Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

Psalm and lection tones like these are very ancient. They carry a whiff of the origins of music, at least
in its cultish uses. Singing, however minimal, is numinous; it elevates words out of the context of the
everyday. Like the biblical readings themselves, the use of lection tones is a definite point of kinship
between Christian and Jewish worship. The Roman psalm tones are mentioned and described in
Carolingian service books as early as the eighth century. They were not actually notated until the early
tenth century, however, and are not found in the early antiphoners, for which reason they are not part of the
“Gregorian” repertory in what we have identified as the strictest, most authentic sense of the term. But the
term “Gregorian” is used by now to cover the whole medieval repertory of the Roman church.


Eight psalm tones (of which the one given in the example is listed last in the standard books) are used
in the Latin liturgy, plus one called the tonus peregrinus (“migrating tone”) because the tenor of the second
hemistich is different from that of the first. The eight-tone system seems to have been borrowed in concept
(though not in actual musical content) from that of the Greek (Byzantine) church. Because the music of a
psalm tone is so obviously related in its function to that of punctuation, the Gregorian tones (incorporating
those used for prayers, as well as psalms and scriptural readings) are often collectively characterized by
the word accentus, or “accent,” already associated with chant notation in one hypothesis of its origin.


Although the designation accentus seems to have been used in this sense no earlier than the sixteenth
century, it is nevertheless very apt, because a psalm sung to a tone is in fact an accentuated or heightened
recitation. Sixteenth-century and later writers who use the word accentus in this way contrast it with the
word concentus, a Latin word associated with the pleasures of music (it may be translated as “harmony,”
or “concert,” or “choir,” or “concord,” depending on the context), which denotes the more distinctive and
decorative melodies found in antiphons, responds, or hymns.


The antiphon in Ex. 1-1 is a modest example of concentus melody. Where the relationship between the
text and music in the psalm tone is straightforwardly syllabic (one note to each syllable, the reciting tone

Free download pdf