Why Did The Carolingians Adopted Roman Chant?

Roman chant is essentially a precursor to the ‘Gregorian’ chant we know today, which should really be called Romano-Frankish chant, and refers to the chant used by the early Roman Catholic church, which possibly developed out of Jewish liturgy. It was adopted and altered by the Carolingians in the late eighth century, and ultimately replaced by the Carolingian version by the end of the thirteenth century. In this essay I am going to focus on why the Carolingians adopted Roman chant, and how and why they changed it.
The king of the Carolingian (or Frankish) empire at the time was Charlemagne (ruled 768-814), and by this point the Carolingians already had strong bonds with Rome. In the mid-eighth century Charlemagne’s father, Pippin III, had

In order to strengthen this spiritual welfare, he believed it was necessary for each church to sing the same type of chant. Following on from his father’s suppression of Gallican chant in 754, Charlemagne detailed in the Admonitio generalis of 789 that ‘all the clergy are to learn the Roman chant thoroughly’ for the sake of ‘the peaceful concord of God’s holy church’ . The ultimate goal was to have a “single, nominally Roman, repertory sung throughout Europe” . As I mentioned earlier, the reason behind this could be Charlemagne’s piety, or it might also be a way to unify and control areas yet to fall under Frankish rule. If Charlemagne could enforce the same religion on all of his subjects, ensuring that all churches and monasteries sung the same chants, in the same way, on the same days, it would enable him to control and unify his kingdom in a much more successful manner.
However, these changes could not be implemented immediately – it is incredibly difficult to break a long-standing tradition, and harder yet to learn a vast number of new chants when they’ve always been passed down orally. Roman liturgical books were distributed throughout the Frankish kingdom, on top of the books and texts that people had brought back from Rome when they went there as a pilgrimage. Charlemagne also sent cantors to