element of metrical verse, eventually replete with rhyme. Settings of such texts, especially rhymed
metrical sequences, are often called versus to distinguish them from the older prosa. Ex. 3-7 contains two
of the sequences that have survived into the modern liturgy. The Easter sequence, Victimae paschali
laudes (“Praises to the Paschal victim”), is attributed in both words and music to the German monk Wipo,
chaplain to the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II (reigned 1024–39). It has the paired versicle structure
common to the form: A, BB, CC, DD. The constituent phrases describe the principal parts of the modal
scale with great regularity. The two phrases of verse A describe the modal pentachord, with the first
phrase darkened by the Dorian lower neighbor, and the second compensating by adding the previously
withheld top note. Verse B makes a steady descent from the authentic tetrachord (cadencing on the tuba)
through the pentachord, through the darkened pentachord with lower neighbor and no tuba. Verse C
extends downward, like the second Kyrie in Ex. 3-5, to describe the plagal tetrachord, proceeding through
the “darkened” pentachord to the full pentachord. Phrase D, which resembles phrase B, begins like it with
the authentic tetrachord at the top of the modal ambitus, and again gradually descends to the final, with the
final phrase (and also the paschal alleluia) colored dark by the use of the subtonium (the lower neighbor).
Ex. 3-7 gives the musical text of Victimae paschali laudes exactly as it is found in the Liber usualis,
a practical edition of Gregorian chant first published in 1934 for the use of modern Catholic
congregations. It lacks a repetition of the D phrase because the text has been officially expurgated. The
omitted verse, the first of the pair sung to phrase D, had read: Credendum est magis soli Mariae
veraci/quam Judeorum turbe fallaci (“More trust is to be put in honest Mary [Magdalen] alone than in
the lying crowd of Jews”). Sensible to its nastiness, and aware of its bearing on a history of persecutions,
the Council of Trent, the mid-sixteenth century congress of church reform that evicted almost all the other
sequences from the liturgy, pruned the offending verse from Victimae paschali as a gesture of
reconciliation with the Jews.
EX. 3-7 Two sequences in modern use