This passage from Amalar recalls the famous words in which St. Augustine, five hundred years
earlier, had extolled the “jubilated” singing of his day, associated by the time of Amalar chiefly with the
Mass Alleluia. And sure enough, Amalar writes enthusiastically of another Roman practice, that of
replacing the traditional jubilus, the melisma on the “-ia” of “Alleluia,” with an even longer melody,
which he describes as “a jubilation that the singers call a sequentia,” presumably because of the way it
followed after the Alleluia chant.^2
That the Franks enthusiastically adopted the practice of adorning their service music with ever
lengthier melodiae we learn from Agobard of Lyons, another ninth-century ecclesiastical observer, who
condemned what Amalar endorsed. From childhood to old age, Agobard complained, the singers in the
schola spent all their time improving their voices instead of their souls, boasted of their virtuosity and
their memories, and vied with one another in melismatic contest. The sequentia repertoire was the tamed
and scripted issue of these frantic oral engagements.