Chant

Chant, unaccompanied sung melody, the rhythms and melodic contours of which are closely tied to the spoken rhythms and inflections of the text. Chant texts can be either sacred or secular, but the term usually refers to sacred liturgical music. Chant has been used in religious ceremonies since ancient times. In terms of present-day chant styles in the Western world, the most important of the early repertories is Jewish liturgical chant, or cantillation (see Jewish Music). The early Christian Church borrowed not only its modes, or scales, but also some Hebrew melodies and melodic fragments. Most of the texts in Christian chant are taken from or based on the Psalms, a biblical book shared by Jews and Christians.

Several types of Christian chant, which is often called plainsong, developed during the first 1,000 years of the Christian era. A repertory called Ambrosian chant developed at Milan, Italy; named after St Ambrose, it is still used in some Roman Catholic services in Milan. In Spain, until about the 11th century, there was a chant repertory called Mozarabic chant, named after the Mozarab Christians who lived in Arab-dominated Spain during the Middle Ages. Today Mozarabic chant survives in a few Spanish cathedrals. Until the 9th century, France had its own chant repertory, called Gallican chant; a few traces of it remain today in the Gregorian repertory. In Rome a separate repertory developed that eventually spread throughout Europe and superseded the others. It is now called Gregorian chant after Pope Gregory I, known as the Great, who was active in collecting Roman chants, having them assigned specific places within the liturgy, and seeing that they were adopted by churches in other cities and countries. Today about 3,000 different Gregorian melodies are known.

The Eastern Christian Churches developed several types of chant before ad 1000, variants of which are still used. The Armenian, Byzantine, Russian, Greek, and Syrian repertories are the most important. Many of the original melodies in these repertories were incorporated into the Gregorian repertory.

Among Protestant denominations only the Church of England has encouraged an extensive use of chant; its repertory, which is harmonized, is called Anglican chant. The psalm text is sung to a short harmonized melody of two or three phrases, which is repeated as often as necessary to the end of the text. Within each phrase, most of the text is sung to a single harmony before a brief cadential formula of a few chords at the end.

Musically, the chanting of the Koran in Islamic music is similar to Jewish cantillation. Both involve unaccompanied, floridly ornamented recitation centred on a single pitch and moving only within a narrow pitch range. Both musical traditions derive ultimately from the same middle eastern roots, and in both cases such chanting has historically been the main form of public presentation of their respective holy texts.

Japanese music and Tibetan music show different forms of Buddhist chanting—the dominant Japanese form is shōmyō, in which long recitation tones are punctuated by strongly rhythmic ornamentation; Tibetan chant, on the other hand, has no melodic movement or ornamentation but uses the extraordinary technique of overtone singing which enables the singers to produce pitches well below what would be possible in their normal singing voices.