Gregorian chant

Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainchant, a

form of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song of the western
Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed mainly in
western and central Europe during the 9th and 10th centuries,
with later additions and redactions. Although popular legend
credits Pope St. Gregory the Great with inventing Gregorian chant,
scholars believe that it arose from a later Carolingian synthesis of
Roman chant and Gallican chant.
Gregorian chant scale patterns are organized against a
background pattern formed of conjunct and disjunct tetrachords.
The chants can be sung by using six-note patterns called
hexachords. Gregorian melodies are traditionally written using
neumes, an early form of musical notation from which the modern
four-line and five-line staff developed. Multi-voice elaborations of
Gregorian chant, known as organum, were an early stage in the
development of Western polyphony.
Gregorian chant was traditionally sung by choirs of men and boys
in churches, or by men and women of religious orders in their
chapels. It is the music of the Roman Rite, performed in the Mass
and the monastic Office.
Although Gregorian chant is no longer obligatory, the Roman
Catholic Church still officially considers it the music most suitable
for worship.

Melodic types
Gregorian chants fall into two broad categories of melody:
recitatives and free melodies. The simplest kind of melody is the
liturgical recitative. Recitative melodies are dominated by a single
pitch, called the reciting tone. Other pitches appear in melodic
formulae for incipits, partial cadences, and full cadences. These
chants are primarily syllabic.

Notation
The earliest notated sources of Gregorian chant (written ca. 950)
used symbols called neumes (Gr. sign, of the hand) to indicate
tone-movements and relative duration within each syllable. A sort
of musical stenography that seems to focus on gestures and tone-

movements but not the specific pitches of individual notes, nor

the relative starting pitches of each neume.

The Neumes
.

Punctum
This is just a single note
Virga
This is the same as a punctum.
Podatus (pes)
When one note is written above another note like this,
the bottom note is sung first, and then the note above it.
Clivis (flexa)
When the higher note comes first, it is written like this.

Scandicus
Three or more notes going upward.

Difference: