The Gregorian Antiphonary was an early Christian antiphonary, i.e. book of choral music to be sung antiphonally in services; it is associated traditionally with Pope Gregory I.
Background
At the early period in question, oral tradition may have sufficed to hand down a certain number of musical formulas. When, later on, the ecclesiastical chants had been co-ordinated, it was found necessary to provide them with a notation.
The attribution to Pope Gregory I (590-604) of an official codification of the collection of antiphons occurring in the Divine Office has at frequent intervals, exercised the wit of the learned. At the end of the ninth century John the Deacon (d. c. 882) ascribed to Gregory I the compilation of the books of music used by the schola cantorum established at Rome, by that pope.
Attribution controversy
The statement, formal as it was, left room for discussion. Pierre Goussainville was the first to express (1685) a doubt as to the authenticity of the Gregorian antiphonary. He was followed by Ellies du Pin, by , and by Casimir Oudin, who added nothing noteworthy to the arguments of Goussainville.
In 1729, Johann Georg von Eckhart suggested Pope Gregory II (715-731) as the author of a work which tradition had for centuries ascribed to Gregory I; his arguments were more or less trivial. In 1749, Dominic Georgi took up the defence of the traditional opinion; among other arguments he brought forward a text whose full bearing on the point at issue he hardly seems to have grasped. This was a text of Egbert of York which Georgi transferred to the end of his book, in the form of a note, so that it was neither seen nor made use of. When, three years later, Vezzozi again took up the question, he also overlooked this particular text, and voluntarily deprived himself of an important argument in favour of the authorship of Gregory I. In 1772 Gallicioli followed in the footsteps of Vezzozi, but renewed the latter's concessions to the adversaries of Gregory I, nor did he make any secret of his surprise at the silence of Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, and Bede, concerning that pope's liturgical and musical labours. Being only partially convinced, he refrained from any conclusion, and left the matter undecided.
It was reopened by Martin Gerbert in 1774, and by Zaccarin in 1781, the latter of whom at last lit upon the text of Egbert. Between 1781 and 1890 no one seems to have discussed, critically, the ascription of the antiphonary to any particular pope. Indeed, the question was supposed to have been settled by the discovery of the antiphonary itself, which was said to be none other than the St. Gall manuscript 359 of the ninth or tenth century, containing an antiphonary between pages 24 and 158. This illusion passed through various phases from 1837 to 1848, when Danjou, in his turn, discovered the Gregorian antiphonary in a Montpellier manuscript of the tenth or eleventh century. In 1851 the Jesuit Lambillotte published a facsimile of the St. Gall manuscript, but the Gregorian question made no real progress.
The discussion concerning the antiphonary was suddenly revived, in 1890, by a public lecture delivered before the Belgian Academy on 27 October, 1899, by François-Auguste Gevaert. His argument has been summarized by Germain Morin: