Embellishing the Liturgy

Tropes and Polyphony

Alejandro Enrique Planchart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754627647
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351940726
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

After the imposition of Gregorian chant upon most of Europe by the authority of the Carolingian kings and emperors in the eighth and ninth centuries, a large number of repertories arose in connection with the new chant and its liturgy. Of these repertories, the tropes, together with the sequences, represent the main creative activity of European musicians in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Because they were not an absolutely official part of the liturgy, as was Gregorian chant, they reflect local traditions, particularly in terms of melody, and more so than the new pieces that were composed at the time. In addition, the earlier layers of tropes represent, in many cases, a survival of the pre local pre Gregorian melodic traditions. This volume provides an introduction to the study of tropes in the form of an extensive anthology of major studies and a comprehensive bibliography and constitutes a classic reference resource for the study of one of the most important musico-liturgical genres of the central middle ages.

Part I
Tropes in General

[1]

THE TROPING HYPOTHESIS

By RICHARD L. CROCKER

The most valuable thing Jacques Handschin taught us was to mistrust our own systems. By instinct he dug out the exceptions, the anomalies, the cases that just did not fit. By instinct he provided each explanation with its antinomy, each potential system with an antidote. Recalcitrant fragments were what irritated his mind into activity; small wonder his thought came out as a disjunct series of footnotes. Provocative, even if provoking, to read, his writings pose questions that may not always have answers but often have important consequences.

Because of his mistrust of system, Handschin’s tussle with the definition of trope is all the more fascinating. In his article Trope, Sequence, and Conductus,¹ he was unusually concerned with being systematic; the first two pages embody a kind of categorical definition quite unlike him. Yet his whole being must have reacted against the idea that a trope was a single, clearly definable thing, as is evident from his efforts in the rest of the article to adjust the original definition to the documentary facts.

The same tension between systematic theory and recalcitrant fact is present in three previous discussions of troping—Léon Gautier’s Histoire de la Poésie liturgique au Moyen Age (1886), the introduction to Walter Howard Frere’s Winchester Troper (1894), and the introduction to the 47th volume of Analecta hymnica, edited by Clemens Blume and Henry Bannister in 1905. To straighten out the complexities of definition embodied in these studies would require far more space than is available here, and would, furthermore, be futile because of the whole approach to defining a trope that these authors have taken.

Actually a trope, in the medieval understanding, can be easily defined. Indeed, there is no need to make up a new definition, for Bishop Durand wrote a perfectly good one in the 13th century:² “A trope is a kind of versicle that is sung on important feasts (for example, Christmas) immediately before the Introit, as if a prelude, and then a continuation of that Introit. Tropes include three [parts of the Introit], namely antiphon, verse, and Gloria Patri.” This definition was dismissed out of hand by Blume, with the implication that Durand had not the foggiest idea of what he was talking about. It seems to me, however, that the good bishop was right and that everyone else has been wrong—wrong in trying to include under “trope” all sorts of things that do not belong there. The problems of definition in Gautier, Frere, Blume, and Handschin are merely those that would be encountered in trying to define under one heading oranges, elephants, and, say, meteoric dust.

Hence, the well-known definition (“a trope is an interpolation into an official, liturgical chant”) has always been extensively qualified, for almost every element of it raises questions when tested against specific cases. The most immediate questions are these: does an introduction or epilogue count as an interpolation? is the interpolation a musical one, or a textual one, or both? And most important (but usually ignored), what really constitutes an official chant, or a liturgical one, and does this involve text, or melody, or both?

These and other difficulties encountered by Gautier, Frere, Blume, and Handschin seem due in the last analysis to a desire for a single, clear explanation—which I call the “troping hypothesis”—for the confusing wealth of musical forms introduced in the 9th and 10th centuries. If only there were one ruling idea to govern the medieval scene! If only that curious, little-known phenomenon, the trope, could be seen as the ruling idea of a process whereby all medieval music was necessarily and intimately tied to pre-existing materials, concerned primarily with their development or ornamentation, within the limits of respected authority imposed by a presumably all-powerful church whose grip on music was already evident in liturgy or the modal system! If all that were true, then how clear and orderly the medieval picture would be. But if the trope was to become the ruling idea, its image would have to be changed, expanded, generalized. This, I think, was the reasoning behind the inclusive definition of the trope—and the source of the difficulties.

Clarity was purchased at a price, for the troping hypothesis led easily to an evaluation: tropes seemed by nature artistically inferior to their subject. Whether or not this evaluation was made, tropes were generally supposed to be lacking in originality, since they were the products of what was considered to be a rigidly controlled environment. As a result, medieval music of the 9th to 11th centuries came to be viewed not as individual works of art, consciously created, but rather as an “outgrowth of the chant,” subject to laws of vegetative morphology rather than to those of original artistic creation. The troping hypothesis also produced a distorted picture of medieval polyphony by undue emphasis upon the use of a cantus firmus, or rather, upon the fact that a cantus firmus is used while neglecting the differences in the way it is used; but that is another story.

There has been a strong trend since the war to revise the troping hypothesis in certain respects. Ewald Jammers has insisted on an important distinction between Gregorian chant and medieval chant. Gregorian chant here refers to the Propers of Mass and Office as found in 9th-century sources, while medieval chant begins with the new forms and styles of monophonic sacred music of the 9th century or later.³ This distinction, which opens the door to a more realistic appreciation of tropes, must be retained in any serious discussion of the problem. Bruno Stäblein, dealing indefatigably with all kinds of tropes in a wisely pragmatic manner, has often taken exception to the troping hypothesis in specific cases, as will be noted later.⁴

On the other hand, there is still a strong tendency for the troping hypothesis to direct research towards isolated examples that demonstrate the hypothesis. Exceptional items that happen to have multiple liturgical and paraliturgical connections are studied in detail, while more representative items or repertories are ignored. A striking example is the almost complete neglect of hymn melodies⁵ and votive antiphons, two extensive categories of musical composition in the 9th to 12th centuries that may be stylistically more important than tropes. But hymns and antiphons have few tropic connections, and for this reason, I think, have been passed over by historians of music in favor of instances of text-underlay to pre-existing melismas, which better fit the trope image.

It would be highly desirable to abandon the whole troping hypothesis—which is, after all, only a hypothesis, not a fact, and therefore has no claim on our credulity beyond its ability to organize known facts or suggest the discovery of new, significant ones. It seems to me that the troping hypothesis is on the one hand invalidated by the real, basic differences that exist between the several things called trope; and on the other, contradicted by the fact that the great bulk of medieval musical composition, within and without the realm of tropes, shows more or less the same degrees of originality generally prevailing in Western music.

One of the most important steps towards reconstruction is to become familiar with the manuscript sources—sources that the originators of the troping hypothesis knew intimately. Here again, a desire for clear definition and classification has tended to obliterate the individuality of the various sources. The separation of 9th-10th century manuscripts into firm categories of graduals on the one hand and tropers on the other is too summary.⁶ The best we can do is to retain a long-standing distinction between manuscripts whose repertories are relatively stable and manuscripts where contents vary greatly from one source to the next.

The relatively stable repertories are the Gregorian Mass Propers and the Office antiphons and responsories; in fact, the only workable definition of “Gregorian Mass Proper” seems to be one based upon the repertory held in common by the earliest manuscripts. These include, beside the six manuscripts edited by Dom Hesbert in his Antiphonale missarum sextuplex (Brussels, 1935) such manuscripts as St. Gall 359, Laon 239, and Chartres 47.⁷ Presence of an item in a significant number of these sources seems to be a necessary—though not a sufficient—condition for its being “Gregorian.”

The manuscripts with the unstable repertories, usually known as “tropers,” are not so much later than those just mentioned. The earliest ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I TROPES IN GENERAL
• PART II AQUITAINE AND THE WEST
• PART III ST GALL AND THE EAST
• PART IV THE ORDINARY
• PART V TROPES IN THE OFFICE
• Index