The core repertoire
Singing the Mass also developed gradually over several centuries. In the fourth century, after the end of the Roman persecutions, the Fathers of the Church (notably St. Augustine of Hippo) used to preach on the epistle and gospel that had been read, often mentioning the psalm that was sung after the epistle. A little later, a psalm was also sung while the people received communion, usually Psalm 33 (34), which has the significant verse, “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” We know much less about the following centuries, but in the sixth and seventh centuries the Introit, Alleluia verse, Tract and Offertory were added to the Mass. Philippe Bernard and others still hold an older viewpoint that the Tract, an unusually simple type of chant, must have begun much earlier.
Until this time, only the celebrations of the principal mysteries of the faith drew on the Bible for Mass texts that refer to the mystery. These feast days included Christmas, Epiphany, the week from Palm Sunday to Easter, and Ascension and Pentecost. In the middle of the seventh century, according to James McKinnon, the Roman Schola was formed. This group of singers accompanied the pope on the stational liturgies that he celebrated in thirty different Roman basilicas during the church year. McKinnon refutes the idea of earlier scholars who held that the schola was active in the time of Pope Gregory I, the Great (590-604), or even earlier in the fifth century. Philippe Bernard holds this last position, dating the schola almost a hundred years before Pope Gregory I.
By 690, in the time of Pope Sergius I, there is a systematic collection of Proper chants for much of the liturgical year. Each day in the calendar from Advent to Pentecost had an Introit, Gradual, Alleluia verse (or Tract in Lent and ember weeks), Offertory and Communion. Apart from the major feasts that already possessed Proper chants, a sustained effort to compose a series of chants must have taken place. McKinnon has established that the four weeks of Advent were added to the beginning of the liturgical year in the latter half of the seventh century. He concludes that the Roman Schola composed the Propers of Advent at that time. Their systematic composition of Proper chants then continued through the season of Christmas and Epiphany, where McKinnon finds ingenious design of both texts and music. He finds similar design in the Propers of Lent (a period that actually began three Sundays before Lent).
Some of this careful planning had been evident to earlier scholars. For example, as many authors have pointed out, the Communion antiphons for the weekday Masses of Lent use texts taken from the psalms in numerical order, starting with Psalm 1 on Ash Wednesday and ending with Psalm 26 on the Friday before Palm Sunday. But the numerical series skips all the Thursdays and a few other days. We know that Pope Gregory II added Masses for the Thursdays of Lent to the calendar about 720. Clearly, the series of twenty-six communions already existed sometime before that date. The Propers were less well organized from Easter to Pentecost, while the Sundays after Pentecost, fully half the year, were only partly supplied with chants.
In addition, the feasts of saints celebrated on their day of death form a separate sanctoral cycle. McKinnon points out similarities between the chants of the last Sundays after Pentecost and the chants of the sanctoral cycle. He suggests that the end of the systematic composition of Mass Propers can be dated about 690, for around that year Pope Sergius I added to the liturgical cycle four great feasts of Our Lady (already celebrated in the East) and the Mass for the Dedication of a Church. From this time on, the chants of the Mass were supplied by borrowing existing chants, using them more than once during the year. Thus the Thursdays of Lent were filled in and the series of Sundays after Pentecost was completed. These chants, about 600 different pieces altogether, are now regarded as the core repertoire of Gregorian chant.
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