The Chorus Urbanus Male Section will be performing a recital of Gregorian chant organised by the Kercem Local Council in connection with the second edition of the festival ‘Is-Sagra ta’ San Girgor.’

This concert, to be held onFriday, the 12th of March, at the Kercem Parish Church, will also include an illustrated lecture on Gregorian chant by The Chorus Urbanus musical director, Dr John Galea.

At the end of the 6th Century, September 592, with the ascent to papacy of Gregory I, called the Great, the Roman chant reached its most perfect expression. This Pope, a member of the noble ‘gens’ of the Anicii, had been praetor of Rome at the age of 30 and was founder of several abbeys. Once elected to the Pontificate he undertook a task that can be summarised in two aspects, in the first place the compilation and selection of the melodies, so that they were copied and collected in books called antifonarii. In second place he dedicated a great part of the effort to the formation of musicians, organising in each church a group of singers that was then known as the schola cantorum.

Another objective of his task was the unification of liturgies. For this reason the chant of the Roman liturgy began to be called Gregorian chant, a denomination that extends also to later musical creations that conserved the same characteristics.

Gregorian chant is pure vocal music sung without accompaniment of instruments. It is sung in unison, that is, all the singers intone the same melody hence the term monodia. It is sung with free rhythm according to the metric rhythm of the literary text and not with absolute measured values. It is modal music written in ‘scales’ of very particular sounds. Chant melodies are classified within three categories: syllabic, where each syllable of the text corresponds to a note; neumatic, where a syllable gets a small group of notes, and melismatic when to a syllable there correspond several notes. The texts are mostly in Latin, the language of the Roman Empire and the language of the early Roman church. Some very few pieces were in Greek. These texts were largely taken from the Bible, psalms, books of the Old Testament; and from the gospels. A few others were composed out of anonymous inspiration.

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