FIG. 2-3 St. Ambrose, the fourth-century governor and bishop of Milan who introduced Byzantine-style hymn-singing to the
Western church. He is shown writing, in an illumination—initial F (Frater Ambrosius)—from the Bible of Pedro de Pamplona,
Seville, MS 56-5-1, fol. 2.
Hymnody is the apparent antithesis (or rather, the calculated complement) of psalmody. Where psalms
and their stichic appendages are lofty and numinous, conducive to spiritual repose and contemplation,
hymns are the liturgy’s popular songs: markedly rhythmical (whether their rhythms are organized by
syllable count or by actual meter), strongly profiled in melody, conducive to enthusiasm. The first verses
of three of the most famous ones are given in Ex. 2-7. At this point they may be regarded primarily as
illustrations of the genre, but later they will serve as examples of contrasting tonalities within the Frankish
“mode” system (and later still, we will see them embodied in polyphonic settings by famous composers).
Ave maris stella (“Hail, Star of the sea”) is an acclamation to the Blessed Virgin Mary intended for
one of the many offices devoted to her that burgeoned in the Franco-Roman liturgy around the time of the
early neumated manuscripts. The text is securely dated to the ninth century. The rather decoratively
neumatic tune, the most famous of several associated with the poem, makes its appearance in the extant
manuscripts somewhat later. In a still primarily oral age, however, the date of a melody’s earliest written
source bears no reliable witness to the date of its creation.
The version of Pange lingua that follows is not Venantius’s original but a reworking—called
“parody,” but without any connotation of satire—by St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), composed for the
office of Corpus Christi (veneration of the body of Christ). Like our contemporary satirical parodies,
medieval sacred parodies (also called contrafacta) were meant to be sung to traditional tunes, so that in
this case the melody is far older than the words. Both this example and the preceding one testify in their
opposite ways to the fluidity of the text-music relationship in this and many other medieval sung
repertories.
Veni creator spiritus, the great Pentecost hymn and something of a Carolingian anthem, has been
attributed honorifically to many famous Franks, including Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856), the archbishop of
Mainz, and even Charlemagne himself. The poem employs the so-called Ambrosian stanza (four lines of
eight syllables each), established by the original Latin hymnodist five centuries before; but the
dynamically arching melody, its successive phrases marking cadences on what we still identify as
“primary” scale degrees, is of exemplary Frankish design.