An early witness to the practice of “prosulation”—as good a term as any for the interpolation of
syllabic texts into melismatic tunes—is Notker Balbulus (Notker the Stammerer, d. 912), a monk at the
East Frankish monastery of St. Gallen, already known to us as Charlemagne’s first biographer. In the
introduction to his Book of Hymns (Liber hymnorum), which dates from about 880, Notker recalls that in
his youth he learned the practice from a monk who had escaped from the West Frankish abbey of Jumièges
(near Rouen in northwestern France), after it had been laid waste by marauding “Normans” (that is,
Vikings).^3 This would have been in 852, about twenty years after Amalar had first described the sequentia
and promoted it among the Franks. This monk, Notker tells us, had with him an antiphoner in which some
sequentia melismas had been “prosulated.” Notker, so he tells us, leapt at this device for making extra-
long vocalises (longissimae melodiae, he calls them) memorable, and went on, so he boasts, to invent
what we now call the sequence.
SEQUENCES
We now use the English word “sequence,” derived from the Latin sequentia (or, sometimes, “prose,”
derived from the Latin prosa) to denote not the jubilus-replacing melisma itself but the syllabic hymn that
(as Notker tells us) was originally derived from it by matching prose syllables to its constituent notes.
The sequence eventually became a canonical part of the Mass, on a par with the Alleluia that it followed
and the Gospel reading that it preceded. It is one of the indigenous Frankish contributions to the evolving
“Roman” liturgy, and Notker (despite the studied modesty of his diction) may have exaggerated his role in
its creation.