The Benedictine monastery of Cluny, in east-central France, was founded by the Abbot Berno in 910
under the patronage of Guillaume (William) the Pious, the first duke of Aquitaine. It was established on
land recently won by William from the duke of Burgundy and deeded to the monastery outright so as to
free it from lay interference. There, Berno sought to reestablish the original Benedictine discipline that
had seriously eroded during two centuries of Norse invasion. The chief means of purifying monastic life
was vastly to increase the amount of time and energy devoted to liturgical observances. That meant not
only expanding the duration and gravity of services but also educating the monks in devotion. This was a
possible purpose of the newly composed prefaces, called tropes (from the Latin tropus, possibly related
to the Byzantine-Greek troparion, or nonscriptural hymn stanza in art-prose).
The primary sites of troping were the antiphons of the Mass proper. Attached most characteristically
to the Introit, the trope became a comment on the Mass as a whole, as if to say, “We are celebrating Mass
today, and this is the reason.” Tropes were also attached to the other Gregorian antiphons that
accompanied ritual action, especially the Offertory (“we are offering gifts, and this is the reason”) and the
Communion (“we are tasting the wine and the wafer, and this is the reason”). While troping became a
very widespread practice as the Cluniac reform spread over large areas of France, Germany, and northern
Italy, the individual tropes were a more local and discretionary genre than the canonical chant. A given
antiphon can be found with many different prefaces in various sources, reflecting local liturgical customs.
At their most elaborate, tropes could function not only as preface to a complete Introit, say, but also as
prefaces to each stichic psalm-verse in the antiphon, or to the cursive verse or verses that followed, or
even to the doxology formula. Thus, in practice, tropes could take the form of interpolations as well as
prefaces. Unlike the syllabic sequence, which contrasted starkly with the melismatic alleluia that it
followed, tropes imitated the neumatic style of the antiphons to which they were appended, to all intents
and purposes becoming part of them. Because the first words of chants are always sung by the precentor
to set the pitch, it is thought that the tropes may have been differentiated from the choral antiphons by
being assigned to soloists.
Manuscripts containing tropes, called “tropers,” are preeminently associated with two monasteries.
One is the East Frankish monastery of St. Gallen, where Notker played his part in the development of the
sequence, and where the monk Tuotilo (d. 915) may have had a similar hand in the development of the
trope. The other is the West Frankish monastery of St. Martial at Limoges in southwestern France, which
in the tenth century belonged, like Cluny, to the Duchy of Aquitaine. The three tropes or sets of tropes in
Ex. 2-8 and Ex. 2-9 are all found in tenth-century St. Martial tropers (but with later concordances in staff
notation), and all meant to enlarge upon the same canonical item—the Introit of the Easter Sunday Mass,
the most copiously troped item in the entire liturgy.
The canonical text of the Introit consists of excerpts from three verses—18, 5, and 6 respectively—of
Psalm 138, words that by the ninth century already had a long tradition of Christian exegesis, or doctrinal
interpretation. Within the original Psalm, the verse excerpt that opens the Introit—Resurrexi, et adhuc
tecum sum (“I arose, and am still with thee”)—refers to an awakening from sleep. Amalar of Metz was
one of the many Christian commentators who construed these words as having been addressed by the
eternal Christ to his Father through the unwitting agency of the psalmist David, and thus to refer
prophetically to the event the Easter Mass commemorates: Christ’s resurrection from the dead on the third
day after his crucifixion. It was one of the functions of the tropes to confirm this interpretation and render
it explicit.
The first and simplest trope in the sample (Ex. 2-8a) consists of a single exhortation or invitation to
the choir to sing, strengthening the assumption that the trope would have been performed by a precentor or
cantor. Despite its brevity, it manages most economically to accomplish the task of an exegetical trope,
identifying the psalmist’s words with the victory of Christ. Ex. 2-8b contains what might be called a full