Rebecca Maloy is the J.W. van Gorkom Professor of Music and director of the Sacred Music at Notre Dame program. A specialist in medieval liturgy and chant, she focuses her research on a liturgy that was practiced on the Iberian Peninsula between the 7th and 11th centuries. Her approach incorporates diverse perspectives, including musical analysis, notational paleography, the relationship between words and music, and the intersections between liturgical texts and patristic theology.
Her recent work examines how the multisensory experience through liturgy and music instilled theological meaning and shaped Christians in the seventh-century time period.
Video transcription:
Rebecca Malloy: My research has focused on this chant and liturgy tradition that was practiced on the Iberian Peninsula between the seventh and 11th centuries. It had not received a huge amount of attention from music scholars primarily because it's written in a kind of notation that shows you the direction of the melody but not the specific pitches. And it's such a shame that we can't hear what the melodies actually sounded like.
I got fascinated by this chant tradition originally because I was looking at texts alone. And so I
was intrigued by how the Old Testament was reworked to kind of convey a Christian interpretation of it. And that's not really so normal in Roman chant — in Roman chant they tend to just use the psalms directly. And this was all these massive interventions into the text to promote a particular interpretation of them and it got me thinking, ‘Who did this and why?’
I looked really closely at what was happening in the seventh century to create this liturgy. The Visigothic rulers of Iberia had converted from — what's normally called Aryan Christianity to Nicene Christianity, or also called Orthodox Christianity — and they were very interested in that time period in creating a whole society that kind of cohered around those Nicene Christian beliefs. And it really leads me to think that they were using sound as a way to instill theological meaning and to shape Christians in this period of time.
My collaborator Emma Hornby and I, when we were first working on this music, we decided to look at this genre that's only sung in Lent. And it was all based on passages of Jeremiah and Job and Isaiah. And it was all the same melody running all the way through the Lenton season. Everything that was saying something like, ‘His enemies have turned against him’ was reworded to be in the first person to say, ‘My enemies have turned against me.’ That ‘me’ that first person voice speaking was the penitent sinner in the first half of Lent. And then the second half of Lent you're still singing the same melodies, you're still emphasizing the first person voice, but now it's the voice of Christ speaking. And so you as a penitent sinner are kind of united, like orally, to the voice of Christ. The memory is so central to this because you have to remember that you're singing the same melody three times a week. And of course you will after six weeks are up. And so it really unifies your voice as the church with the voice of Christ.
The creators of the liturgy were so attentive to how these texts fell on the ear, and how they were delivered through melody in a very strategic way. The people within the liturgy, they stood, they kneeled, they were quiet, they paid attention to their breath. And, of course, I'm paying the most attention to sound as a musicologist, but when you think of the liturgy as multisensory experience, it must have just been so moving to sit in a church and be a part of that.
Notre Dame has a fantastic group of people who work on liturgy and they are housed in many different departments. There is so much potential here for interdisciplinary dialogue around the kinds of questions that I'm interested in. Sacred Music at Notre Dame is a program that sits at that intersection between the disciplines, especially music and theology. And my hope is that our students can go out and promote exactly this multisensory experience through the liturgy that I'm studying in my own work.
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on August 12, 2025.