Ambrosian Chant

Ambrosian chant (also called Milanese chant ) is attributed to St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan from 374 to 397, a time when the Western Roman emperor made it his capital. Hence it is sometimes called the oldest Western chant. It is the liturgical plainchant of the Ambrosian Rite of the Western church. It is the oldest surviving plainchant tradition other than Gregorian which is officially approved by the Roman Catholic Church.

OVERVIEW

Milan has a history as a center of religious music composition, going back to St. Ambrose who is credited with composing hymns (presumably texts and chants). St. Augustine names four of these hymns that are still extant: Aeterne rerum conditor, Deus creator omnium, Jam surgit hora tertia, and Veni redemptor gentium. These all use the same meter, and later hymns of the same meter are called Ambrosian, and many have long been used in Gregorian as well as Milanese liturgical books.

Despite these early origins, Milanese chant is generally identified with the Lombard kingdom, founded in 569. Although the Ambrosian rite is liturgically related to Gallican and Mozarabic rites and Ambrosian chant is likewise related to those plainchant traditions, Ambrosian chant is a distinct musical repertory. It is characterized by different categories of chant, different chant texts, and different musical styles make, and by the 8th century, this chant was attested to be normative across northern Italy, perhaps reaching into southern Italy as well.

Between the 8th and 13th centuries, Gregorian chant supplanted most local chant forms in the western church, supplanting Mozarabic, Gallican, Celitc, Old Roman and Beneventan. Ambrosian chant alone survived, despite the efforts of the Vatican over several centuries to supplant it with Gregorian chant. Charlemagne became king of Lombardy by conquest in 774, and Carolingian kings of Italy ruled until 962. But the Carolingian insistence on Roman (that is, Gregorian) chant was ineffective in Lombardy. At the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, the many local variants of the Roman rite were standardized, but Milan (and the part of northern Italy that formed its archdiocese) was allowed to retain its rite because of its antiquity.

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL

Liturgica.com offers the following additional content on this subject:

1. Early Western Liturgics

2. Milanese chant

3. Early Western Chant

4. Gregorian Reforms

5. Carolingian Reforms 

6. Gregorian Chant 

The Liturgica.com Web Store offers:

1. CDs of Ambrosian Chant and other minor Western chant forms

2. A wide range of books on the development of liturgical worship

3. A selection of books on chant and its development

4. Books on iconography

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