Untitled

MUSICAL FORMS 113
is the very core and soul of public worship, psalmodic chant was a
dominating factor influencing, directly or indirectly, the musical
forms applied to a prose text for public worship. It will be necessary,
therefore, to go into some detail about psalmody in its various forms,
because it gave birth to the recitative, antiphonal, and responsorial
style of the Mass and Office.
The psalm verse is divided into two parts (hemistichs). From the
very beginning the music tended to mark this binary division of the
literary text, trying to preserve the natural stress of the words without
paying much heed to the contents of the text itself. We must consider
liturgical psalmody in five different classes :
(i) the simple psalmody
of the Office; (ii) the antiphonal psalmody of the Mass; (iii) the
'
psalmody of the Invitatory Psalm 94, Venite exsultemus', always
sung at the opening of Matins; (iv) the greater responds of Matins;
(v) the tracts. The psalmodic origin of all these forms can be ascertained
from the incipit, the tenor or reciting note (tuba), the medial cadence
at the end of the first half-verse, and the final cadence at the end of
the second half-verse, as in this example of simple psalmody:
Ex.35
Among the different styles found in psalmody we have to distin
guish (a) the liturgical recitative several syllables, words, phrases, or
even whole sentences sung on the same note. This note was originally
B or A, followed by a note one tone lower: in the course of time this
rose to C, and the reciting note was then a semitone lower. The
liturgical recitatives of the ancient tones of the collect, epistle, and
gospel have a special charm: but a sublime point of art is reached in
the Preface, the Pater nosier of the Mass, the Te Deum, the Exsultet,
the Litany of the Saints, the Passion chant of Holy Week, and such
pieces. These melodic recitatives were known all over Europe and are
particularly characteristic of the old Latin liturgies. While the Eastern
Church, in its impressive dialogues between celebrant, deacon, subdeacon,
and choir, always used a recitative florid in melody and
cadence, the Western Church, more restrained and conscious of its
B 825