Plainsong
body of monophonic chants used in the liturgies of the Western Christian Church
Plainsong or plainchant (calque from the French plain-chant; Latin: cantus planus) is a body of chants used in the liturgies of the Western Church. When referring to the term plainsong, it is those sacred pieces that are composed in Latin text. Plainsong was the exclusive form of the Western Christian church music until the ninth century and the introduction of polyphony.
The monophonic chants of plainsong have a non-metric rhythm, which is generally considered freer than the metered rhythms of later Western music. They are also traditionally sung without musical accompaniment, though recent scholarship has unearthed a widespread custom of accompanied chant that transcended religious and geographical borders.
There are three types of chant melodies that plainsongs fall into: syllabic, neumatic, and melismatic. The free flowing melismatic melody form of plainsong is still heard in Middle Eastern music being performed today.
Although the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches did not split until long after the origin of plainsong, Byzantine chants are generally not classified as plainsong.
History
Plainsong developed during the earliest centuries of Christianity, influenced possibly by the music of the Jewish synagogue and certainly by the Greek modal system. It has its own system of notation.
“Plainsong” enters the record as body of monophonic chants used in the liturgies of the Western Christian Church. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Plainsong, body and monophonic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2707688. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Plainsong” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.