is not strange that the only kind of music was ritual music and that all our information comes through ecclesiastical annalists.
25. The First Christian Songs.—Singing in public and private
worship was a matter of course for the early Christians. For
Jewish converts this was a continuance of synagogue customs,
but, since the Church grew mostly among non-Jews, the technical
forms employed were more Greek than Hebrew. The use of
instruments was long resisted, because of their association with
pagan sensuality. In addition to the Hebrew Psalms (in the
Greek version), the new faith tended constantly to produce new
hymns, at first apparently in the form of rhapsodies. From the
2d to the 4th centuries the foundations of the vast structure of
Christian hymnody were securely laid, especially in the epoch-making
work of certain Latin writers.
The New Testament makes some mention of the singing of hymns.
The earliest complete hymn extant is by Clement of Alexandria (d. 220),
and parts of canticles like the Gloria in Excelsis and the Te Deum may
have been somewhat earlier. By about 400, sacred poems have adopted
accent, rhyme and stanza in a way quite novel. For two or three centuries
thereafter the abundance of original hymns is a sure sign of the
cultivation of religious music.
26. The Gregorian Style.—From the 4th century the strong
accent upon unity of organization, fixity of creed and uniformity
of liturgy led steadily to a demand for richness and stateliness.
Costly edifices became common, ministrants were multiplied, and
the whole ritual of worship tended to become ornate. This involved
a new attention to music.
The first centre of activity was Constantinople, where Greek music was the established type of artistic song. Thus the tradition of the ancient unison melody was handed on to Italy and the West. The evolution that followed is only imperfectly traceable in detail, but in the end it provided the mediæval Church with a large and striking body of melodies, fitted to a variety of prose texts and even to metrical poetry. We must suppose that these ritual melodies grew out of manifold experiments at different places, which were only gradually wrought into a general and uniform system. Even after the system was codified, its usages continued to accumulate, and from time to time considerable modifications in style appeared.
