psalmody. Since they were never mediated by Frankish editors, the Ambrosian melodies conform only
vaguely with the familiar system of medieval “church modes” (the subject of our next chapter).
Also notated in the tenth and eleventh centuries was the chant sung on the Iberian peninsula, sung at
least since the seventh century, but called Mozarabic (a term referring to Christians living under Islamic
domination) because it continued to be sung after the Moorish invasion of 711, which ushered in a period
of Muslim political rule that lasted almost until the end of the fifteenth century. The Mozarabic chant was
officially suppressed in favor of the Gregorian in 1085 following the Christian reconquest of Toledo, the
seat of the Spanish church. Hence almost all of the Mozarabic sources are notated in nondiastematic
neumes that cannot now be read for their precise pitch content. But even so, the makeup of the liturgy, the
style of its constituent melodies (whether syllabic or melismatic, etc.), and hence its relationship to other
rites can be assessed; and because they are the largest body of liturgical manuscripts to preserve an
authenticated pre-Carolingian Latin rite, the Mozarabic sources have attracted a good deal of scholarly
attention, if not as much as they deserve. The rite underwent a spurious nationalistic revival in the late
fifteenth century, when the Moors were expelled from Spain. Printed books of “Mozarabic chant” were
then prepared, but the melodies they contain (some of them still sung at the Cathedral of Toledo) bear no
discernible relation to the neumes in the authentic Mozarabic sources.
The so-called Beneventan chant, a repertory sung at various locales in southern Italy (Benevento,
Monte Cassino, etc.) was another rite that lasted just long enough alongside the Gregorian to make it into
neumatic notation. Beneventan manuscripts dating from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries survive, but
only the oldest layer (mainly consisting of chants for Easter and Holy Week) is free of Gregorian
infiltration. Judging from what little remains of it, it is possible that the Beneventan repertory was largely
a Latinized import from the Byzantine church. The same may be said for the rite of Ravenna, the ex-
Byzantine city that Pepin conquered and bestowed on Pope Stephen II. It survived into the manuscript age
in shreds and was mostly extinct by the end of the eleventh century.
WHAT IS ART?
As has been observed frequently and well, the forms of Frankish musical composition, the earliest
composition in the literate tradition we habitually call our own, often contradict the assumptions that we
habitually make about musical compositions—assumptions we do not usually even know we are making,
precisely because they are habitual. We normally neither reflect upon them nor consider alternatives. Very
old music often asks us to consider alternatives, and to reflect.
Regarding tropes to the Introit, for example, one might well ask in what sense a series of
interpolations into a preexisting piece can itself be considered “a piece.” It is neither continuous nor
coherent nor unitary nor independent, all of these adjectives naming qualities that we tacitly expect pieces
of music to exemplify. Indeed, the Introit itself, once it plays host to the trope, loses its continuity, its
coherence, its unity, and its independence. Does it lose its piecehood when invaded by the other? And if
its piecehood is so easily lost, how genuine was it to begin with?
Rather than judge the trope or its host on the basis of their conformity with our casual expectations
(for such a judgment can only be invidious), we might take the opportunity the trope affords us to critique
those expectations. For it would indeed be surprising if musical expectations had not changed over a
period of a thousand years.
The first criterion that might be questioned is the notion from which all the others stem—namely, that a
piece of music worthy of consideration as such ought to be able to stand timelessly on its own two feet.
What is demanded is that it have an existence independent of its context, its observers, and particularly its