example, to Christmas, or to Masses where a bishop presided. The Sanctus, as in the early
church, concluded the Preface, the introductory portion of the eucharistic prayer. The
Agnus Dei, finally, sung during the fraction of the host, was introduced only in the time
of Pope Sergius I (r. 697–701). Its text, “Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the
world,” was adopted as a deliberate act of theological defiance against the Byzantine
empire, which recently had forbidden references to Christ as a lamb. (The Ite missa est,
intoned by the celebrant to signal the end of Mass, later took on the character of an
Ordinary chant when it began to imitate the melodies of the Kyrie.)
While this early-medieval papal Mass (and its Frankish adaptations) retained the
essential shape of its 4th-century counterpart, its overall aspect differed dramatically.
Aside from the pomp required by the movements of the pope and his retinue, the
dominating impression is that created by the nearly continuous choral and solo singing of
the schola cantorum. The melodies of the Mass Proper, while probably not precisely
those we know from the early 10th-century Frankish manuscripts of Gregorian chant,
were comparable in format and dimension. The melodies of the Mass Ordinary were
simpler than their later counterparts; but still they were sung by the schola as discrete
musical events, whereas they had originated for the most part as simple congregational
contributions to the dialogue with the celebrant. He, too, ceded much of his earlier role as
the aural focal point of the ceremony. He continued to exchange greetings with the
attendant clergy and people, and he chanted the Preface and Pater noster; but he recited
the eucharistic prayers (the medieval Canon) in a subdued tone, and by the end of the 8th
century in complete silence. Solemn Mass at the beginning of the 8th century was well on
its way to being dominated by ecclesiastical music, a process that would be completed in
the late Middle Ages.
The texts, and quite possibly the music, of the Mass Proper achieved their first
maturity close in time to the copying of Ordo Romanus I. We have the texts in unnotated
Frankish graduals from ca. 800 (and their melodies from notated graduals of ca. 900), and
we know that the texts existed in Rome in the first half of the 8th century because they
appear in the so-called Old Roman graduals, manuscripts that represent the Roman
liturgy before its transmission to Francia in the second half of the 8th century. In earlier
centuries, the Proper chants had simply been psalms and the first chant books had been
psalters, so that clearly a period of intense composition and organization was required to
produce the complex system of texts that makes up the early-medieval Mass Proper.
Liturgical and musical historians long assumed this period to be the time of Pope Gregory
I (590–604), but it appears more likely now to have been the heyday of the schola
cantorum, the later 7th and earlier 8th centuries.
The essential trait of the Mass Proper is the provision of an appropriate set of chants
for each day of the annual cycle, something one might take for granted today, but an
innovation in a time when the more normal expectation was a day-to-day selection of
antiphons and psalms from an existing repertory. The majority of the new texts were
chosen from the time-honored source of the Psalter, but they were short apposite
passages, removed from their original context and frequently reshaped to create a work-
able vehicle for a musical composition. And many texts were fashioned from other
biblical sources, for example, evocative lyrics from the prophetic books for the newly
created season of Advent, and colorful Gospel narratives for the communion antiphons of
the Christmas and Paschal seasons. As for the melodies, one can only assume that this
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