learns it from the printed page. Its utterly forgotten lead-in verse puts the famous chorus in the mouth of a young girl: “Katie
Casey was baseball mad,/Had the fever and had it bad;/Just to root for the hometown crew,/Ev’ry sou Katie blew./On a Saturday,
her young beau/Called to see if she’d like to go/To see a show, but Miss Kate said, ‘No,/I’ll tell you what you can do.”’ The
chorus has flourished by itself in oral tradition for almost a century. As always, the oral tradition has modified what it transmits,
here only in small ways, but irrevocably. The tune has survived the mouth-to-mouth process unchanged, but many people now
sing “Take me out to the crowd,” and everyone sings “For it’s root, root, root.”PSALMODY IN PRACTICE: THE OFFICE
It is time now for some music. Many of the points in the foregoing account of the history and prehistory of
Gregorian psalmody, and also something of its many genres and styles, may be illustrated by tracing
settings of a single psalm verse through its various liturgical habitats. The twelfth verse of Psalm 91
(according to the numbering in the standard Latin Bible, known as the Vulgate, translated by St. Jerome in
the late fourth century) was especially favored in the liturgy, perhaps owing to its vivid similes. It crops
up time and again in many contexts, running the full stylistic gamut of Gregorian chant from the barest
“liturgical recitative” to the most flamboyant jubilation.
In the “original” Latin the verse reads, Justus ut palma florebit, et sicut cedrus Libani
multiplicabitur. In the Authorized (King James) Version of 1611, long the standard English translation (in
which the parent psalm carries the number 92), it reads, “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree:
he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.” In its simplest musical form, the verse takes its place in the
cursive recitation of the psalm from which it comes, within the weekly monastic office round. In such
contexts it is sung to an elementary reciting formula or “tone,” each verse alternating in historical practice
with an antiphon. In modern, somewhat streamlined practice the refrain sandwiches the entire psalm
rather than alternating with every verse. In Ex. 1-1, the psalm is paired with an antiphon consisting of its
own twelfth verse, the Justus ut palma verse, extracted according to the stichic principle for use in a
service commemorating a martyr saint, to whom the sentiments expressed in the text are especially
pertinent.
A psalm tone like the one given here is music stripped to its minimum functional requirements as a
medium for the exaltation of a sacred utterance. In the example, the tone formula is analyzed into its
constituent parts, which function very much like punctuation marks. First there is the intonation (in Latin,
initium or beginning), given the first time by a soloist (called the precentor) to establish the pitch. As in a
declarative sentence, the intonation formula always ascends to a repeated pitch, called the reciting tone or
tenor (because it is held, for which the Latin is tenere; other names for it include repercussa, because it is
repeated, and tuba, because it is “trumpeted”). The tenor is repeated as often as necessary to
accommodate the syllables of the text: since psalms are prose texts, the number of syllables varies
considerably from verse to verse. In a long verse there will be many repetitions of the tenor, lending the
whole the “monotone” quality often associated with the idea of “chanting.” The longest verses (in the
abbreviated version shown in Ex. 1-1, only verse 2) have a “bend” (flexus) as additional punctuation.
The end of the first hemistich is sung to a formula known as the mediant (in Latin, mediatio), which
functions as a divider, like the comma or colon in the text. The second hemistich again begins on the tenor,
and the whole verse ends with the termination (in Latin, terminatio), often called the cadence because,
again as in a declarative sentence, it entails a lowering (or “falling,” for which the Latin is cadere) of
pitch. Note that at the end of the psalm, the doxology—the Christianizing tag invoking the Holy Trinity (a
notion assuredly unfamiliar to the Old Testament authors of the Psalter)—has been appended. It is treated
simply as an extra pair of psalm verses.
EX. 1-1 Justus ut palma as antiphon to Psalm 91