The medieval chant traditions of the Eastern and Western churches can generally be traced back to about the tenth century, when the earliest surviving notated manuscripts were created. In these earliest sources, the various traditions are already distinct from each other and fully formed, each with thousands of chants that are assigned to at least eight modes and belong to dozens of melody types or families, carefully distributed across the daily, weekly and annual cycles of a complicated liturgical calendar. Yet we have hardly any information at all as to how these traditions evolved into the highly complex state in which we first find them. Where did they come from and when did they originate? How and when did they achieve the relatively fixed form in which we know them? Questions such as these have been important in chant research during the last thirty years, ever since Willi Apel outlined what he called ‘the “central” problem of the chant, that is, the question concerning its origin and development’. But attempts to investigate these questions have often been conceived too narrowly, overlooking as much evidence as they include or more. For instance, many scholars have written about ‘the central problem’ as if it belonged mainly to Gregorian chant and its close relative, the Old Roman or special Urban repertory, when in fact the origins and early history of almost every tradition of Eastern and Western chant are equally obscure.

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Of all the musical traditions in the world among which fruitful comparisons with medieval European chant might be made, the chant tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church promises to be especially informative. In Ethiopia one can actually witness many of the same processes of oral and written transmission as were or may have been active in medieval Europe. Music and literacy are taught in a single curriculum in ecclesiastical schools. Future singers begin to acquire the repertory by memorising chants that serve both as models for whole melodies and as the sources of the melodic phrases linked to individual notational signs. At a later stage of training each one copies out a complete notated manuscript on parchment using medieval scribal techniques. But these manuscripts are used primarily for study purposes; during liturgical celebrations the chants are performed from memory without books, as seems originally to have been the case also with Gregorian and Byzantine chant. Finally, singers learn to improvise sung liturgical poetry according to a structured system of rules. If one desired to imitate the example of Parry and Lord, who investigated the modern South Slavic epic for possible clues to Homeric poetry, it would be difficult to find a modern culture more similar to the one that spawned Gregorian chant.

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