entertaining detail, beginning with the famous incipit Quem quaeritis (“Whom do you seek?”), then
substituting the manger for the tomb and the shepherds for the Marys. Once again, the object is to justify an
Old Testament reading as a prophecy of Christ’s coming, in this case the famous lines from the book of
Isaiah (“Unto us a child is born”) on which the Christmas Introit is based. Christmas, too, became a fertile
site of church dramas (“manger plays”) in centuries to come. Scholars used to think that the eventual
medieval church plays, enacted not at Mass but after matins, were amplifications of actual Introit tropes
(tropes on tropes, so to speak). The relationship has turned out to be far less direct than that, but the
general practice of acting out the liturgy did nevertheless originate in the dialogue tropes for Easter and
Christmas.
EX. 2-9 Easter dialogue trope (Quem quaeritis in sepulchro)THE MASS ORDINARY
Finally, Frankish composers were responsible for creating fancy melodies for the invariant texts of the
Mass liturgy, the ones recited at every Mass regardless of the occasion. There had not been any need for
such settings in pre-Carolingian times, because these texts—acclamations all—had not yet been assigned
stable liturgical positions. Their adoption by the Franks reflects a love of pomp, most likely transferred
from civic ceremonial (like the laudes regiae, the “royal acclamations,” with which Charlemagne was
greeted after his Roman coronation). Once these texts became fixed, they could be written down as part of
the Mass ordo (Latin for “order of events”), which listed things to do at a given service.
The texts (and chants) proper to the unique occasion were collected in their own books (antiphoners,
graduals, and the like). Those that were sung at every Mass were included in the ordo itself. Hence to
musicians the term “Mass Ordinary” (from ordinarium missae) has come to mean, precisely, the five
invariant texts sung by the choir: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. These began to receive
significant musical attention in the Carolingian period; much later they began to get set as a unified
polyphonic cycle, spawning a tradition of Mass composition that lasted into the twentieth century, to
which many famous composers of the standard concert repertory (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, to name a
few) made contributions. Another text that was often included in the early ordinary formularies was the