Musical Offerings ⦁ 2024 ⦁ Volume 15 ⦁ Number 1 5 than adding new text.20 While the festal Offices later came to be associated with feast days of various saints, they began mostly with sacred days tied to events in the life of Christ. Although chant in the Mass, particularly the Proper, became increasingly separated from the tradition of psalmody, this change did not pervade within the Offices until the tenth century.21 The Offices rarely wavered from the authority of the Scriptures in their early years. From the beginning, the Offices were rooted in Scripture, establishing communities who inhaled and exhaled the Psalms. This commitment to the highest authority was maintained for many generations, passed down in local communities as a conservative tradition. St. Benedict and Helisachar stand as inspiring examples of men who brought reform to their communities by reestablishing old truths. Yet, new feast days celebrating the saints slowly shifted the unified focus of liturgy for the Offices, shaking the immutable commitment to Scripture. This shift provided the opportunity for a whole new function of the Offices to emerge. Beginning as early as the seventh century, the church calendar blossomed with new feast days,22 each of which required an entire set of services for the Offices, often including a Mass as well, with new text and often new melodies.23 While early church calendars were predominantly governed by the Christocentric seasons of Lent and Advent, these were enhanced by specific feasts and supplemented by a bevy of additional feasts associated with saints.24 For example, by 1085 the Paris church calendar had expanded to fifty-four annual feast days, most of which commemorated saints.25 Although the hierarchy of the Catholic structure tended to standardize which feasts were celebrated in the various jurisdictions, the actual details of the celebrations were left to the individual churches and monasteries, leading to a rich variety of Offices as each community created their own services.26 20 Hoppin, 95, 101. 21 Hoppin, 104; This date is both arbitrary and debatable, but it is based on a synthesis of Page, Hughes, Brand, and Batzler. 22 Quoted in Aspesi, “Liturgy and History in the Early Middle Ages,” 6. 23 Hoppin, 173–174. 24 Aspesi, “Introduction,” 1. 25 Baltzer, Ch. 7. 26 Hoppin, 173.
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