PROSA
Like the jubilus itself, the early sequentia vocalises—sung on the word “Alleluia” but so melismatic as
to be virtually textless—had many internal phrase repetitions designed to make them easier to memorize.
Another memory aid employed by Frankish singers was of far-reaching artistic significance: they added
words to melismatic chants that turned them, perhaps paradoxically, into syllabic hymns. This led to a
fantastic flowering of new devotional song that developed over three centuries and reached its peak in
twelfth-century France.
Its beginnings are what concern us now. Amalar’s neuma triplex can serve as our starting point. As its
surviving sources attest, it begat several little prose poems, or prosulae; compare the pair in Example 2-2
with the climactic third melisma in Ex. 2-1.
The texts are in prose (or “art-prose” as it has been called, since its diction is very high-flown)
because the original melody, like most melismatic chants, is rhythmically rhapsodic and irregular. (The
use of prose was nothing new, of course; the psalms themselves are examples of art-prose.) But the
melody’s one regularizing feature—the use of a repeated phrase at the outset (disguised by the
interpolation of a pair of low notes)—lends the texted version a slight suggestion of strophic or “couplet”
form. (In strophic form every line of text is set to the same melody; in couplet form the melody changes
after every pair of lines.) Also note parenthetically the interpolated “key signature” of one flat in Ex. 2-
2a. This was not part of the original notation, but reflects the way we assume any medieval singer would
have sung a melody in which B immediately preceded or followed an F, or in which F and B described
the outer limits of a melodic “turn.” (The augmented fourth, not recognized by the Frankish music theory
we will shortly be investigating, was adjusted to the perfect fourth in practice long before it was
“prohibited” in theory.)
A similar underlaying of a prose text or prosula to a preexisting melisma adorns a famous chant we
met in the previous chapter. The eleventh-century Gradual of St. Yrieux, which contains elaborated
versions of the Mass propers, has what looks like a syllabic version of the Alleluia Justus ut palma: an
entire poem is interpolated into the text of its verse to correspond with the notes of the long melisma on
“cedrus.” As we may recall from Ex. 1-6, that melisma is distinguished by regularizing internal
repetitions that can be represented as aabb. When the prose text is underlaid to the melisma, the resulting
prosula has the appearance of a poem in couplets (pairs of lines set to the same tune). As we shall see,
paired verses are characteristic of many medieval chants. We may be witnessing the procedure in its
embryo (compare Ex. 2-3 with Ex. 1-6).
EX. 2-2A Prosulae to the neuma triplex, Facture tue