TENOR “FAMILIES”
Of the three components that went into this brainy little song, the most frequently used was the tenor. The
“In seculum” melisma, like several others (including “DO-”[mino] from the same parent gradual, Haec
dies), was a great favorite with the university crowd, used over and over again as a motet tenor. This, too,
was an aspect of “tour de force culture,” in which emulation or outdoing—doing the same thing but doing
it better—was a cardinal aim.
But why the “In seculum” tenor in particular? It might have had something to do with its eccentric
tonal scheme. The Gregorian melismas, on which motets (like clausulas before them) were constructed,
are groups of notes excerpted more or less at hazard out of larger tonal structures. They do not at all
necessarily end on the final of the parent chant’s mode. Indeed, the “In seculum” melisma does not. The
Haec dies Gradual is in mode 2 transposed to cadence on A. The “In seculum” melisma ends on F. And
even within the melisma the final note is surprising, since it occurs only at the end, after many
repercussions (some of them quite convincingly cadential) on C.
When the melisma forms the tenor of a clausula that is then re-inserted into the context of a full
performance of the Gradual, the tonal disparity is minimized. When it forms the tenor of a motet that is
performed all by itself, the tonal disparity is emphasized and becomes perhaps—or indeed almost
certainly, in view of the tenor’s popularity—a source of pleasure in its own right, for it is yet another
aspect of discordia concors. (For modern listeners, who are trained to value tonal unity in a composition,
it is perhaps a guiltier pleasure than it was for Grocheio and his contemporaries.) Wayward or
unpredictable tonal characteristics, deemed a deviation or a defect in more recent music, are normal in
medieval motets, and were probably even an allurement.
COLOR AND TALEA
An extraordinary witness to the popularity of the “In seculum” melisma is a little appendix of textless
pieces, all based on it, found at the end of the Bamberg manuscript after the hundred motets that make up
its main corpus or “body” of works. Although they are without text and written in score, these pieces are
not really “clausulae,” because they are written in mensural notation and have nothing to do with the
actual Notre Dame repertory. (As far as the composers themselves were in all likelihood concerned, they
were borrowing the “In seculum” tenor not from a Gradual but from other motets.) They were “abstract”
pattern-pieces, intended for vocalizing or for instrumental performance, and as such count as the earliest
written “chamber music.” Fig. 7-6, an “opening” of two facing pages from the Bamberg manuscript,
shows three of these pieces and the beginning of a fourth; Ex. 7-6 contains transcriptions of two of the
complete pieces.