EX. 1-7B Haec dies (Easter Gradual)It is easy to show (here, by bracketing them) that these two chants draw heavily upon a shared fund of
melodic turns. In fact a whole family of Graduals, numbering more than twenty in all, have these formulas
in common: besides the two given here, they include the Graduals for the Christmas Midnight Mass (to the
words Tecum principium, “With Thee in the day of Thy power”) and the funeral Mass, called the
Requiem after the opening word of its Introit, which happens to recur in the Gradual (Requiem aeternam,
“Eternal rest”). Again, what is striking is that the shared formulas are found most frequently at initial and
(especially) cadential points, and that internal repetitions regularly occur to accommodate lengthier texts.
In other words, these extremely elaborate chants still behave, under their flowing melismatic raiment,
very much like the psalm tones they may once have been.
How did the one evolve into the other? While we will never find a contemporary witness to musical