ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the possible reasons for the continuing stability of the eighth-mode tracts in the Old Roman and Gregorian traditions. One of the concerns of the newly developing discipline was to find connections between the abstract music theory of the ancients and the living tradition of liturgical chant. The closeness of the early written sources has led Levy to describe the tradition, especially of the ‘idiomelic’ chants, as ‘concretized’. The alteration of the eighth-mode tracts to fit the tonal constraints of the eight mode system, and the eradication of chromatic elements, seem to have been primary concerns only when pitched notation developed in the eleventh century, and do not affect the early written tradition. The real seat of melodic transmission then lay in memory, and for so long as staffless neumes continued as the basic medium of written transmission, memory continued as the guarantor of full melodic substance.’
