Gregorian Chant

Gregorian chant is the monophonic, unaccompanied liturgical chant of the Roman Catholic Church, sung in Latin to the texts of the Mass and the Divine Office. Its melodies move by step within the eight church modes, in free rhythm governed by the prose of the text rather than by metre, and are performed by a solo cantor and choir in alternation. Codified in the Frankish-Roman synthesis of the eighth and ninth centuries and traditionally ascribed to Pope Gregory I, it is the foundational repertory of Western art music and the root from which organum and polyphony grew.