4 - Responses to Textual Meaning in the Second-Mode Tract Melodies

Summary

While relationships between chant, grammar and rhetoric have previously been identified, these have tended to concentrate on Carolingian and later compositions such as tropes and sequences. Other studies have focused on general analogies and parallels between chant and grammar, generally giving limited illustrative examples of single chants, often those used for similar purposes by medieval commentators. By contrast, I here offer a detailed exploration of the interaction between textual and musical rhetoric in one genre within the Western liturgical chant core repertory.

Whereas grammar is the art of correct language, rhetoric is the art of good delivery. The purpose of rhetoric is docere, delectare, movere: to teach, to delight, to move. Rhetoric was acceptable within Christian doctrine, according to Augustine, as long as it was aimed at leading people towards Christian truth. The ‘measured’ style, whose primary purpose was to delight, used ornamental figures and, in treatises, ‘music was often treated as an ornament that replaces meter, since it could order, proportion and measure the words’. In this sense, replacing a spoken expression of a text or a simple intonation with structured melody constitutes a rhetorically enhanced rendition of it, regardless of the melody's characteristics. Many aspects of chant performance were never written down: there is, for example, no explicit sign for a silence in neumatic notation, although silence was an important rhetorical strategy in chant performance. The notation of ornamentation through the quilisma and oriscus is inconsistent in different manuscripts, and also in different notations of the same phrase within a single manuscript. This rhetorical tool therefore appears to have been applied in performance, according to cantorial whim, and therefore lies beyond the scope of this study, which is concerned with rhetorical aspects integral to the composition of the second-mode tracts.

As discussed on pp. 64–72, some melodic characteristics of the second-mode tracts lend particular emphasis to particular words. These include large leaps, extremes of tessitura, repeated melodic patterns, either within a melisma or on separate syllables within a phrase (beyond the standard Old Roman FED oscillations), and non-melismatic articulation of a portion of text within this primarily melismatic genre outside the usual formulaic recitation patterns within phrases. Some of these characteristics appear in formulaic phrases whose use is always emphatic. Each second-mode tract also uses formulaic phrases in unexpected places, or melodic shapes which lie outside the formulaic system altogether.