IS. Gregoty is said to have banished from the church rhythmic singing, as too gay and paganish, and to have established the plain chant, or canto fermo, in which the notes were all of equal length, as in our psalmody, or at least of no stated measure, as in Cathedral chanting. Rous seau says, that " the Christians began to have churches, and to sing psalms and other hymns, at a time when music had already lost almost all its energy; that they deprived it of the greatest power which remained to it, namely, that of rhythm and metre, when from the verse to which it had always been applied, they transferred it to the prose of the sacred books, or to some kind of barbarous poesy, worse for music than prose itself. Then one of the constituent parts of music vanished, and the chant drawling uniformly, and without any kind of measure, in notes of nearly equal length, lost with its rhythmic and cadenced march, all its energy." Now, though there can be no question that the energy of music depends greatly on rhythm and cadence, yet we cannot help thinking that in the end she gained by laying aside the ancient lyric measures, and that the canto ferrno of the church made way for that better and more ener getic rhythm of her own, which, after the invention of the time table, she acquired on the stage, and in the chamber.
19. Pope Gregory conferred a great benefit on music, by applying the same Roman letters to denote all the replicates of the same sound in different octaves. Before his time, it appears, the sounds in the double octave, or great system of the Greeks, had been denoted by fifteen Roman letters. Gregory reduced them to seven, applying the same letters, in different forms, to three different octaves, as in the fol lowing scale.
This was an important step in notation. These seven let ters are still used throughout Etu-ope, as the denominations of the sounds of the Diatonic scale : and we see from the pre dilection of the ancients for the minor scale,how the first letter of the Alphabet comes to occupy its present place, instead of denoting the fundamental sound of the major mode.
20. From this period forwards may be traced several steps in the method of notation. First, Gregory's letters were written over the syllables to which they were to be sung, thus: Afterwards the letters were placed higher or lower in the page, according to their place in the scale, seemingly to as sist the imagination in reading the notes. Then the alpha betic characters were placed at the beginning of the lines in which the words were written, of which curious spechnens may be seen in Dr. Burney, vol. ii. pp. 33, 35, &c.; and in Sir John Hawkins, vol. i. p. 434. A little before the time of Guido, points were placed on seven lines, perhaps in imitation of the strings of the lyre. At last Guido placed the points Or notes on both lines and spaces, and thus he reduced the number of lines to four, which is the staff still used in the canto fermo of the Roman church. One letter placed on a line at the beginning of the staff, determined the names of the notes on the other lines, and in the spaces.
Hence the origin of the clefs, which are nothing but Gothic letters disfigured.
2 t. Guido was also the inventor of the method of sobni sation, or singing by syllables, which are so used as to mark the places of the semitones. Ile Ns-as led to this in vention by observing that in a hymn to St. Jobn, the first and middle syllables of the three first lines formed a regular ascent in the scale of the major mode, as we should say. This hymn is preserved, and, as connected with an inven The Greeks used four syllables, Ta, Te, The, Tho, with which they practised in learning to sing their tetrachords, so that the idea of always applying the same syllable to a sound, similarly related to the rest of the scale, was not original. But it may seem surprising that Guido stopped short of Gregory's seven letters, which completed the scale. the eighth being a repetition of the first. In this Guido made a retrograde step to the system of the Greeks, among whom the tritone from the fourth to the seventh of our major scale was carefully avoided. Like them, Guido and his followers regarded the greater seventh of the scale, so important ilt our modulations, as irregular, or not belonging to the system. He disting,uishecl three Hexachords, which being repeated in the higher octaves, carried the scale from G on the first of the bass, to ce on the fourth space of the treble, as exhi bited in the following. Diagram.
22. These three hexachords are exactly similar. The rea son of the different names assigned them, is thus stated by Dr. Burney. " II) the Canto fermo, or ancient chants of the Boman church, F was not allowed to be made sharp in the key of G, which rendered the B as tritonus to F ti harsh and difficult ; hence the hexachord of G was called durum; that of C, in which the B flat was unnecessary, natural e ; and that of F, on which the B flat was indispensable, molle, soft as it removed the harshness which the tritonus or sharp fourth, consisting of three whole tones between F and B na tural, would have occasioned." Our characters, t natural, and b tlat, are derived froin these distinctions: The natural or duruni B, As-as written with a square or Gothic letter; and the soft or flat B, with a round or Homan letter. The French to this day call the 1:r B quarre, and the b Benio/. AVe here sec also the origin of the word gannnut. The lowest note of Guido's scale being a tone lower than the Imvest of the old scales, and being octave below Gregory's G, Ivas denoted by the Greek letter F, gamma ; and this sound having the syllable UT given it, was called gamma ut, and contracted to ganonut, and used to signify the whole scale. By this diagram also, the reader may understand the names given by our forefathers.° the different notes of the scale, which expressed their relations in different liexachords: As for instance, G, sol, re, ut ; for this note is so?, in the hexachord of C, re.„ in that of F, and ut as the first sound in its own liexachord.