project of textual revision and creation went hand in hand with a similar musical process.
What remains a question of the most profound difficulty, however, is how closely these
melodies match those in the earliest notated Frankish graduals of nearly two centuries
later.
Two major developments altered the external aspect of the Mass in later centuries: the
accumulation of tropes and the growth in prominence of the Ordinary. Tropes—preludes,
interludes, and postludes of text and music—were freely added to chants of the Proper
and Ordinary with the exception of the Credo. They were obviously a creative outlet for
active clerical poets and musicians at a time when the core repertory of the Mass was
complete. Common already among the 9th-century Franks, troping reached its climax in
the great Benedictine monasteries of the 11th century, such as those belonging to the
French order of Cluny. The Ordinary, in addition to accumulating tropes, was the
beneficiary of numerous new and more elaborate melodies. Both manifestations can be
seen as different aspects of a process that at once gave the Ordinary an eminence it had
not previously possessed (nor deserved, modern liturgical scholars would say) and
allowed it also to share to some extent in the essential characteristic of the Proper, as
certain tropes and melodies became associated with particular feast days, or at least
classes of festival. In the late Middle Ages, the rise of the polyphonic Ordinary succeeded
in eclipsing even the musical significance of the Proper. France was foremost in this
movement that created one of the great monuments of western music, the Cyclic Mass, a
unified composition in five movements: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.
Guillaume Dufay of Cambrai (d. 1474) was the central figure in establishing the genre.
James McKinnon
[See also: CALENDAR, LITURGICAL; CYCLIC MASS; EUCHARISTIC
VENERATION AND VESSELS; GALLICAN RITE; LITURGICAL BOOKS;
LITURGICAL LANGUAGES; LITURGICAL YEAR; STATIONS OF THE CROSS;
SEQUENCE (EARLY); SEQUENCE (LATE); TROPES, ORDINARY; TROPES,
PROPER; VESTMENTS, ECCLESIASTICAL]
Atchley, Edward. Ordo Romanus Primus. London: Moring, 1905.
Jeffery, Peter. “The Introduction of Psalmody into the Roman Mass by Pope Celestine I (422–
432).” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 26(1984):147–65.
Jungmann, Josef. The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, trans. Francis
X.Brunner. 2 vols. New York: Benziger, 1951–55.
Levy, Kenneth. “The Byzantine Sanctus and its Modal Tradition in East and West.” Annales
musicologiques 6(1958–63):7–68.
McKinnon, James. “The Fourth-Century Origin of the Gradual.” Early Music History 7(1987):91–
106.
Martimort, Aimé Georges. “Origine et signification de l’alleluia de la messe romaine.” In
Kyriakon: Festschrift Johannes Quasten, ed. Patrick Granfield and Josef Jungmann. Münster in
Westphalia: Aschendorff, 1970, pp. 811–38.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1136