CHAPTER 2
New Styles and Forms
FRANKISH ADDITIONS TO THE ORIGINAL
CHANT REPERTORY
LONGISSIMAE MELODIAE
Amalar (or Amalarius) of Metz, an urban cleric and a disciple of Alcuin, served Charlemagne and his
successor Louis as both churchman and statesman. He was one of the supervisors of the Carolingian chant
and liturgy reform, and virtually our sole witness to it. After a diplomatic sojourn in Rome in 831, Amalar
spent the remaining decades of his life compiling liturgical books, to which he added commentaries
replete with information about the church singing he had heard, which he wished to see transplanted to
Frankish soil. Although Amalar did not use neumes (possibly because he lived just too early to have had
the option of using them), his descriptions of the ways in which the Roman chant was adapted to the use of
the Franks are uniquely detailed and vivid.
One thing we learn from Amalar is that the Roman cantors he observed had taken one of their real
showpieces—a neuma triplex, a huge threefold melisma from a matins responsory commemorating St.
John the Baptist’s day (December 27)—and transferred it back to Christmas, where its festive jubilation
seemed even more appropriate. This practice was part of a general trend, which Amalar wanted to abet,
toward adorning the liturgy with special music. Christmas, liturgically the most elaborate of days (on
which, for example, not one but three Masses were sung: at midnight and at dawn as well as at the usual
hour between terce and sext), was of course especially favored. The neuma triplex was available for
insertion, however, wherever it was wanted. In different sources it is found associated with the feast of
the Holy Innocents and with the feasts of various saints as celebrated, with special pomp, in their home
diocese.
The third and most sumptuous of the neuma triplex melismas, with its seventy-eight notes, may be the
longest melodia, or stretch of textless vocalizing, in the entire repertory of medieval chant. In Example 2-
1, the concluding words (fabricae mundi, “of the structure of the world”) from Descendit de caelis (“He
descended from Heaven”), the crowning responsory from Christmas matins, are given first in their
“normal” form, then with the neuma triplex melisma as eventually written down in staff notation about
three centuries after Amalar described it. (We can assume that it still pretty much resembles the eighth-
century melody Amalar described because it concords well with unheighted neumes in much older
manuscripts.)
Amalar enthusiastically endorses the practice of interpolating such neumae or melismas into festive
chants, in keeping with the old idea of “jubilated” singing. Noting that in its original context (the feast of
St. John the Baptist) the triple melisma fell on the word intellectus, which he interprets to mean an
ecstatic or mystical kind of “understanding” beyond the power of words to convey, Amalar exhorts
monastic musicians that “if you ever come to the ‘understanding’ in which divinity and eternity are beheld,
you must tarry in that ‘understanding,’ rejoicing in song without words which pass away.”^1
EX. 2-1 Neuma triplex