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304 CURIOSITIES OF MUSIC |
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much, to show that music was but one of the fields in which this wonderful man exercised his talents.
He collected the available church music, he added to it by composing new hymns and anthems, he arranged them for the various special days of the year, he invented or amplified the system of ecclesiastical composition, and took care that the reforms should be permanent, by having most things relative to his musical labors, written out in a lasting manner.*
These reforms he began about A. D. 599. He did not discard the four modes of St. Ambrose, but rather extended them; and yet (through the great personal popularity of St. Ambrose), the Milan Cathedral kept the Ambrosian chant unadulterated, for centuries after the establishÂment of the Gregorian.
As late as the latter half of the fifteenth centuiy, Franchinus Gafor speaks of the Grego-rians and Ambrosians as partizans. Of course, in order to secure uniformity, the rulers of Europe, sought to dwarf the workings of the Ambrosian system, and Charlemagne even ordered the Ambrosian books to be burnt. Although, as above stated, there was nothing antagonistic in the two systems, yet their musical results seem to have had a material difference, for Eadulf of Tongern an unimpeachable witness of the fourteenth century, who heard both methods in their purity, says that he found the Ambrosian chanting, widely different from the Eoman (Gregorian);
• Ambros Qweh. d Mub., t. 2, p. 43. |
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