Artefact

Artefact

www.youtube.com/watch?v=srr_uP… - Old Roman chant - Tecum Principium. After Charlemagne had spread Christianity by the sword in large parts of Europe and coincidentally had gained a large territory for themselves to rule over, he set out to destroy all existing regional identities. I the part of his Reich which had already long been christianized different forms of sung worship, a.k.a. chants, had developed over the years, together with different forms of religious service. Charlemagne didn't want any of that, feeling that the existing cultural pluriformity threatened the unity of his power base. So he got together with the leaders of the Western Christian church, with whom he and his daddy Pepin were already best buddies because of their power (of course being the whore the Catholic Church is, after France fell apart it was later just as quickly abandoned in favor of the proto-Germans a.k.a. Holy Roman Empire), and together they came up with a scheme for a kind of early McDonaldization of the territory: all existing regional forms of worship were to be banned and replaced with a uniform liturgy, which included the nowadays well-known, thanks to Enya and her new age following, Gregorian chant (NEVER, though, tell a devout Catholic that you use Gregorian chant for "relaxation", they will take it as a grave offense and blasphemy!). All but a few non-standardized forms of chanting were quickly forgotten, and in fact, despite extensive research, no one really knows today what most sounded like. One exception is Old Roman Chant, which originating in Rome itself probably found some protection from old skool dissenters while the rest of Western Europe was being culturally cleansed (what Charlemagne did would be considered a cultural crime by modern UNESCO standards, but the same applies to the Protestant wave of iconoclasm of course, which easily matched anything we now hate about the Taliban and IS, in terms of destruction of humankind's cultural heritage). What I personally like about Old Roman Chant is that it seems to be designed to keep people awake rather than to put them to sleep, which Gregorian chant tends to do for me, just like the uniform, standardized nutritional crap sold at McDonalds does. Without doubt no coincidence at all.