TROPES, ORDINARY
. Texted compositions written to supplement Ordinary chants for the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria,
Sanctus, Agnus Dei). Although the Credo was rarely troped, a small repertoire of tropes
for the Benedicamus Domino, the piece sung at the close of the hours of the Office and at
the close of Mass during Lent, exists as well. Because chants for the Ordinary were being
composed during the 9th and 10th centuries, the same period in which Ordinary tropes
were first written, there has been argument over the extent to which Ordinary chants were
originally conceived with their tropes.
True Kyrie tropes, to be distinguished from the syllabically texted Latin Kyrie, are rare
and originated early, with French sources containing even fewer of them than
manuscripts from east of the Rhine and from Italy. The music of these chants is
distinguished in style from that of Kyrie chants in general; the tropes are added to Kyries
with greater flexibility than is found with many Proper chants. Gloria tropes comprise a
larger and more varied repertory of texts and music. Some of the verses of Gloria tropes,
the “wandering verses,” are used in a variety of positions and combinations and may have
been derived from Gallican chants, especially the litanies. Sanctus and Agnus Dei tropes
were often of two types: those that introduce the chant and help establish the feast
(making an Ordinary chant Proper) were of special importance in southern French
sources; other trope elements were interpolated within the petitions of the chant, and,
within the Agnus Dei, created a piece resembling a litany. Iversen has found that Sanctus
and Agnus Dei tropes dating from the 11th century and written in northwestern France
and England often develop trinitarian themes. In the following example of a Sanctus
trope, from a 12th-century source from the Norman abbey of Saint-Évroult, the trope
transforms the chant, causing each statement to be addressed to a particular member of
the Trinity:
SANCTUS,
Pater, ex quo omnia, deus.
SANCTUS,
Filius, per quem omnia, deus.
SANCTUS
Spiritus, in quo omnia, colendus,
DEUS SABAOTH.
PLENI SUNT CAELI ET TERRA GLORIA TUA, etc.
Margot Fassler[See also: TROPES, PROPER]
Iversen, Gunilla, ed. Corpus Troporum VII: Tropes du Sanctus. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell,
1990.
——. Corpus Troporum IV: Tropes de l’Agnus Dei. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1980.
Bjork, David. “The Kyrie Trope.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 33(1980):1–41.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1758