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146 TROPE, SEQUENCE, AND CONDUCTUS
art of church singing was at its height. 1 We are told, for example, by
Agobard of Lyons, 2 who was opposed to Amalar, that most of the
singers, from childhood to old age, spent all their time exercising
themselves in their art, to the neglect of their spiritual education:
they were arrogant about the great number of songs they had learned,
whereas in olden days they had been content with biblical texts and
their natural skill in singing and so preferred frequently to repeat the
same things rather than to burden themselves with endless and super
fluous novelties (it is not clear whether he is referring to texts or
melodies, since he was equally insistent on textual purity and opposed
to luxury in music). It was Agobard's view that there should be a
single universal form of praying, reading, and singing an ideal
which soon came to be realized in large measure; this, he thought,
could easily be learned by gifted youths without any hindrance to
their spiritual education. Even Amalar, who was more tolerant in his
attitude to non-biblical texts and assigned a mystical meaning to the
richness of music, represented mainly by melismata, declares that
stupid singers are delighted by the mere sound of their singing, with
out understanding its spiritual meaning, and boast of the magnificent
composition of their melodiae? We get the impression that an over
whelming richness of melodic invention flowed into church song at
this period at the very time when unity was ordered by the authori
ties. This seems at first sight paradoxical, since richness meant variety ;
it is more than probable, however, that a good
deal of the influx con
sisted of musical material which later appeared in the guise
syllabic trope and the sequence.
of the
ADAPTATION OF TEXTS
We have now reached the point where this interpolated musical
material came to be provided with a text whose syllables corresponded
to the individual notes and whose content had naturally to be in con
formity with the words of the original plainsong. As time went on the
purely melismatic interpolations were superseded more and more by
those bearing a text, and consequently a sequence or trope came to
mean what it means today not a melismatic song but one with a
definite text. In other words, the melodies become a part of hymnody.
Considering the tremendous development of hymnody in the Eastern
Church (see pp. 16-32) we may be surprised to find that in the West
apart from the Ambrosian hymns, which are very modest representa-
1 Cf. H. F. Muller in Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie, xliv (1924), pp. 556 ff.
2 Patrologia Latina, civ. 338.
8 Ibid. cv. 1274.