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

13

"They hastened their work. Their pieces, scarcely out of their hands, were almost as soon sung as composed; everything was received without examination or with a very superficial examination, and it was only after printing, without having tried them, and after having authorized them by public usage, that one noticed their defects, but too late and when it was no longer time to remedy them."

The author then enters into the detail of the defects of all kinds that are reproached to modern Plain-Chant liturgical monophonic chant; ignorance of modulation, bad melody, incorrect prosody, lack of sense, affectation of forms most proper to counterpoint the art of combining musical melodies while sacrificing the Chant, etc., etc. We will not follow him in this long enumeration: what we have just cited is enough to prove what we have established in the first place, that those of the modern Plains-Chants liturgical monophonic chants that are not an imitation (more or less happy) of the Roman Chant, are only absurd productions.

One can without fear assure that it would be the same for those that one could compose subsequently; for, besides the fact that the knowledge of the rules of this sort of composition becomes more rare day by day, it also requires a genius all the more extraordinary to find beautiful Chants therein, as the genre offers fewer resources due to its excessive limitation and the opposition that exists between this style and that of our days. Also, there is reason to believe that it would be very difficult to find today in Europe two persons in a state to compose a piece of Plain-Chant liturgical monophonic chant that would be equally irreproachable in relation