Musica enchiriadis, is its notation. It is called Daseian notation after the Greek prosodia daseia, the
“sign of rough breathing” used in various modified forms by Greek music theorists to indicate pitches, and
it is found mainly in didactic treatises. In Fig. 2-2b, Daseian signs showing the pitches from c to a are
written in ascending order inside the column preceding the first phrase of Rex caeli, and those from c to
c’ precede the wider-ranging second phrase. Here is proof that the Franks had at their disposal a notation
that showed exact pitches. They could have used it in their chant manuscripts, too, if they had wanted to
do so. Again we must confront the fact that music was still primarily an art of memory, and that in
practical sources all that was required was enough notation to bring a melody forward, so to speak, from
the back of the mind. “Sight-reading,” as we know it today, was not yet thought a useful skill.
HYMNS
The sequence, although it was the most elaborate, was only one of many new musical forms with which
the Franks adorned and amplified the imported Roman chant, and made it their own. The strophic office
hymn was another genre that they cultivated avidly. The Latin liturgy had known hymnody since at least
the fourth century, but for doctrinal reasons it was rejected in Rome (and so it was not part of the
repertory brought north under the Carolingians). St. Augustine recounts that his teacher St. Ambrose, the
fourth-century bishop of Milan, had adapted hymns from Greek practice for full congregational singing
during vigils. The greatest Latin hymnographer after Ambrose was a contemporary of Pope Gregory
named Venantius Fortunatus (d. ca. 600), an Italian who served as bishop of Poitiers in west-central
France. His most famous composition, Pange lingua gloriosi (“Sing, O my tongue”), used a metrical
scheme (trochaic tetrameter) that would be widely imitated by later hymn composers.
Both Ambrose’s fourth-century Milanese texts and Venantius’s sixth-century “Gallican” ones remained
current into the twentieth century, but no melodies can be documented before the year 1000, and once they
begin appearing in monastic manuscripts, they appear in such profusion that most of the oldest texts are
provided with as many as a dozen or more tunes. There is no telling which or how many of them date from
before the ninth century, but the overwhelming majority conform so much better with the tonal criteria
established by the ninth-century Frankish music theorists (whose work we will shortly be investigating)
than they do with the tonal types of the Roman chant, that their Frankish origin seems virtually certain.