could be sung to two, three, four, or more notes, even whole cascades called melismas.
Melismatic singing was held by Christian mystics to be the highest form of religious utterance: “It is a
certain sound of joy without words,” St. Augustine wrote of melismatic chanting in the fourth century, “the
expression of a mind poured forth in joy.”^4 It came to be called jubilated singing, after jubilus, Latin for a
“call” upon God (as in Charlemagne’s Admonitio, quoted earlier; compare the root ju-, pronounced
“yoo,” as in “yoo-hoo!”). This musical jubilation, in fact, was the means through which the Latin word
took on its secondary (in English borrowings, primary) association with joy.
The jubilated singing at matins was a lusher version of the refrains that were added to psalms—
together with a concluding doxology (from the Greek for “words of praise”) to the Holy Trinity—in their
other Christian uses. These simpler refrains were called antiphons, possibly because they alternated with
the psalm verses in a manner that recalled biblical multichoral antiphony.
The shorter services were the day offices. They began with the dawn office of praise (Lauds) and
continued with four “minor hours” named after the clock hours in medieval parlance: prime (the first
hour; in present-day terms, 6A.M.), terce (the third hour, or 9 A.M.), sext (the sixth hour, or 12 noon), and
none (the ninth hour, or 3P.M.; the fact that our word noon derives from none is just one of those things). At
these tiny services (often combined in pairs so that there would be more uninterrupted time for work), we
can observe the liturgy in microcosm. At a minimum an office included a psalm, a scripture reading
(“chapter” or capitulum), and a hymn, which was a metrical song of praise derived from Greek pagan
practice, showing again how eclectic were the sources of the Christian liturgy that was once thought to
descend in simple fashion from that of the temple and synagogue. St. Augustine’s definition of a hymn is
neat:
A hymn is song with praise of God. If you praise God and do not sing, you do not utter a hymn. If you sing and do not
praise God, you do not utter a hymn. If you praise anything other than God, and if you sing these praises, still you do not
utter a hymn. A hymn therefore has these three things: song, and praise, and God.^5The public liturgical day ended with evensong or Vespers, consisting of several full psalms with
antiphons, along with the psalm-like “Canticle of Mary” (known as the Magnificat after its first word).
There was a bedtime service for monks called Compline (completion), at which special elaborate
antiphons (or “anthems,” to use the English cognate) came to be sung, in the later middle ages, to the
Blessed Virgin as a plea for her intercession. (Compline and Lauds are the other services that contain
canticles—texts from the New Testament that are sung in the same manner as psalms, with antiphons and
doxology.)
Just as the liturgical day was a cycle of services, and the monastic week was a cycle of psalms, so the
whole church calendar was organized in a yearly cycle of commemorations, known as feasts, that became
ever more copious and diverse over time—wheels within wheels within wheels, within which Christian
monastics lived out their lives, fulfilling the prophet’s mystical vision (see Ezekiel 1:15–21). The basic
framework was provided by the Proper of the Time, or temporale, commemorating events in the life of
Christ, organized in two great cycles surrounding the two biggest feasts, Christmas and Easter.
Their complicated relationship epitomizes the eclecticism of Christian worship. The Christmas cycle,
beginning with four solemn weeks of preparation called Advent and ending with the feast of Epiphany, is
reckoned by the Roman pagan (secular and solar) calendar. The Easter cycle, beginning with the forty-day
fast called Lent and ending with the feast of Pentecost, is reckoned by the Jewish lunar calendar, as
modified by councils of Christian bishops to insure that Easter fell on Sunday (Dominica—“the Lord’s
Day”—in Latin). Since the date of Easter can vary by as much as a month relative to that of Christmas, the
calendar allows for a variable number of Sundays after Epiphany (on one side of Easter) and Sundays