Considerations on the Necessity of Restoring the Chant of the Church of Rome in All Churches of the Empire

( 11 )

some merit are only copies made with more or less skill; the greatest number are only a horrible mutilation. Let us listen to what a very learned and very estimable writer, the author of the Practical and Theoretical Treatise on Plain-Chant, printed in Paris in 1750, says on this matter.

"The reform of the breviaries and other books of the holy liturgy, which the zeal of several Churches of France has led them to undertake, has made it necessary to compose new Chants, but what a difference between the ancient ones and these!

"The changes made in the breviaries were enjoyed as soon as they appeared....... How did it happen that the new Chants experienced, if not all, at least the majority, a different fate? for....... they are not enjoyed by the multitude, they revolt good connoisseurs, and they produce in the listeners in effect only boredom, coldness, and insipidity? Why this? it is because the reformers of the offices....... did nothing without going back to the purest sources of venerable antiquity....... The composers of the Chant, on the contrary, took, for the most part, a completely opposite route. Some, without any regard for the ancient masters, perhaps even without ever having known them, worked only from the new ones; and even then, their work consisted only of copying them slavishly, or at most of imitating them without taste and with as little choice of the authors they proposed to themselves as of the Chants they needed for the works they were charged with. The others, even bolder and more independent, sought neither models nor guides....... They