It has been suggested that the reason for the appearance of texted and melismatic Kyrie melodies side
by side has to do with the state of notation in the tenth century, when the neumes had been well
established, but the staff had yet to be invented. The syllabic notation was necessary in order to show
which syllables were sung to which notes; but the melismatic notation, in which the various neume shapes
indicated rise and fall much better than single notes could do, was necessary in order to record the
melodies’ contour accurately enough to serve even a rudimentary mnemonic purpose. The same double-
entry procedure is found in early sequence manuscripts. Both the syllabic sequence melody and a
melismatic counterpart, conventionally texted Alleluia, are frequently found side by side, or else in
consecutive sections of the book. The assumption that these melismatic tunes were in every case
preexisting sequentia melismas, to which the words of the sequence were later added, has been
questioned on the same grounds of chronology as in the case of the Kyries, and this has led to a thorough
revision of the history of the sequence.^4 It was probably cases like these, where double notation was
necessary in order to convey all the needed information, that made it urgent to find a way of conveying all
the information at once. This, in short, may have been the necessity that mothered the invention of the staff.
THE FULL FRANKO-ROMAN MASS
With the standardization of the “ordinary” chants, the Franks completed a musical enhancement of the
sixth-century ordo (or agenda) of the western Mass that established its form for the next millennium. Their
version, which was reimported back to Rome in the eleventh century and became standard almost
everywhere in Europe and the British Isles, is given in Table 2-1.
TABLE 2-1 Ordo of the Western Mass