or sung Scripture," said Frank Brownstead, director of music at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. "The beginnings of it would have been in resonant buildings where people could not hear speech. That style of singing caught on. It was a way to be heard before amplification."
Although some kind of chant is likely to have been used in church services from the beginning -- as in Jewish services before that -- what modern listeners recognize as Gregorian chant is generally regarded as a reworking of earlier forms that it supplanted over the course of the 8th to 11th centuries.
There was no established written notation for music, however, so it had to be learned aurally. Various methods of notation began to surface, but none was completely satisfactory. Some specified rhythms but not pitches. Others gave pitch notation but without rhythmic details. It took centuries to develop the modern system.
