"benedicamus domino": the unwritten tradition

"Benedicamus Domino": The Unwritten TraditionAuthor(s): Anne Walters RobertsonSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 1-62Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831750 .

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Benedicamus Domino: the Unwritten Tradition*

BY ANNE WALTERS ROBERTSON For Michel Huglo on his 65th birthday.

AT LEAST EIGHT OR NINE TIMES during the course of daily worship, the versicle Benedicamus domino ("Let us bless the Lord") sounded

from the choir and corridors of a medieval church. This chant, along with its response Deo gratias ("Thanks be to God"), served as the normal concluding sentences for each of the eight office hours (vespers, compline, matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none) except matins. They closed the various orations and preces that occurred throughout the day. During penitential seasons, the Benedicamus versicle was intoned at the end of mass in place of another versicle, Ite missa est ("Go, the mass is ended"). The processional commemorations after first vespers and lauds finished with Benedicamus domino. It often stood at the ends of the conductus and versus whose familiar termina- tion, Benedicamus domino, pointed to the derivation and probably to the liturgical function of the piece. So great was the demand for the Benedicamus that the inventors of tropes and liturgical dramatists plied the text with new words. Polyphonists, too, gave the sentence multi-voice accolade from the earliest days of polyphonic practice.

The omnipresence of Benedicamus domino in the divine service is rivaled by the number of references to the versicle in medieval literature. A famous abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, and a prominent bishop of Notre Dame of Paris, Odo of Sully, commented on the Benedicamus in the twelfth century. Ordinaries and customaries

*Portions of this article were read at the fifty-second annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Cleveland on November 7, 1986. A Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled me to consult unpublished ordinaries, customaries, and music manuscripts in France and England in I985. Rebecca Baltzer, Norman Smith, and Craig Wright offered me many valuable comments during the preparation of this study. I am particularly indebted to the work of the late Frank L. Harrison on the Benedicamus and to Ruth Steiner of Catholic University for her suggestions and for allowing me access to the microfilms of the splendid Dom Mocquereau Collection. Throughout this article, the designations for manuscripts are drawn from the table of Library Sigla in the New Grove Dictionary. In cases where abbreviations do not exist, the citations are written out in full.



2 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

throughout the middle ages include precious bits of information about it. One book may describe when to sing the chant, another how or where in the church it was performed. These sources, however, preserve relatively few melodies for the versicle. Instead, the standard musical manuscripts or, in the early centuries, patristic books record the majority of tunes for the Benedicamus. Collections of melodies for the chant continue to appear in manuscripts up to the advent of printing. After that, the Benedicamus still found a place in the ceremonials that bridged the centuries into the modem era. Clearly, it is easy to establish the significance of the chant in the liturgy of western Christendom. And given its preeminence, we would expect to know a great deal about the usage of the Benedicamus and about the important body of music that grew up for it.

But this is not quite the case, for modern scholarship on this chant has been hit-and-miss. While the studies that center on the Benedicamus have concentrated on the polyphonic and troped forms of the chant,' the monophonic counterpart has gone largely undiscus- sed.2 For this reason, scholars have recognized as widespread only a handful of popular melodies before the thirteenth century.3 Even the most basic tool, a catalogue of tunes for the Benedicamus, does not exist in the broader form that we have for the chants of the ordinary of the mass.4 The performance practice of the versicle in the divine ritual, moreover, is obscure. As a result, the fundamental nature of the chant is poorly understood, and many elementary questions remain unan- swered. Why did the Benedicamus achieve such stature in the liturgy? What is its relationship to other monophonic and polyphonic forms of the middle ages?

I'The principal study of the polyphonic Benedicamus now available is Barclay 1977. Essays with major sections devoted to polyphonic and troped Benedicamus include Marshall 1962, 133-39, Fuller 1969 (passim), Fuller 1971, 169-92, Arlt 1970,

1:79-8I, 160-206, and Huglo 1982, 117-22, I34-35. A study by Anne Hallmark has also been announced: "Polyphonic Tropes of the Benedicamus domino" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ., forthcoming).

2 Harrison 1963, 74-75, and Harrison 1965 treat a series of melodies for the Benedicamus from Exeter Cathedral. See also the brief discussions in "Benedicamus domino," Hiley i980, and Walters [Robertson] 1984, 507-19-

3 See Barclay 1977, 1:36-49; 636, who discusses five melodies for the Benedicamus, based on the melismas Hodie processit, Judeam mariam, Flos filius, Quem queritis, and Clementiam.

4 Preliminary attempts to organize a number of Benedicamus melodies according to mode, along with a few concordances for each chant, can be found in Barclay 1977, 1:53-93, and in Huglo 1982, 150-54. Neither author, however, claims to have covered the number and variety of sources that are employed, for instance, in the catalogues that exist for the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus dei.



BENEDICAMUS DOMINO: THE UNWRITTEN TRADITION

The lack of scholarship on the monophonic Benedicamus, though unfortunate, is defensible. Modern catalogues of liturgical books rarely include the Benedicamus in their inventories,5 hence the patient researcher must leaf through hundreds of folios to unveil them. Even then, the first haphazard appearances of the chant do not immediately suggest a comprehensible tradition. Until the Sarum Rite standardized a series of Benedicamus melodies in the late middle ages,6 few collections are neatly organized and consistently located in the same place in manuscripts. Furthermore, the early examples of the Benedicamus often lack rubrics that name the feasts for which the melodies were intended. The first references to the chant are not found in manuscripts of music at all, but rather in customaries and in the writings of liturgists from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Even these mentions are scattered, and their variation from book to book would seem at first to deny that there was much rhyme or reason to the usage of the Benedicamus. In sum, the versicle gives the false impression of having existed somewhere on the periphery of other chants of the ordinary.

In the face of so many obstacles, it is easy to see why scholars have been reluctant to undertake a comprehensive study of the monophonic, untroped Benedicamus, and indeed this is not the purpose of the present essay. Yet it is precisely this basic form of the chant that may permit new insight into the entire Benedicamus tradition, and this premise underlies our study. First of all, we can account in part for the prestige of the monophonic Benedicamus by refining our knowledge of the performance practice of the chant in the daily ritual. In addition, a new series of twenty-six Benedicamus from two closely related houses in thirteenth-century France will be uncovered. These melodies, based on other types of chant, stand squarely on the dividing line between the early and late traditions of the Benedicamus. Through them, the nature of much of the music for the monophonic Benedicamus and the liturgical placement of the versicle can be sketched. A search for the twenty-six tunes in the repertories of other establishments throughout Europe will show that the large body of Benedicamus melodies that circulated during the middle ages was more interconnected than has previously been known. Hence, a number of

5Two exceptions are Husmann 1964 and Ker 1969-83. But other descriptions of plainchant manuscripts hardly mention the Benedicamus in text or index. Fortunately, most basic catalogues of medieval polyphonic sources, such as those in Reaney 1966 and the article "Sources" in the New Grove Dictionary do take the Benedicamus into account.

6 See Sandon I984, 82-83. Also see below, n. 62.




these chants enjoyed considerable fame. Many of the Benedicamus are linked to two other musical forms: responsory tropes and certain

polyphonic genres. Finally, we will treat the question of why the monophonic Benedicamus seems to have been reluctant to claim its

rightful place in musical manuscripts.

I

The earliest evidence of a versicle Benedicamus domino comes from the late eighth and ninth centuries. Joseph Jungmann speculates that this addition to the divine service probably took place in the Gallican rite of the Frankish kingdom, for there is no trace of the Benedicamus in Roman sources until some time later (Jungmann 1951-55, 2:432-37). Although music for the chant is not extant from the Carolingian era, it is likely that the Benedicamus began to receive special musical treatment at an early date. Such attention, however, was not lavished indiscriminately on the versicle. It was reserved for the services at which the chant was performed in elaborate fashion. The Benedicamus at mass did not normally fall into this category, since here the chant stood as a substitute for Ite missa est on somber occasions. Collections of Benedicamus often include one or more simple tones that would have been appropriate for mass and for the lesser office hours:7

Example I Melody for the simple tone of the Benedicamus

F: Pn, lat. 17328, fols. I70-7ov

Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

The more ornate melodies, on the other hand, were intended for the hours of first vespers, lauds, and second vespers (see Example 2

below). Sometimes the rubrics of medieval ordines and customaries specifically state this; in other cases, instructions for the performance

7 Example I, from a twelfth-century French Cistercian gradual (F:Pn, lat. 17328), illustrates one of the most common of the simple tones. Concordances are found not only in Cistercian sources (e. g., F:Pn, n.a.l. 1413 [fol. 104]), but in many other traditions (see Huglo 1982, I 17; and n. 84 below).



BENEDICAMUS DOMINO: THE UNWRITTEN TRADITION 5

of these offices call for "festive" Benedicamus. Further witness to the prominence of the chant is the manner of its execution at first vespers, lauds, and second vespers. This, too, is described in ordinaries and customaries, which show that the performance of the Benedicamus was most closely akin to that of the responsory at first vespers and to the alleluia at mass. Both the responsory and the alleluia are typically melismatic in monophony, and many were later provided with polyphonic settings. It comes as no surprise then that the Benedicamus of vespers and lauds joins these "elite" forms, as the following survey of ceremonial books of the middle ages demonstrates.

The location of the performers on high feasts is important evidence for the preeminence of the Benedicamus. Three places in the church were favored: a step or steps in the church, the middle of the choir, and the front of the altar. The exact location of the first of these spots, the step(s), is difficult to pinpoint, and it no doubt differs from place to place.8 At vespers and lauds on the feast of the Invention of the Cross, the early eleventh-century Liber Tramitis from the Cluniac monastery of Farfa in Italy stipulates that: "the boys should sing [proclament] the short responsories and Benedicamus domino in front of the steps at this hour [lauds] as well as at vespers."9 From the thirteenth century on, the use of a step for the Benedicamus was commonplace, as seen in documents from Fleury (Davril 1976, 294), from the Benedictine abbeys of Bury St. Edmunds (Gransden 1973, 28) and Saint Mary at York (Abbess of Stanbrook and Tolhurst

i936-51, 2:

I94), and from fourteenth-century Italy (Harrison 1965,

35-36). The second location, the middle of the choir, was also designated for the Benedicamus on several levels of feasts. The thirteenth-century ordinary from the cathedral of Bayeux calls for boys to perform the versicle here at vespers and lauds on ferial days

8 Harrison i963, 52, names three places in the church where all special parts of the service were performed in front of a lectern: the choir step, the middle of the choir, and the choir screen. Unfortunately, however, the precise location of the first of these spots, the choir step, is not as clear-cut as he implies. The sources generally use the words gradus or gradus chori, and it must be determined whether the reference is to a step into the choir stalls on either side of the chancel, a step between the chancel and the sanctuary, a step between the chancel and the nave, a step up to the lectern in the choir (Harrison's interpretation), or perhaps a step directly in front of the main altar.

9 "Breviata responsoria sive Benedicamus domino tam in hac hora quam in Vesperas pueri ante gradus proclament" (Dinter i980, Ioo). Which steps are intended is not clear, and similar references to this location throughout the Liber are equally vague. They are probably not the steps in front of the altar, however, for the customary generally chooses the words gradus altaris (or ante altare) to indicate this station (Dinter i980, 216 and 227).




and on simplex feasts (Chevalier 1902, 7). Similar instructions can be found at Barking Abbey in Essex (Tolhurst 1927-28, 2:173) and in the monastery of Saint Matthias and Saint Maximinian in Trier, where an important action, the bow ante et retro, accompanies the chanting of the Benedicamus (Becker 1968, io). The third spot, the front of the main altar, was a popular place for the chanting of the Benedicamus from the eleventh century on. At lauds on the feast of Philip and James, the Liber Tramitis states: "The boys should sing the responsory and the Benedicamus domino in front of the altar."1' Frank Harrison (1963, io6) has shown that the Sarum Rite also favored the position in front of the altar.

Whether the Benedicamus was sung at one of the steps in the choir area, in the middle of the choir, or in front of the altar, the care with which the sources often detail the locations of singers and the actions that enhanced the performance of the versicle demonstrate that the chant was a notable feature of festive and some ferial days. In the same way, many medieval ordinaries and customaries also specify the number and quality of persons assigned to sing the melodies, and these sources suggest that the ornate Benedicamus was meant to be a showcase for trained singers.

Anywhere from one to six soloists might have performed the chant at a given hour. One singer is sometimes named for the little hours (prime, terce, sext, none and compline), for the less important of the two vespers services (second vespers) on days closely surrounding high feasts, on lesser feasts, and on ferial and rogation days. Undoubt- edly the melodies sung in these cases were simple. Examples of the Benedicamus executed by one soloist occur in the Liber Tramitis (Dinter i98o, 28), in the eleventh-century constitutions of Archbishop Lanfranc for the monks of Canterbury (Knowles 1967, 43-44), in the thirteenth-century customaries from the cathedrals of Bayeux (Chev- alier 1902, 7) and from Exeter (Dalton i909, 1:25), and in sources from the monastery of Bec in Normandy (Dickson 1967, 95 and 58) and from Barking Abbey (Tolhurst 1927, 1:4o and 59).

This same performance practice governs the singing of a Benedicamus at the end of the services of commemoration that followed first vespers and lauds. At Barking Abbey, for instance, four singers performed the Benedicamus at the end of lauds on the feast of Saint Stephen, and then a single soloist sang a second, simple Benedicamus

10 "Responsorium atque Benedicamus Domino ante aram cantent pueri" (Dinter 1980, 98). This placement did not hold for every celebration of lauds, however. During Easter week, the same boys were required to remain in their places (presumably the choir stalls) to sing the Benedicamus (Dinter 1980, 92).




(sine notis) at the close of the commemorations for Christmas and for the Virgin which followed lauds (Tolhurst 1927, 1:3 ). The ordinaries from the French Benedictine abbey of Saint-Corneille of Compiegne" and the customary of Bec (Dickson 1967, 152) contain comparable directions. While one performer was the general rule, Harrison (1963, Io6) notes that the Sarum Rite required two boys to chant the Benedicamus before the altar at the ends of the commemorations following vespers and lauds.

By far the most common performing force for the Benedicamus was two or three soloists. Sources from the abbey of Saint-Denis in Paris, including two thirteenth-century ordinaries (F:Pm 526; F:Pn, lat. 976) and the eighteenth-century copy of a fourteenth-century ordinary (Paris, Archives nationales, L 863, no. io), illustrate the use of two soloists. The rubric commonly found in these books is Benedicamus a duobus ("Benedicamus by two") or Benedicamus a duobus pueris ("Benedicamus by two boys").12 Similar directions appear in the late twelfth-century ordinary written by Adam of Corlandon for the cathedral of Laon (Chevalier 1897, 193), and in the Sarum Rite (Harrison 1963, io6). Other documents even state specifically that the Benedicamus should be sung by the same two soloists who earlier would have chanted the responsory at first vespers, or who later would sing the alleluia at mass. Examples of this usage can be seen in the instructions for lauds on Christmas in the thirteenth-century customary from Norwich: "Then the two [soloists] who sang the responsory will sing the Benedicamus." 3 The twelfth-century customary from the German Augustinian monastery of Marbach augments the number of singers for the Benedicamus from two to three at vespers on principale

I1 Vespers on the feast of Saint Denis closes as follows: "The Benedicamus Preciosus. After vespers there should be a procession to their altar [the altar of Saints Denis, Rusticus, and Eleutherius]. The Responsory Vir inclitus. Any oration from their [feast]. The Benedicamus Angelorum" ("Benedicamus Preciosus. Post vesperas fiat processio ad altare ipsorum. R[esponsorium] Vir inclitus. Ora[tio] quelibet de eis. Benedicamus Angelorum"), F:Pn, lat. 18o44, fol. o4. While this passage does not specify the numbers of performers, another general rubric calls for two boys on the Benedicamus, except during the commemorative services of Advent: "Benedicamus a duobus pueris nisi fuerit adventus. Si fuerit adventus fiat commemoratio de adventu et Benedicamus ab uno puero;" F:Pn, lat. 18045, fol. I24. The two other thirteenth- century ordinaries from Saint-Corneille, F:Pn, lat. 18045, and F:Pn, lat. 18046, are somewhat less informative than F:Pn, lat. i8o44, but both contain specific rubrics for the performance of the Benedicamus domino (e. g. Feast of Saint Denis, F:Pn, lat. I8045, fol. 13.)

12 See F:Pm 526, fol. 72v; F:Pn, lat. 976, fol. 42v; and Paris, Archives nationales, L 863, no. io, fol. I23v.

13 "Deinde duo cantabunt Benedicamus qui cantaverunt responsorium" (Tolhurst 1948, 33)-




festivals: "... at vespers the responsory [is sung by] two and the Benedicamus by three."14 The abbey of Saint-Corneille of Compiegne1S and the nuns of Barking Abbey (Tolhurst 1928, 2:173) call for three soloists on the vespers responsory, the alleluia at mass, and the Benedicamus domino on some important feasts. Rubrics for two soloists predominate, however. In addition to the examples already given,16 two singers chanted the Benedicamus at Fleury (Davril 1976, 295), at Saint Mary's in York (Abbess of Stanbrook and Tolhurst 1937, 2:196-97), and as far away as Rome, where the thirteenth-century papal court employed two for the Benedicamus at lauds on Easter and throughout Easter week at vespers and lauds: "The hebdomadarius with another capellanus sing loudly Benedicamus domino alleluia alleluia .. ."17

Although two or three soloists usually performed the Benedicamus, sources from the late middle ages show that the versicle could be sung by as many as four or even six. This increase probably reflects the general expansion of the liturgy that occurred throughout much of Europe in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The customary of Fleury specifies the use of four singers at vespers and lauds on ten solemn feastdays.18 Similar instructions for four soloists serve the major duplex celebrations at Exeter cathedral (Dalton 1909, 1:62-63), the censing that took place at Bury St. Edmunds after vespers on feasts of twelve lessons (Gransden 1973, I -I 2), the principal feasts at the abbey of Saint Mary at York (Abbess of Stanbrook and Tolhurst 1936, 1:299, and i937, 2:181 and i88), the services of lauds on the feast of Saint Stephen (Tolhurst 1927, 1:31) and second vespers on Holy Innocents at Barking Abbey (Tolhurst 1927, 1:34). At lauds on Christmas, the nuns at Barking Abbey regularly employed six soloists for the troped Benedicamus (Tolhurst 1927, 1:26) and they assigned an equal number to an untroped Benedicamus at vespers on the feast of Conception (Tolhurst 1928, 2:170).

14 ,,. .. ad vesperas duobus responsorium et Benedicamus tribus" (Siegwart 1965, I73)-

15 The two thirteenth-century ordinaries from Saint-Corneille, F:Pn, lat. 18o44 (fol. 4iv) and lat. 18046 (fol. 4ov) transmit the following rubric: "qui cantaverint alleluia cantent Benedicamus et sic per quatuor dies."

16 See also Oury 1972, 23x and 236, where several instances of two boys or two soloists on the Benedicamus are given.

17 "Ebdomadarius cum alio capellano cantant altissime Benedicamus domino alleluia alleluia .. ." (Van Dijk and Walker 1975, 285).

18 "De decem sollempnitatibus in quibus bini concinunt fratres et est conventus in capis mediocribus ... Responsorium et Benedicamus ad Vesperas et Laudes quatuor fratres non revestiti cantabunt" (Davril I976, 295-96). The feasts covered by this rubric are Saints Stephen, John, Holy Innocents, Scolastica, Annunciation, Trinity, John the Baptist, Peter and Paul, Nicholas, and Conception.




The next section will show that many of the melodies for the ornate Benedicamus domino were derived from the verses of responsories and alleluias. It is significant, then, that the performance of the responsory verse was often the task of boys (Harrison 1963, 39), for the boys would have been familiar with these melismas from their original contexts. Perhaps, in fact, the actual selection of melodies for the Benedicamus was sometimes made from the very melismas that the boys had already learned. Besides the instances of boys cited above, a twelfth-century Cluniac document from the Italian monastery of Vallombrosa suggests that boys were routinely required to sing the Benedicamus at lauds and at vespers,19 and the ordinaries from Lyon likewise assign the versicle to pueri (Huglo 1982, ii 7). As the boys grew to adulthood, they would certainly have continued to sing these melismas, both in their original forms and as Benedicamus. Young girls, of course, served as soloists for the Benedicamus in nunneries such as Barking Abbey. The ordinary of this house regularly assigns the chant to categories of females known as infantes, juvencule, and scolares (Tolhurst 1927, 1:3 , 34; and Tolhurst I1928, 2:I67, 173, 274, 369).

Despite local variations in performance practice, it is evident that the same basic principles for the execution of the Benedicamus recur consistently in important centers throughout Europe during the middle ages. The canonical hours of first and second vespers and lauds on the higher feasts employed the most elaborate melodies. The use of two to six soloists and their location in the church shows that the Benedicamus at these services rivaled other ornate music of the divine ritual, particularly the responsory at first vespers, and the alleluia at mass. What is more, these precepts cross a wide range of monastic and secular rites: Cluniac, Benedictine, Augustinian, Sarum, and even Roman. Small wonder, then, that the earliest sources of the Benedicamus contain sizable numbers of melismatic monophonic, troped, and polyphonic Benedicamus alongside the one or two simple tones that would have been employed in the lesser hours and during most penitential masses.20 Several issues remain unsettled, however.

19 "It is the duty of the boys to sing the versicles and short responsories in church, and to execute the Benedicamus domino at lauds and vespers, and to perform the antiphons in the offices of saints .. ." ("Eorum [infantum] est enim in aecclesia versiculos et brevia responsoria dicere et in Laudes Matutinas vel Vesperum Benedicamus domino pronuntiare et imponere antifonas in officis de Sanctis ..."), Hallinger 1983b, 366-67.

20 Within the limits of this study of the monophonic Benedicamus, little can be said here about the performance of the troped and polyphonic Benedicamus. In general, however, the method of execution was similar to that of the monophonic form. Polyphonic substitutes for the Benedicamus were often sung in the pulpit, where



IO JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

How was a particular melody assigned to a feast? In what ways do the ornate tunes that were often drawn from other forms of chant relate to their parent sources? The ordinaries and customaries, which to this point have provided abundant information, can yield no more without the help of the musical sources for the Benedicamus. The chants, therefore, are the topic of the next sections.

II

Although music for the monophonic Benedicamus domino is first found in manuscripts from the ninth and tenth centuries, the examples are invariably added by late tenth- or eleventh-century scribes. The very nature of the early sources suggests that the chant was just beginning to be written down, for the monophonic Benedicamus are usually entered haphazardly in small groups within patristic rather than liturgical manuscripts.21 Not until the eleventh century are Benedicamus chants sometimes contemporaneous with the books in which they are notated. By now, the melodies are included in liturgical sources, most often tropers, prosers, and graduals. Michel Huglo's catalogue lists several Aquitanian manuscripts, a central Italian troper, a gradual from Cluny, a gradual-antiphoner from

Saint-Maur-des-Foss6s, and a few patristic sources from this period.22 Troped Benedicamus melodies are naturally integrated into the bodies of the tropers and prosers, while small groups of ornate, untroped melodies often occur at the ends of sections or in the margins of folios.

By the twelfth century, it is clear that the monophonic Benedicamus now forms a vital part of the contents of service books. Tropers and prosers still dominate as sources, but the tunes are also written in graduals, antiphoners, and processional-hymnals. Occasionally, as Huglo shows (1982, 136-49), they are also preserved in a directorium chori, an epistolary, evangeliary, theoretical treatise, or book of rituals. Monophonic Benedicamus appear alongside the troped and polyphonic versions. Included in the sources from the twelfth century are three of

important portions of the mass were also intoned. A brief overview of the performance practice of the troped and polyphonic Benedicamus at Exeter, Evreux, Bayeux, and Siena can be found in Barclay 1977, I:16-22; and in Harrison 1963, io8-II I, I14, and 117-29-

21 Huglo 1982, 136-49, gives several examples of ninth- and tenth-century manuscripts in which Benedicamus melodies are added.

22 Huglo 1982, 136-49; see also the discussion of the polyphonic Benedicamus in F:Pn, lat. 12584, ibid., I 17-22. Some of the sources listed by Huglo are also treated in Barclay 1977 (see her Table of Contents and Manuscript Abbreviations).



BENEDICAMUS DOMINO: THE UNWRITTEN TRADITION I I

the so-called Saint-Martial manuscripts23 and the Codex Calixtinus.24 Two twelfth-century documents also reveal that the melodies for

the Benedicamus are not necessarily original. Around 1146, the great abbot of Cluny Peter the Venerable sanctions a kind of "Benedicamus by plagiarism" when he prescribes the use of the melisma Flosfilius ejus (from the Marian Responsory Styrps jesse) as a Benedicamus at vespers and lauds on high feasts:

And I add that at vespers and lauds on those same solemn feasts,25 as well as on whichever other major feasts you might wish, the Benedicamus domino should be sung according to the melody of that very new, yet good, and already popular verse which many sing on the nativity of the blessed mother of the Lord: Virgo deigenitrix est,flosfilius ejus. The melody is not taken from the whole verse, however, but from the end of the verse, that is Flosfilius ejus. The purpose for this ordinance was that on more festive days a more solemn chant is preferable, and so that this greater variation of melodies might increase the devotion of those singing. 26

Abbot Peter is not espousing a new compositional technique in this passage, for the contrafacting of chants was certainly standard in the twelfth century. His words simply acknowledge a procedure that had been the norm for some time. This is not immediately apparent from the collections of ornate Benedicamus melodies from the eleventh century. These pieces are notated in neumes that are difficult if not impossible to transcribe and compare with other music. Still, the chants resemble the later, readable tunes through their use of melismas on one or two syllables of the words Benedicamus domino. Peter the Venerable verifies that these apparently self-standing chants are not always newly conceived. His Benedicamus on Flosfilius is only one instance of a tune that is excised from another class of chant and

23 F:Pn, lat. I I 39; F:Pn, lat. 3549; F:Pn, lat. 3719. For a summary of the locations of Benedicamus in these manuscripts, see Huglo 1982, 144-45; also Barclay 1977, 1:94-202.

24 Compostela, Biblioteca de la Catedral (no shelf number). Facsimiles of the polyphonic Benedicamus in Lopez-Calo 1982, 51, and transcriptions on pp. 165-67.

25 Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Peter and Paul, and Assumption (see Hallinger 198 3a, 139, and the commentary in Hallinger 1975a, 42 [footnote]).

26 "Additum est et hoc, ut in eisdem solemnitatibus et in quibuslibet, prout libuerit, maioribus ad Vesperos vel ad Laudes cantetur Benedicamus domino iuxta cantum novi quidem sed boni et iam publici versus illius, qui in Nativitate beatae Matris Domini a multis canitur, Virgo dei genitrix virga est, flos filius eius. Sumptus est autem cantus non de toto versu, sed de fine versus, hoc est Flosfilius eius. Causa instituti huius fuit, ut et solemnioribus diebus magis congrueret solemnior cantus et ut ipsa cantuum variatio maior esset cantantium devotio" (Hallinger 1975a, o103).




given independent existence as a melody for the Benedicamus. Other examples were at least coeval with his.

By the thirteenth century, the Sarum Rite regarded the borrowing of melodies for the Benedicamus as commonplace. Frank Harrison has singled out a Sarum statute which states:

On duplex feasts and on feasts when the invitatory is sung by three, some appropriate Benedicamus from the historia [i. e., the matins responsories] of the feast with which it deals or some other which is appropriate to the feast is sung.27

At this time, collections of melodies for the Benedicamus were finally starting to take shape. In many missals, a small number of Benedicamus often have a place of their own in the canon of the mass or at the end in the kyriale, sometimes with a rubric to designate the level of feast at which the Benedicamus is sung.28 Among these early collections, a miniscule number preserve Benedicamus melodies in an unprecedented manner, not only recording lengthy series, but also naming the sources of the melismas that are converted into Benedicamus domino. Harrison uncovered a collection of this type of specificity in a thirteenth-century notated missal of the Sarum Rite from Exeter, now found in the John Rylands Library in Manchester (GB:Mr, lat. 24, fols. 14-I4v).29 The Exeter manuscript lists thirty melodies for the Benedicamus. Fifteen of these provide the original words or phrases from the fifteen melismas on which the new text, Benedicamus domino, is set. 30 With the aid of these verbal cues to the parent chant, Harrison located the sources of the fifteen Benedicamus melodies that have such verbal incipits, and of three for which verbal cues were not provided

27 "In festis vero duplicibus et in festis quando Invitatorium a tribus canitur, dicitur aliquod proprium Benedicamus de historia festi de quo agitur vel aliquid aliud quod festo conveniat" (Frere i898, 1:254), discussed in Harrison 1963, 74-75, and in Harrison 1965, 37.

28 The preservation of Benedicamus in a missal, a book for the mass, may at first seem odd, since the chant is associated primarily with the office hours. This location is clearly related to the earlier existence of Benedicamus in the tropers and prosers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which evolved into the kyriale of thirteenth-century missals. The differences in appearance between twelfth- and thirteenth-century collections of Benedicamus-even when they originated in the same house-are striking, as the comparison of Figures I and 2, both from the abbey of Saint-Denis, shows. Breviaries occasionally preserve Benedicamus melodies, as, for example, the breviary portion of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century missal and breviary from Saint-Etienne in Chaflons-sur-Marne, F:Pa 595, fol. 54v.

29 Harrison 1963, 74-75; and Harrison 1965, 37-38. See Legg [1916] 1969 for an edition of the Sarum missal, based primarily on this manuscript.

30 Facsimile of fol. 14 in Hiley i98o, and in Harrison 1963, Plate VII.



BENEDICAMUS DOMINO: THE UNWRITTEN TRADITION I 3

TABLE I

Inventory of Benedicamus Melodies in the Exeter Missal, GB:Mr, lat. 24, f. 14

Table I is based on Harrison 1965, 38. The information given in Nos. 2-16 of my table corresponds exactly to Harrison's Nos. I-I5. There is another Benedicamus at the very beginning of the series which Harrison did not take into account because it is neither melismatic nor does it have any cue to its source melody. Nos. 17-3o are also not included in Harrison's table, because they have no cues to their source melodies. (Harrison did identify the source melodies of Nos. 22 and 24 below.)

Melody Number Cue or Rubric Source of Melody Feast

2 in secula R. Benedicamus patrem Trinity 3 in perhenni R. Honor virtus Trinity 4 hodie processit R. Solem iustitiae Nativity of Mary 5 precoma R. Candida virginitas Assumption 6 flos filius R. Stirps Jesse Nativity of Mary 7 judea mariam R. Ad nutum Nativity of

Mary. 8 contra inimici iacula Ant. Crux fidelis Saturday procession in summer 9 et egrediens R. Dixit angelus Peter ad vincula

10 gladio R. Misit impius Peter ad vincula Ii in odorem R. Beatus Laurentius Lawrence 12 commutans lutea R. Jacet granum Thomas of Canterbury 13 vel carnis opera R. Christe Jesu Thomas of Canterbury 14 quem suscita R. Dominus Jesus Palm Sunday Procession 15 clementiam R. Qui cum audissent Nicholas i6 eructavit R. Regnum mundi Common of virgins 17 [O Christi pietas] Ant. 0 Christi pietas Nicholas

(=F:Pn, lat. I 1107, no. 26) 18 - 19 Ad missam tamen. K. Clemens rector' 20 Quando benedicamus simple tone

dicitur ab uno puero vel clerico tamen dicitur iste.

21 In paschali tempore dicitur unum istorum.

22 [Balaam] Seq. Epiphaniam Domino Epiphany 23 -

24 [Amborum sacrum] K. Cunctipotens genitor 25 -

26 -

27 Iste ultimum dicitur -

in duplicibus festis a duobus pueris in paschali tempore. In duplicibus festis ultimo loco a duobus pueris.

28 In rogationibus. -

29 - 30

'Source identified in Barclay 1977, i:6o, melody no. 21.

(see Table i). Fourteen melodies are drawn from responsories, one comes from an antiphon, one from a sequence, and two from Kyrie tropes.

This series of Benedicamus melodies from Exeter, with its clues to the identities of the parent chants, has been hailed as an extraordinary




collection.31 In terms of the sheer numbers of melodies, it is significant, but the list still does not tell us enough about how and when the individual melodies for this chant were used in the offices. The better-known tunes Flosfilius and Clementiam are greatly outnumbered by less familiar melodies. When were these other melodies employed? Certainly the liturgical placement of the parent chants gives some insight into this question, but it does not account for all duplex feasts in the Sarum Rite. Evidently the melodies Flosfilius, Clementiam and the simple tones were not sung day-in and day-out all year long at Exeter, as one would suspect from looking at the repertories of Benedicamus melodies in the Codex Calixtinus or at Notre Dame in Paris, for instance.32 Rather, a much greater variety of melismas was pressed into service. Flosfilius and Clementiam were simply two tunes among this number. Was this just a peculiarity of the Sarum Rite? Or does this collection signal the tip of an iceberg: an unwritten tradition for the Benedicamus domino?

III

Two thirteenth-century manuscripts, contemporaneous with the Exeter missal, provide answers to some of these questions. A notated missal from the royal abbey of Saint-Denis in Paris, F:Pn, lat.

o107 (see Figure i), and a gradual from the abbey of Saint-Corneille of Compiegne, F:Pn, lat. i7329, preserve virtually identical series of Benedicamus melodies, which until now have remained unidentified.33

These two collections are extraordinary for several reasons. In the first place, they document the use of twenty-six Benedicamus, many of which were previously unknown in this form. Next, the origins of all but one of the tunes can be identified, and these parent sources reveal new types of chants from which the Benedicamus could be borrowed. Third, other liturgical books from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille provide abundant details about the liturgical placement of these melodies-much more than has ever been known for the chant. Fourth, the comparison of the Benedicamus with those contained in other collections demonstrates that some melodies can be traced to

31 See Huglo 1982, 121, and Hiley 1980, 123. 32 The Benedicamus at Notre Dame will be mentioned later. The Compostela

manuscript contains three untroped, polyphonic settings of the Benedicamus on the melismas Flosfilius, Clementiam, and the simple tone. See the discussion of these pieces in Barclay 1977, i:258-352, the facsimiles mentioned above in n. 24, and the catalogue in Reaney 1966, 241.

33 F:Pn, lat. 110o7, fols. 395v-96V; and F:Pn, lat. 17329, fols. 246v-49.




. ....

4 IW

A~'-'/4

-''4 kn.A - 4ff-'-40 444-', 44' -'4-'44,4 -

Figure i. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, lat. I107 (i3th c.), f. 395v




distant establishments and to the very beginning of the manuscript tradition of the notated Benedicamus. And fifth, it is clear that some of the melodies have ties with other forms of medieval music, including responsory tropes and polyphony. Taken together, the information contained in these two sources will allow us not only to understand the use of the Benedicamus at Saint-Denis and at Saint-Corneille, but also to make tenable observations about the transmission and performance of the versicle in other houses as well. Example 2 gives a transcription of these melodies, as they are found in F:Pn, lat. I 107, along with a guide to their ordering in F:Pn, lat. 17329.

Only a few of the rubrics that introduce the Benedicamus of Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille are recognizable at first glance. The ninth and tenth melodies, Clementiam and Flos, were used far and wide both as monophonic Benedicamus melodies and as tenors in polyphonic settings.34 The next tune, which is not rubricated, is almost as popular; it is taken from the Antiphon 0 christipietas. Clemens (No. 13) is based on the Kyrie melody Clemens rector, and Balaam (No. I2), from the Sequence Epiphaniam domino, is likewise well-known as a tenor in polyphony.3s These Benedicamus, along with In secula (No. 23) and Amborum sacrum (No. 25),36 also appear in the series from Exeter. But the cues for many of the remaining melodies are not as familiar. Their sources come to light with the aid of other manuscripts from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille: the contemporaneous ordinaries. These books provide helpful clues to the chants on which the Benedicamus melismas are based. For example, the Saint-Denis ordinaries record Benedicamus ut Preciosus at first vespers on the feast of the octave of Saint Denis (i6 October). 37 This hint directs us to the music for the feast of Saint Denis, where the source for Preciosus is likely to be found. Since the liturgy of the abbey naturally contains a proper office for Saint Denis, the discovery of the parent chant is simple. The

34 For a catalogue of the uses of Clementiam and Flos as tenors of two- and three-voice Benedicamus, see Barclay 1977, 1:354-57. Reaney 1966, 841, gives a guide to instances of the tenor Flos in other types of polyphony.

35 See Harrison 1963, 134, Harrison 1965, 38, and Reaney 1966, 829. 36 Barclay treats an interesting two-part, motet-like piece Amborum

sacrum/Benedicamus Domino from the thirteenth-century Aquitanian source, GB:Cu, Ff. I. 17 (fols. 4v, 3). The tenor is not based on the Benedicamus Amborum sacrum, but rather on Flosfilius, and the only connection to Amborum is textual: the upper voice is a pastiche of texts that begin with the phrase Amborum sacrum spiramen nexus amorque from the Kyrie trope Cunctipotens genitor (Barclay 1977, 1:241-57). For edition, commentary, and bibliography, see also Tischler 1985, 2:68 and 3A:no. 5, Tischler 1982, 1:15-18 (no. 5) and 3:51, and Gennrich 1957, 73 (no. 747).

37 F:Pm 526, fol. 183v; F:Pn, lat. 976, fol. 136v; and Paris, Archives nationales, L 863, no. 10, fol. I25v.




twelfth-century antiphoner from Saint-Denis, F:Pn, lat. 17296, provides the answer: it is melisma on Preciosus from the Responsory Preciosus domini dionysius (Example 2, No. I5).38 Similar searches reveal the identies of twenty-five or the twenty-six Benedicamus.39

A striking aspect of Example 2 is the close resemblance between the collections from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille. All but six of the melodies sung at Saint-Denis were also in use at Saint-Corneille, and the Saint-Corneille list contains no Benedicamus that were not also found at Saint-Denis. The reasons for this affinity are understandable: the abbey of Saint-Corneille was reformed by the famous Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis in the twelfth century. Suger installed a contingent of Saint-Denis monks at Saint-Corneille and then restruc- tured their divine office in imitation of the Saint-Denis model through the copying of service books and, in some cases, through the actual transferal of sources from Saint-Denis to Saint-Corneille.4o It is no wonder then that these two collections of Benedicamus melodies are so similar, apart from their ordering of the chants.

In like fashion, the series from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille share their layout of Benedicamus with the Exeter collection, even though the books books differ with respect to many of the actual tunes that are listed. All three manuscripts were compiled during the same period-the second half of the thirteenth century;41 hence one would

38 F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 23 Iv. This manuscript is especially useful here since it not only originated at Saint-Denis in the twelfth century, but later passed to the abbey of Saint-Corneille, as witnessed by the presence of a shelfmark from this establishment on fol. 2r.

39 There is no cue for the final Benedicamus, and I have been unable to discover the source for this tune. It seems to have been quite widespread, however, given the number of concordances that can be produced (see below, n. 78). Huglo 1982, 152, 154 (no. 41 ), has also shown that it was a popular tenor for polyphonic settings, and it is listed as melody no. 99 in Barclay 1977, I:88. The Benedicamus collections in both the Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille manuscripts are followed by similar series of melodies for the Ite missa est. These tunes, too, are based on melismas from responsories and other forms of chant, and many of them are the same melismas that are used in the Benedicamus. I have identified the sources for all of the Ites in F:Pn, lat. 1107 in Walters [Robertson] 1984, 512-13. It is very likely that many of the observations made here about the Benedicamus are equally applicable to the Ite missa est. Eifrig 1984 and Hiley 1985 name and treat some of these melodies.

40 On the close liturgical ties between these two establishments, see Walters [Robertson] 1984, 103, 305-7, 312-13, and 515-

41 F:Pn, lat. 10o7 was copied after 1259 (Walters [Robertson] 1984, 28o-8!, and Walters [Robertson] 1985, 194). The date of production of F:Pn, lat. 17329 has not been precisely determined, but the style of script and the contents of the manuscript both suggest the second half of the thirteenth century (Delisle 1871). GB:Mr, lat. 24 was likewise copied in the mid-thirteenth century, probably around 1260 (James 1921, i:73-74)-



Example 2

Benedicamus Melodies at Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille, based on F:Pn, lat. II07 Note: Pitches in brackets are found in the Benedicamus but not in the source, while pitches in parentheses occur in the source but not in the Benedicamus. In Nos. 13 and 25, "Melnicki" refers to the catalogue of Kyrie melodies, Landwehr-Melnicki 1955. In No. 26, "Huglo" refers to the catalogue of Benedicamus melodies in Huglo 1982, 150-54. The text underlay for the source melody is given in brackets. Void notes indicate plicated notes.

Solo or choral part of Feast from which Number of melody in Cue Source of melody responsorial source source comes Mode F:Pn, lat. 17329

i. Secundum ordinem AlleluiaJuravit dominus, solo Common of one confessor i

2 F:Pn, lat. 1 107, fol. 309v

Scd'm Be- ne- di - ca - mus do- mi- no ordinem [. . se- cun- dum or dinem]

2. Angelorum Responsory Vir inclitus choral Saint Denis 3 dionysius, F: Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 231

An- gl'- or/ Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no [... an- ge- lo- rum ]

0

z

0 ITI Z n

z

n

n

? vl

C)



3. Pax Antiphon Pax eterna, Dedication of Church F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 346

A- =-=1b Pax Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

[... huic pre- stet do- mu- i]

4. Quid te Responsory Cornelius centurio, choral Saints Peter and Paul i 6 F: Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 175

" w v - w WWw "

Quid te Be- ne- di- ca- musdo-mino

[. . quid te o- por- te- at face- re

5. Fines terre Responsory Benedicat nos deus, choral All Saints i 7 F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 239v

Fi- nes terre Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

[... fines terre]

o

O h,o

r)

-3

z o H

z

tl,,




6. Commenda Responsory Ofelixfelicis, choral Saint Mary Magdalene 7 8 F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 350v

Comrm da Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no [... com- men- da]

7. Destinavit Responsory Gaudeat exultans, choral Saint Eugene i 9 F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 252'

1- * Jeto ).A *) o De- sti- na- vit Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

[... de- sti- na- vit eu- ge- ni- um]

8. Alacriter Responsory Valerius igitur, choral Saint Vincent o10 F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 63

A- la- cri- ter Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no [... a- la- cri- ter cu- cur- re- runt]

edt

B.

0D

0

f,4 0

;o

c)

z

r

z

TII

?:

?



9. Clementiam Responsory Qui cum audissent, choral Saint Nicholas 5 11 F:Pn, lat. 17296, 263 (reading a 4th higher)

Clem- tia Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no [... cle- men- ci- am]

io. Flos Verse Virgo dei, solo Nativity of Mary 2 12 Responsory Styrpsjesse, F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 211

Flos Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

[... flos fi- li- us e- jus ]

Ii. - Antiphon 0 christipietas, Saint Nicholas 6 20 F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 264'

A

[m- i---

. -• ==".I. Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

[O christi pi- e- tas]

CD

CD CL) o

('1 L?

0

z

z

o

c3

m,.




I2. Balaam Sequence Epiphaniam domino, Epiphany 7 5 F:Pn, lat. 110o7, fol. 346"

Ba- la- am Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

[Ba- la- am de quo va- ti- ci- nans ex- i- bit ex ja- cob ru- ti- lans in- quit stel- la]

13. Clemens Kyrie Clemens rector (Melnicki no. 102) I

(Kyrie Clemens n.g. in

Saint-Denis manuscripts)

Cle- me- Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

14. Posuisti Alleluia Posuisti domine, solo Common of one martyr i 16 F:Pn, lat. I 107, fol. 292' (=jubilus)

Po- su- i- sti Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

[Po- su- i- sti do- mi- ne ]

h,o

t•J 0

0

0

H

o

rT

z

ca0 rTI

H ca ol



15. Preciosus Responsory Preciosus domini, solo Saint Denis I 13 F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 231v

Pre- ci- os' Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

[Pre- ci- o- sus do- mi- ni ]

16. Erat autem Verse Erat autem, solo Common of evangelists 5 1

Responsory Quatuor animalia (Benedicamus transposed A •down

a 5th)

E- rat afit Be-ne-di- ca- mus do- mi- no

Source F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 270v (reading in entirety)

[E- rat autem qua- si vi- si- o dis- cur- rens in me-di-o qua- tu- or a- ni- ma- li- a]

17. Per omnia secula Responsory Hodie martyrum, choral Saint Maurice F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 220

. . . W i

- •' e..-w W. Per oia Be-ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

[. . . per om- ni- a se- cu- la]

trl

c~bc~ cP N

O

3

a

-o

z

z

-i

z

Ka,




18. Occumbere Responsory Gloriosi domine choral Saint Vincent -

Occiib' Be- ne- di- ca-mus do- mi- no

Source F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 6i' (reading in entirety)

---w -U - - . w - -w

[. . .oc- cum- be- re]

19. Vernabantur Responsory Christi miles choral Saint Vincent i 14

V'na bant' Be-ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

Source F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 63v (reading in entirety)

[Ver- na-ba- ntur san- gui- ne]

20. Quorum vallatus Responsory Beatus dei athleta, choral Saint Vincent I 21

F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 64

Quor/ vallat' Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no [... quo-rum val- la- tus ca- ter- va]

13 @~c

CP 0

Cl z

0

4•

?

r-

oil z

0

1

C-



2 I. Surrexit dominus Alleluia Surrexit dominus, solo Easter F:Pn, lat. i 0o7, fol. I49v

,- - Lw

WJ1 4 w w W

- w

•W w

Surre> dfis Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no [Sur- rex- it do- mi- nus]

22. Benedictus ascendit Responsory Preciosus choral Transitus of Benedict i 17 confessor, F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 83

Biidict' ascendit Be-ne- di- ca-mus do- mi- no [. . . Be-ne- dic-tus as- cen- dit]

23. In secula Responsory Benedicamus choral Trinity 8 4 patrem , F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 167v

In sec'la Be- ne- di-ca-mus do- mi- no [. . . in se- cu- la]

tI t•

N

== Ir

0

z

z

m

z




24. Aromatibus Responsory Diluculo valde surgens, choral Saint Mary Magdalene -

F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 350

A- ro- ma- ti- bus Be- ne- di- ca-mus do- mi- no

[... a- ro- ma- ti- bus pre- ci- o- sis]

25. Amborum sacrum Kyrie Cunctipotens genitor, (Melnicki no. 18) I 18 F:Pn, lat. 1107, fol. 393v

Am- bor/ sa- cer[sic] Be- ne-di- ca- mus do- mi- no

[Ky- ri- e e- ley- son]

26. - (Huglo, no. 411) 7 19

Be- ne- di- ca- mus do- mi- no

m

o

. 0

t,

ti

z C.)

C.) r rJ




expect to find comparable conventions for entering groups of Benedicamus into these coeval sources.42 But aside from these three collections, no other manuscripts that consistently name the sources of Benedicamus melismas have yet come to light. Indeed, this custom seems to have sprung up full-blown and virtually without precedent during this period. It also appears to have been short-lived. The reasons for this new specificity and its quick demise will be explored later. Here, it is significant that the method of notating the Benedicamus, which may have been novel, in no way precludes the earlier existence of many of these same melodies, at least at Saint- Denis. The two earlier thirteenth-century ordinaries from the abbey that were mentioned above, F:Pm 526 (copied between 1234 and I236) and F:Pn, lat. 976 (copied between 1241 and 1259, most likely around 1258), contain verbal references to the chants. Similarly, the twelfth-century antiphoner, F:Pn, lat. 17296 (copied between

1140 and 1150)43 incorporates six melodies for the Benedicamus which

interrupt a proper office for John the Baptist (Figure 2).44 All six of these tunes later appear in the highly organized, thirteenth-century series in F:Pn, lat. 11o7 (cf. Figures i and 2). Figure 2 demonstrates that the twelfth-century list is haphazardly copied, or at least that the Benedicamus were written at slightly different times. A redundancy in this series is clear from a comparison of the first and sixth melodies-- they are built on the same melisma.4s F:Pn, lat. 17296 includes none of the rubrics which name the sources of the Benedicamus. But the very presence of these six melodies is noteworthy, because they hail from Saint-Denis and therefore represent an earlier stage of development of the polished series of Benedicamus found in F:Pn, lat. I 107. Viewed together, these two series of Benedicamus from Saint-Denis also depict the migration of the Benedicamus collection from a twelfth-century antiphoner to a thirteenth-century missal.

42 It is just possible that this likeness between the Exeter and Saint-Denis missals may have a more direct cause. A reliable thirteenth-century chronicler, Guillaume of Nangis, reports that King Henry III of England spent an entire month in the abbey of Saint-Denis in 1259 (Geraud 1843, 2:370, and F6libien 1706, 243). If an exchange of liturgical books took place during this visit, one might imagine that Saint-Denis was influenced by a well-organized Sarum missal that the English king or one of his retinue would have had on hand, or vice versa.

43 On the dating and provenance of these manuscripts, see Walters [Robertson] 1984, 303-7, 323-27 and 333-34, and Walters [Robertson] 1985, 192-94-

44 F:Pn, lat. 17296, fol. 171 . 45 The melisma is Alacriter, taken from the Responsory Valerius igitur from the

feast of Saint Vincent. The two readings vary slightly. Benedicamus no. 2 in Figure 2 is Quid te, no. 3 is In secula, no. 4 Destinavit, no. 5 Clementiam (cf. Example 2).




-P~i;:Q::~i:: ::i~;::: :;;P ::?:?NUNN "D'i_ ::::w _09 Ori

?::?:2:~:aR NIT x- L IS:::. ::::

PIMwn 'AAWAWIDN -? w. ? ki

AAWWWONO __

A,.,

7z UNNwow T :ff:m

-.:rpi:

Figure 2. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, lat. 17296 (12th c.), f. I71

Since most of the tunes heretofore identified for the Benedicamus domino are borrowed from responsories, the other types of chant-




sources represented in Example 2 may come as something of a

surprise. Three of the melodies hail from alleluia melismas,46 two from antiphons, two from Kyrie melodies, one from a sequence, and one from an unidentified source. To try to explain this richness of sources, we must recall the thesis advanced above: that the tradition of

singing the Benedicamus may have been unwritten, to some extent, until the late thirteenth century. As mentioned earlier, Abbot Peter of

Cluny and the various thirteenth-century ordinances characterize the festive Benedicamus domino as a borrower from other classes of chant. The thrust of their remarks is that the text Benedicamus domino was to be sung on an appropriate melisma. Nowhere do they refer to Benedicamus as actually written out in fine libri or in missale, as sometimes happens for other chants. The thirteenth-century series from Saint-Denis, Saint-Corneille, and Exeter, quite uncommon in their preservation of full cycles of notated melodies for the versicle, understandably draw on a greater variety of sources for the Benedicamus than has previously been known.

If the variety of sources is great, so too is the stylistic diversity of the melismas that make up the tunes, a diversity resulting mainly from the underlay of the text Benedicamus domino and the lengths of the source melismas. A total length of thirty-five to forty-five pitches is not uncommon, as seen in the melodies Pax, Commenda, and Occumbere (Example 2, Nos. 3, 6, and 18). The longest stretch of notes usually falls on the syllables -ne- and -ca- of Benedicamus and on do- of domino. The remaining syllables in each melody offset this density around the melisma with syllabic or mildly neumatic settings. Sometimes the Benedicamus domino text segments the chant in such a way that two roughly equal melismas result, as in the melodies Quid te and Fines terre (Example 2, Nos. 4 and 5). Other Benedicamus are considerably shorter and hardly deserve to be called melismatic: 0 christi pietas, Balaam, Clemens, Quorum vallatus, and Amborum sacrum (Nos. I 1-13, 20, and 25). These melodies consist of a single melisma of about fifteen notes or of two melismas which approximately divide this number.

6 The use of alleluia melismas as sources for melodies for the Benedicamus was specified by the ordinary of the cathedral of Bayeux: "the melody of the Benedicamus and the Ite missa est on festive days are customarily taken from the tune of a Kyrie or an alleluia or from any of the responsories of that day" ("et solent sumi cantus Benedicamus diebus festivis et Ite missa est in cantu Kyrieleison vel Alleluia vel alicujus ex responsis ipsius diei"), Chevalier 1902, 33. Until now, however, no examples of this type of borrowing had been found (see Barclay 1977, 1:14)-




Hand in hand with the structure of the source melismas goes the nature of the source text. Often, in fact, its words provide the rationale for the placement of melismas, since the vowels of the text Benedicamus domino frequently emulate the sounds of the parent chant that they replace. Examples of this process are plentiful in the series from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille. They are most readily apparent in the comparison of the Benedicamus melismas with their parent sources (Example 2) in the melodies Secundum ordinem (No. i), Pax (No. 3), Quid te (No. 4; assonance between the syllable -ne- of Be-ne-dicamus and the word te of Quid te), Fines terre (No. 5), Commenda (No. 6), and Destinavit (No. 7). These correspondences recall the same

technique of vowel imitation that occurs when the text of a prosula is set to a melisma of an offertory47 or an alleluia (sequentia), or when a

trope is inserted in a conductus or in a section of organum.48 In like manner, the placement of the Benedicamus text follows logically the

phrasing of the melody, especially when assonance is not present. This method of creating melodies for the Benedicamus is at once natural, and more important, it clearly accommodates the soloist who already knew the preexisting chant segment. The singer would be able to "map out" the underlay of the brief text Benedicamus domino in his head, using assonance and phrasing as guides. He could then, in effect, compose the Benedicamus orally. Furthermore, he could accom- plish this without reading from a notated version of the Benedicamus.

There is further support for the possibility of oral composition of the Benedicamus melodies in Example 2, for the chants follow the notes of their models quite closely.49 Sometimes pitches from the parent source are repeated in the Benedicamus so that a portion of the Benedicamus text can be comfortably set (see Example 2, Nos.

io, 14, 15, i8, 23). Occasionally notes are added to the newly adapted melody, most of the time at or near the end to form a smooth conclusion for the chant which encircles the final more definitively (Nos. Io, I5, I7). Only the Benedicamus Erat autem (No. 16) is entirely exceptional in its derivation. A large portion from the middle of the Verse Erat autem (from the Responsory Quatuor animalia) is omitted

47 For examples of prosulae, see Stiblein 1961, Kelly 1977, 369-83, and Steiner 1969, 388. Steiner 1980 summarizes the use of prosulas with various classes of chant.

48 A polyphonic example of this latter type has recently been documented in Payne 1986, 247.

49 The twelfth-century antiphoner, F:Pn, lat. 17296, contains the original sources for all Benedicamus that are borrowed from responsories and from the Antiphon Pax eterna. The remaining Benedicamus in Example 2 are compared with their parent alleluias, Kyries, and sequences in the same missal from Saint-Denis that preserves the Benedicamus chants (F:Pn, lat. 110o7).



BENEDICAMUS DOMINO: THE UNWRITTEN TRADITION 31I

from the Benedicamus setting, and the final phrase of the Benedicamus is

transposed down a fifth from the original chant. Possibly these variants are due in part to the difference in age between the thirteenth- century manuscript which contains the Benedicamus (F:Pn, lat. Io107) and the twelfth-century antiphoner (F:Pn, lat. 17296) in which the Responsory Quatuor animalia is found.s0 But it may also be the case that the soloists found it difficult to remember the syllabically set text visio discurrens in medio quatuor ani-, and consequently skipped over this portion, proceeding directly to the melisma on -ma- of animalia. The similar-sounding triads on do- (F-A-C) and on ani- (C-E-G) would have made the jump possible. In all of the other melodies, the discrepancies with the original chant are slight and demonstrate once again the ease with which someone who had memorized the original melisma might well introduce the text Benedicamus domino spontaneously.

The modality of these Benedicamus is generally clear-cut, and this straightforwardness, too, must have aided the singer. Most of the tunes fall within the range of the first mode. Flosfilius (No. i6) lies in the second mode. The fifth mode is represented by two melodies (Nos. 9 and i6), the sixth mode by 0 christipietas (No. I i), the seventh mode by three tunes (Nos. 6, i2, and 26), and the eighth mode by the melody In secula (No. 23). Some Benedicamus wander little and seem to emphasize strongly the structural points of the mode, such as the comfortable leap of a fifth D-A in the first mode (Angelorum, Quid te, Fines terre, Alacriter, Occumbere, Vernabantur, Surrexit dominus, Benedictus ascendit, Aromatibus, Amborum sacrum; Nos. 2, 4, 5, 8, i8, 19, 21, 22, 24, and 25). Others employ extreme ranges of the mode (e.g. Pax, Clementiam; Nos. 3 and 9), and they often exhibit lengthy scalar or triadic passages (Secundum ordinem, Pax, In secula; Nos. I, 3, and 23)- Even the most far-reaching melodies, however, would not have posed a serious obstacle to soloists who would long before have learned them by heart in their original sources.

So far, this discussion of the Benedicamus has emphasized aspects of these melodies that facilitated their performance by soloists. It may seem paradoxical, therefore, to discover that the majority of responsory-based tunes from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille are not drawn from the solo portions at all, but rather from the choral sections (see Example 2). Moreover, of the three fragments from alleluia verses

50 Hans-J6rgen Holman 1963, 44, notes similar discrepancies between different manuscripts in his study of the melismatic responsories of the Worcester antiphoner, the Lucca Codex, and the so-called Hartker Codex. He concludes that while the melisma of a responsory is almost always found in the same position in various readings of the chant, the different versions are often musically unlike.




that serve as sources (Secundum ordinem, Posuisti, Surrexit dominus; Nos. I, 14, and 21), Posuisti comes from the part of the verse that is mirrored in thejubilus of the alleluia, a segment that was sung by the choir. The Benedicamus from the sequence (Balaam, No. I2), the two from Kyries (Clemens, Amborum; Nos. 13 and 25), and no doubt the two from antiphons (Pax, 0 christi pietas; Nos. 3 and II)s5 were equally familiar to the choir. Does this not contradict the evidence presented earlier that these Benedicamus were intended for soloists?

Once again the performance practice of the versicle provides the answer. The choir was in fact intimately involved in the execution of the Benedicamus-they echoed the same melody in their response Deo

gratias.52 This important role, then, was made easier through the use of melismas for Benedicamus and Deogratias that were either memorized by the choir or at least were well known to them through frequent repetition as choral sections in the original sources. Like the soloists, the choir could sing the Deo gratias without the aid of a notated copy, especially since they would often have performed the same music in some other part of the divine office. In the few cases where the Benedicamus was drawn from a solo part of a chant, and even in the instances where it was not, those assigned to the Benedicamus probably joined in with the choir on the response Deo gratias. From the soloists' viewpoint, the fact that choral passages were often "elevated" to the level of solo music would not have presented a problem. Not only would these skilled singers have learned the choral music in their earlier years as choristers, they would have retained the repertory by assisting the choir in the choral portions of the responsorial chants of the mass and office.53

5' Since the antiphon 0 christi pietas is also the source of a Kyrie melody, it is doubly likely that the choir would have known this tune by heart.

52 There is little information in ordinaries about who executed the Deogratias, and this silence usually indicates the use of the choir, since the sources generally specify numbers of singers for soloistic music only. One passage from the early ninth-century liturgist Amalarius of Metz supports the notion that the Deo gratias was intended for non-soloists (Hanssens 1948, 2:170): "After the voice of the deacon saying Ite missa est or Benedicamus Domino has been heard, the people respond Deo gratias" ("quando post auditam vocem diaconi, quae dicit: 'Ite missa est,' sive: 'Benedicamus Domino,' populus respondit: 'Deogratias' "). Harrison 1963, 0o6, however, infers that the Deogratias was executed by two soloists on duplex feasts in the Sarum Rite. Manuscripts that demonstrate that the Deo gratias was chanted on the same melody as the Benedicamus, or that even notate the chant at all, are rare. For examples, see some of the sources described below in Table 3: F:Pn, lat. 887, fols. 6, 46, 155v- I56; I:Lc 603, fol. 243; F:Pn, n.a.l. I413, fol. Io04

53 While we can assume that the members of the choir did not perform music that was designated for soloists, there is no reason to believe that the soloists refrained




IV

The ordinaries from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille have greatly facilitated the discovery of the sources of the melismas for the Benedicamus. At the same time, these books offer witness of the ceremonial uses of these melodies that is unparalleled in detail, as Table 2 shows. This knowledge, in turn, clarifies the ordering of these two series of Benedicamus.

It is curious, for example, that the most famous tunes (Flos filius and Clementiam) do not appear at the beginning of the lists of Benedicamus either in F:Pn, lat. I 107 or in F:Pn, lat. 17329. What is the reason for this arrangement? After all, these Benedicamus occur within two highly organized and well-rubricated sequentiaries and kyriales, and hence the order of these melodies must have some significance.54 Table 2 makes this ordering clear. The ordinaries assign Benedicamus I through 7 to first vespers, the first office hour that would have

required these elaborate tunes. Moreover, melodies 2 through 7 are almost in calendric order, and six of the seven tunes are destined for twelve-lesson feasts of duplex rank. The first melody, the Benedicamus Secundum ordinem, comes from the Alleluia Juravit dominus from the common of one confessor. This chant served a number of feasts for saints who held this title. The eighth melody, Alacriter, begins the series for second vespers. The ninth Benedicamus, Clementiam, was

sung most often at second vespers on the highest feasts of annuale and semiannuale rank. Next follows the Benedicamus Flos flius, which was intoned on these same high feasts at first vespers.55 From here to the end of the list, the level of festivals more or less decreases. The melodies 0 christi pietas and Balaam were chanted on semiannuale and

duplex occasions, most of the time at second vespers. The next group of tunes (Posuisti, Preciosus, Erat autem, Per omnia secula, Vernabantur) were used on duplex, semiduplex, and semiannuale feasts at first

vespers.s6 The Benedicamus Posuisti, taken from the Alleluia Posuisti

from singing with the choir. (I am grateful to John Boe, Thomas Kelly, and Craig Wright for discussion which helped form my opinion on this point.)

54 On the kyriale in the Saint-Denis missal F:Pn, lat. I o107, see Walters [Robertson] 1984, 483-89.

55 For the Benedicamus Flos, the high level of the feast days (annuale, semiannuale) temporarily takes precedence over the strict ordering according to office hour.

56 It is likely that the last four of these melodies are listed together because they were intended for more than one level of feast. Had they been restricted to duplex celebrations, they would be probably have been located at the beginning of the list.



TABLE 2

Liturgical Placement of Benedicamus Melodies at Saint-Denis

Table 2 is based on the thirteenth-century ordinaries from Saint-Denis, F:Pm 526 and F:Pn, lat. 976, and on the eighteenth-century copy of a fourteenth-century source, Paris, Archives nationales, L 863, no. i o. Feasts designated "I4th c" occur only in the latter manuscript; those designated "I3th c" occur only in the two thirteenth-century ordinaries. Numbering and order of the Benedicamus melodies follow Example 2. Feasts and dates given in parentheses indicate those Benedicamus which have no liturgical assignment in the Saint-Denis ordinaries. An asterisk (*) before a feast denotes saints whose relics were present at Saint-Denis. Numerals under Rank refer to numbers of lessons in feasts; letters represent the system of gradation that was employed in the fourteenth century: semiduplex (sd), duplex (d), semiannuale (sa), annuale (a). Entries in this table are conflated from all three ordinaries.

Benedicamus Melody Feast to which Assigned Date Vesp-I Matins Lauds Vesp-2 Rank

i. Secundum ordinem *Hilary of Poitiers I3 Jan. x 12-d Gregory - I4th c 12 Mar. x 12-d

*Dionysius of Corinth 8 Apr. x 12-d Augustine - 14th c 28 Aug. x 12-d

*Hilary of Mende 25 Oct. x 12-d Martin - i4th c ii Nov x 12-d

2. Angelorum Michael 29 Sept. x I 2-d 3. Pax Ded. of Church - I3th c 24 Feb. x 12-d 4. Quid te *Peter and Paul 29 June x 12-sa 5. Fines terre Trinity x 6. Commenda Mary Magdalene 22 July x 12-d 7. Destinavit *Eugene 15 Iov. x 12-d 8. Alacriter *Vincent 22 Jan. x 12-d 9. Clementiam Christmas 25 Dec. x 12-a

Easter x 3-a Invention of Nail x 3-a Pentecost x 3-a Assumption 15 Aug. x 12-a

*Osmanna 9 Sept. x x 12-d

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z

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TABLE 2, continued


Benedicamus Melody Feast to which Assigned Dat- Vesp-i Matins Lauds Vesp-2 Rank

9. Clementiam *Denis 9 Oct. x 12-a All Saints I Nov. x 12-sa Nicholas 6 Dec. x 12-d

Requiescant in pace Philip Augustus - d. 1223 14 July x io. Flos filius Epiphany 6 Jan. x 12-sa

Ascension x 12-sa Pentecost x 3-a Purification 2 Feb. x 12-sa Ded. of Church - 14th c 24 Feb. x 12-a

Assumption 15 Aug. x 12-a

Nativity of Mary - 14th c 8 Sept. x I2-sa *Denis 9 Oct. x 12-a All Saints I Nov. x 12-sa

I1. O christi pietas Nativity of Mary - i4th c 8 Sept. x 12-sa Nicholas 6 Dec. x 12-d

Requiescant in pace Abbot Suger - d. I 151 14 Jan. x 12. Balaam Epiphany 6 Jan. x 12-sa 13. Clemens 14. Posuisti Commemoration of 25 Dec. x

Stephen Stephen 26 Dec. x 12-d

*Eugene - 14th c. 15 Nov. x 12-d *Clement 23 Nov. x I2-d

15. Preciosus Detection of Denis 9 June x I2-d Consecration of Altar 28 July x 12-sd Octave of Denis 16 Oct. x I 2-sa

16. Erat autem John 27 Dec. x 12-sa 17. Per omnia secula *Maurice 22 Sept. x 12-d

9

m

z

z

o z

z



TABLE 2, continued


Benedicamus Melody Feast to which Assigned Date Vesp-I Matins Lauds Vesp-2 Rank

18. Occumbere (*Vincent) (22 an.) 19. Vernabantur *Vincent 22 an. x 2-d 20. Quorum vallatus *Vincent 22 an. x 12-d

Requiescant in pace Philip Augustus - d. 1223 14 uly x Requiescant in pace Robert II - d. 103 I 20 uly x Requiescant in pace Charles the Bald - d. 877 6 Oct. x Requiescant in pace Abbot Suger - d. i1151 14 Jan. x

21. Surrexit dominus (Easter) 22. Benedictus ascendit Benedict 21 Mar. x x 12-d 23. In secula (Trinity) 24. Aromatibus (Mary Magdalene) (22 July) 25. Amborum sacrum Christmas 25 Dec. x 12-a

Pentecost x 3-a Assumption 15 Aug. x I2-a

26. (not named)

Melody named only in Paris, Archives nationales, L 863, no. to (pp. 70, 71): 0 quam suavis est Corpus Christi - 14th c x x 12-d

t-)

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from the common of one martyr,57 functioned like Secundum ordinem as a common Benedicamus for saints classified as martyrs. It probably occurs here, rather than at the beginning with the other melodies for duplex feasts, because it was used both at first and at second vespers. The final melodies were sung mostly at lauds, another office hour for which such ornate chants would have been appropriate. Five Benedicamus (Clemens, Occumbere, Surrexit dominus, In secula, and Aromatibus; Nos. 13, 18, 21, 23, and 24) have no liturgical assignments in the Saint-Denis ordinaries. The last four were doubtless connected with the feasts from which their melismas were drawn.58 The use of the Benedicamus Clemens is not clarified in the ordinaries.59

From this analysis, it is clear that there is a high degree of organization in the Benedicamus list from Saint-Denis. The melodies are grouped in the order of their occurrence during the daily office hours and according to the ranks of the celebrations they enhanced. Those who consulted the missal would have understood this arrangement, because they would have recognized the liturgical implications of the cue which preceded each Benedicamus. Hence the kinds of rubrics that designate the level of feast at which a melody was sung (e.g., in festis duplicibus) were unnecessary. More important to the thirteenth-century soloist was the name of the melismatic source of each Benedicamus melody. Since he already knew the music of the offices, this information alone would have reminded him both of the tune required and of the service for which the Benedicamus was intended.

57 Steiner 1973, 120-2 1, has noted that the first part of the Alleluia Posuisti, the source of the Benedicamus Posuisti, is composed of a section of melisma (Steiner's "S-melisma") that is also found in a number of other chants.

58 Other evidence makes it quite clear that the Benedicamus on Surrexit must have been connected with Easter day and the week that follows. The ordinaries call for the Alleluia Surrexit at the second vespers service on Wednesday of Easter week (F:Pm 526, fol. 59v), and for Ite missa est based on the melisma Surrexit dominus both at first vespers on Easter (Paris, Archives nationales, L 863, no. io, p. 50) and at mass on Easter and the three days that follow (F:Pm 526, fol. 57v; F:Pn, lat. 976, fol. 31). The Benedicamus on this melisma was no doubt intoned at the end of second vespers on Easter and probably during Easter week as well.

59 While the Kyrie Clemens rector is not notated in the kyriale at Saint-Denis (see Walters [Robertson] 1984, 484-88), the ordinaries assign it to the Feast of Saint Stephen, for the Commemoration of the Dead, for the anniversaries of King Dagobert (19 January) and King Robert (20 July). (The liturgical placements for the melodies of the kyriale at Saint-Denis, based on the ordinaries, is forthcoming in my book, Music and Ritual at the Royal Abbey ofSaint-Denis, 567- 567.) It is unlikely that the Benedicamus Clemens was sung on any of these occasions, since other tunes are already specified (see Table 4 below). Barclay 1977, i:6o, shows that this melody (her no. 21) is designated for "lauds on semidouble feasts," but she draws only on modem sources.




The ordinary, Paris, Archives nationales L 863, no. Io (see Table 2) also shows that certain changes in the liturgical placement of the Benedicamus were made in the fourteenth century.60 The services at which Benedicamus were sung in the fourteenth century often result from the elevation of the ranks of certain festivals at Saint-Denis after the two thirteenth-century ordinaries were copied.61 In other cases, these alterations demonstrate that some saints who had proper offices in the thirteenth century were demoted to offices from the commune sanctorum in the fourteenth century. The office for Saint Eugene at Saint-Denis illustrates this decrease in specificity. In the thirteenth century, Eugene is provided with his own Benedicamus, Destinavit, from the proper Responsory Gaudeat exultans. By the fourteenth

century, on the other hand, the saint had fewer proper chants in his liturgy, and the Benedicamus assigned to his feast at first vespers is now Posuisti, from the Alleluia Posuisti for the common of one martyr.

Clearly, the thirteenth-century Benedicamus series from Saint- Denis, Saint-Corneille, and Exeter represent the height of organization and presentation of Benedicamus melodies. Collections of Benedicamus that follow sometimes include rubrics that name the levels of feasts or the office hours at which the melodies were to be performed.62 But the identification of the melodies by means of a cue

60 This manuscript was copied around 1760, but it represents fourteenth-century (and not eighteenth-century) practice, because it is an abridgement of an ordinary which was written between 1350 and I364 (Walters [Robertson] 1984, 340).

61 On the raising of the levels of celebrations at Saint-Denis, see Walters [Robertson] 1984, 151-62.

62 For example, the English Benedictine collection of thirteen Benedicamus in the ordinary from the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Mary York, GB:Cjc, D.27, fols. 14-I4v, in which each melody is preceded by a rubric naming the rank of service for which it is destined. This ordinary, dated probably between 1398 and 1405, is published in Abbess of Stanbrook and Tolhurst 1936-51. While the rubrics for the Benedicamus are printed in the edition (ibid. 1936, 1:I9), the musical portions were all omitted and must be seen in the original manuscript. (I thank Dr. Elizabeth Archibald of King's College, Cambridge, who first explored this manuscript for me.) The Hereford missal (Henderson [1874] 1969, 138-39), preserves five tones for the Benedicamus: for ferial days, Purification of Mary, Annunciation (during Lent), semiduplex feasts, and feasts of nine lessons. The Sarum Rite abounds with similar collections, some of which likewise provide liturgical assignments. There are often a substantial number of concordances of Benedicamus melodies in the Sarum sources, although each series seems to preserve a distinctive order of tunes. See, for example, the collection of ten Benedicamus in the late fourteenth-century Sarum missal Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS. 394, fol. I io (now housed in the Old Bodleian Library), and the eight Benedicamus that are preserved in the early fifteenth-century Sarum missal Oxford, Pembroke College, MS i, fol. 127 (choice and ordering of Benedicamus melodies in the Corpus Christi book are virtually identical to those presented in the "standard" Sarum list [Sandon 1984, 83]). The Corpus Christi and Pembroke sources are inventoried respectively in Ker 198 3, 3:609 and 669. (I am grateful to Judith Silber




to the responsory or other chant from which it was borrowed seems to have been transitory, if not ephemeral.63 There was probably a good reason for this. In the face of an ever-enlarging divine service in the fourteenth century, it became necessary to establish some sort of permanence for these tunes both by writing them down and by assigning them to specific places in the ritual. No longer was it feasible to perform the Benedicamus by relying solely on the melismatic source.64 The melismas were consequently detached from their original contexts, or they were newly composed. In either case, they now stood as independent chants for the Benedicamus domino in their own right.65 As a result, notated collections of Benedicamus become increasingly common in the fourteenth century.

V

Since there is little overlap between the Benedicamus of the Exeter series and those from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille, we must ask

for examining these two manuscripts for me before I was able to see them.) Further examples from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries from other countries can be had in Huglo 1982, 136-54, added to which is the collection of three Benedicamus with information on ranks of feasts in the fifteenth-century missal from Rouen, F:R(m) 385 (fols. 157V-58V).

63 One last manuscript should be mentioned here. The "Black Book" (Liber Niger) of Lincoln Cathedral, compiled over many centuries, contains specific information for three Benedicamus: In perhenni seculorum tempore, Flosfilius, and Clementiam. The first melody is assigned to all duplex and semiduplex feasts at first vespers except during Easter. It is described thus (Bradshaw and Wordsworth 1892, 1:369): "[The Benedicamus] is sung in this way according to In perhenni seculorum tempore from the end of the sixth responsory from the feast of Trinity" (Latin text given below, p. 56). Flosfilius was employed at lauds on major and minor duplex celebrations and was drawn "from the end of the verse which is called virga [sic] dei" (Bradshaw and Wordsworth 1892, 1:373). Clementiam, which stood at the end of second vespers, came "from the end of the fifth responsory from the historia of blessed Nicholas" (ibid., p. 381). While the Liber Niger does provide these details about the original sources of the three Benedicamus, it does not include the actual tunes for the chants. See Sandon's composite edition of the Sarum ordinary (1984, 8 1-83), which contains clues for the Ite, but no indications of the parent chants for the Benedicamus.

4 Harrison 1963, 18- 19, cites interesting evidence from the fourteenth century to support this point. The requirements for new secondaries and choristers at the collegiate church of Ottery St. Mary in southwest England, founded in 1337, included the memorization of "all the usual melodies for the Benedicamus within a month after admission." This stipulation seems to imply that the Benedicamus now had to be learned one-by-one, rather than by recalling the melismas from which some were doubtless drawn.

65 While Harrison 1963, 74 and 124, has noted that "the melody of the neuma [of the Benedicamus] achieved an independent place in the ritual," he does not acknowledge that the labeling of the melismas still provided an important a link to the parent chant.




whether the selection of tunes in these houses is peculiar to each establishment. The melodies shared by all three lists are In secula, Flos

filius, Clementiam, 0 christi pietas, the unidentified melisma (F:Pn, lat.

So107, no. 26), Balaam, and Amborum sacrum (Example 2, Nos. 23, 1o, 9, II, 26, 12, and 25). But this leaves a large number of tunes that

appear to be particular to Exeter on the one hand, and to Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille on the other. Do the majority of these Benedicamus reflect merely the special liturgical needs or parochial choices of these three houses? Or were they sung in other places as well?

A selection of manuscripts from various parts of Europe reveals that many of the Benedicamus chants from Saint-Denis and Saint- Corneille did in fact exist in other places. Table 3 provides a short list of sources from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries which contain one or more Benedicamus melodies.66 None of these collections offers clues to the sources of the Benedicamus. But a few of the later ones do include rubrics that specify the level of feast on which each chant should be performed. Table 3 by no means encompasses all collections of Benedicamus melodies, but it does begin to demonstrate the wide temporal and geographic distribution of several tunes that match those found in the collections from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille.

The melodies which are based on the melismas Clementiam, Flos filius, 0 christi pietas, and Clemens (Example 2, Nos. 9-11 and 13) are commonly found, as might be expected. Most of these chants were popular Benedicamus throughout the middle ages. The use of 0 christi pietas as a Benedicamus, however, seems to be exceptional, for the tune appears more often as an Ite missa est. The Benedicamus based on the opening of the popular Kyrie Clemens rector also appears in a number of sources,67 including the twelfth-century troper from Spain, E:Mn 19421, where it is restated as an Ite missa est on the same folio. The well-known melody Balaam occurs by itself as a Benedicamus in the twelfth-century proser from Laon, F:LA 263.68 Here the melody is introduced by a rubric, "you might want a Benedicamus of this sort" (Benedicamus quale volueris), at the end of a section of proses for vespers, following the Magnificat. The instructions probably imply that the

66 A few of these sources are described in the catalogues of Barclay (1977) or

Huglo (1982); the others are presented here for the first time. 67 Concordances in Barclay 1977, i:6o, melody no. 21; and in Huglo 1982, 150

(melody nos. I I I and 118), 153. A study of E-Mn 19421 is found in Hiley 1981. 68 Huglo 1982, 140, cites this Benedicamus and its rubric, but without identifying

the source of the melody. Arlt 1970, 2:38, likewise notes its use as a Benedicamus at the end of compline in the office of Circumcision at the French cathedral of Beauvais.



TABLE 3

Beginning List of Manuscripts Containing Benedicamus Melodies that are Found in F:Pn, lat. 11o7 and F:Pn, lat. 17329

Manuscript Benedicamus Melodies Provenance

Eleventh Century F:Pn, lat. 887 - troper/proser; Benedicamus (BD) on fols. 6, 45v, fol. 156, no. 4 - PRECIOSUS Aurillac, south France

46, 155v, 156.

Twelfth Century E:Mn 289 - troper/proser; BD on fols. 140-40v. fol. 140, no.

- PAX Norman Sicily fol.

i4ov, no. I - PRECIOSUS no. 3 - VERNABANTUR no. 8 - FLOS FILIUS

E:Mn 19421 - troper; BD on fols. io6, i io, iov, I I6. fol. i io, no. i - FLOS FILIUS Catania, Spain with alleluia

fol. i iov, no. 6 - FLOS FILIUS no. 9 - CLEMENS RECTOR

F:LA 263 - troper; one BD on fol. 131. fol. 131 - BALAAM Laon, France F:RSc 265 - cantatorium and lectionary; BD on fol. 49v. fol. 49v, no. 4 = F:Pn, lat. 110o7, no. 26 S. Denis of Reims,

fol. 49v, no. 6 - PRECIOSUS France GB: Ob, Laud. misc. 4 (503) - processioner; BD on fols. fol. 163, no. i - FLOS FILIUS S. Albans, England

163-65v. fol. 164, no. i - FLOS FILIUS with alleluia

I:Lc 603 - antiphoner; BD on fols. 243-43v, 256. fol. 243, no. 4 - FLOS FILIUS Pontetetto, Italy fol. 243, no. 5 = F:Pn, lat. 1107, no. 26

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TABLE 3, continued

Manuscript Benedicamus Melodies Provenance

Thirteenth Century F:Pa 135 - Sarum missal; BD on fol. i52. fol. i52

- QUORUM VALLATUS England F: Pa 595 - thirteenth-fourteenth century missal/breviary; BD fol. 54v, no. i - FLOS FILIUS S. Etienne,

on fol. 54v. no. 2 - CLEMENTIAM Chalons-sur- no. 6 - QUORUM VALLATUS Marne, France

GB:Mr, lat. 24 - notated missal; BD on fols. i4-i4v. fol. 14, no. 2 - IN SECULA Exeter, England no. 6 - FLOS FILIUS no. 15 - CLEMENTIAM no. 17 - O0 CHRISTI PIETAS no. i8 = F:Pn, lat. 1107, no. 26 no. 19 - CLEMENS RECTOR

fol. I4v, no. i - BALAAM no. 3 - AMBORUM SACRUM

US:NYpm 797 - gradual; BD on fols. 252v-53v. fol. 253, no. 3 - FLOS FILIUS Padua, Italy

Fourteenth Century GB: Cfm 369 - twelfth-century notated missal with BD added fol. 509v, no. i - FLOS FILIUS Lewes Priory,

in fourteenth century on fo7. 509v (453v). no. 2 - PRECIOSUS England GB:Cjc, D.27 - ordinary; BD on fols. i4-i4v, fol. 14, no. 5 - FLOS FILIUS S. Mary, York,

no. 7 - CLEMENTIAM England no. 9 = F:Pn, lat. Io107, no. 26

Oxford, Jesus College, MS io - antiphoner from twelfth, fol. I89v, no. I - FLOS FILIUS S. Peter, Gloucestel thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries; BD added on fols. no. 2 = F:Pn, lat. o107, no. 26 England i89v-9o in fourteenth century. MS now in Bodleian Lib. no. 3 - QUORUM VALLATUS

Fifteenth Century F:Pn, Reserve 1750 - Franciscan book of intonations; BD on Pg. 8, no. 5 - FLOS FILIUS Paris, France

pg. 8.

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soloist might fashion a Benedicamus not only from the Sequence Epiphaniam domino, but from some of the other proses that are given.

The ubiquity of several of the less familiar tunes is more surprising. The Benedicamus Preciosus (Example 2, No. 15) from the Respon- sory for Saint Denis Preciosus domini dionysius enjoys a rather wide distribution. This melody appears in the eleventh-century Aquitanian troper F:Pn, lat. 887,69 and in the twelfth-century troper from Norman Sicily E-Mn 289 in a slightly varied version.70 Preciosus was heard around the same time in France, where it is preserved in a cantatorium and lectionary from the collegiate church of Saint-Denis at Reims, F:RSc 265. Here the chant is written as an isolated Ite missa est in the midst of a series of seven Benedicamus. Since seven other Ite melodies also appear in a group at the top of this folio, the Ite Preciosus was clearly meant to serve also as a setting of the words Benedicamus domino.71 An English source from the twelfth-century also includes this melody: the notated missal from the Cluniac priory of Lewes, GB:Cfm 369. The Benedicamus, provided with the rubric "at lauds and

vespers on duplex feasts" ("ad laudes et ad vesperas in duplicibus") is found at the end of the manuscript in a section that was added in the fourteenth century.72

Other Benedicamus at first would seem to have only local popular- ity. Four melodies from Saint-Denis/Saint-Corneille are based on melismas of responsories from the feast of Saint Vincent: Alacriter, Occumbere, Vernabantur, and Quorum vallatus (Example 2, Nos. 8, 18-20). These chants reflect the liturgical biases of the monks of Saint-Denis, who kept the cult of Saint Vincent with great tenacity. Hence, it is not surprising that four of the twenty-six Benedicamus found in F:Pn, lat. 1107 should be drawn from his liturgy. Again, however, two of these tunes also appear in other houses, and in a variety of forms. Vernabantur closely resembles the third Benedicamus

69 The five Benedicamus on this folio are added by a slightly later hand, still from the eleventh century, to judge from the formation of the diastematic neumes. I am grateful to Michel Huglo for his opinion on the date of these additions.

70 These two appearances of Preciosus are also catalogued by Barbara Barclay, although she was unaware of their source (see Barclay 1977, 1:53, melody nos. 2 and I, respectively). The author notes that the two melodies are quite similar and "may in fact represent local variations of the same melismatic passage" (ibid., 51). The reading in the Saint-Denis/Saint-Corneille manuscripts follows that in F:Pn, lat. 887 most closely.

71 The Saint-Denis missal F:Pn, lat. 1107 also provides evidence for the dual usage of Preciosus both as Benedicamus (fol. 396) and as Ite (fol. 397).

72 On this missal, see Leroquais 1935, 12, and Holder 1985.




melisma from E-Mn 289.73 Quorum vallatus was almost as common as Preciosus, to judge from the number of times it occurs in the manuscripts surveyed in Table 3. At Saint-Denis, it served not only as Benedicamus domino, but also as a melody for the closing versicle for matins and lauds of the office for the dead, Requiescant in pace (see Table 2, No. 20 above). The requiem mass likewise employed the Requiescant in pace on Quorum vallatus in place of the Ite missa est. These services took place on the anniversaries that were celebrated yearly at Saint-Denis for three important kings and one abbot: Charles the Bald (d. 877), Robert the Pious (d. 103 i), Abbot Suger (d. i 15 1), and Philip Augustus (d. 22 3).74 Quorum vallatus is also found in the fourteenth-

century portion of the Gloucester antiphonal, Oxford, Jesus College, MS io.75 The thirteenth-century Sarum missal F:Pa 135 preserves this sole Benedicamus along with a single melody for the Ite missa est and one for the Requiescant in pace. Finally, the thirteenth/fourteenth- century missal and breviary F:Pa 595 from Saint-Etienne in Chalons- sur-Marne records Quorum vallatus as the sixth out of seven ornate Benedicamus.

At least two other melodies from the Saint-Denis series were sung as Benedicamus outside the abbey. The melisma Pax (Example 2, No. 3) from the Antiphon Pax eterna occurs with minor variations in the twelfth-century Sicilian troper E-Mn 289.76 The last melody in the Saint-Denis series (F:Pn, lat. I 107; Table 2, No. 26), whose source is not yet known,77 appears in two twelfth-century manuscripts: the French cantatorium F:RSc 265, and the antiphoner from Lucca I:Lc 603.78

From these concordances, we can conclude that at least twelve of the twenty-six melodies for the Benedicamus domino in the series from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille were known in other places in Europe. Not only geographically but temporally, too, the dispersion of several of these chants is striking. One of them, Preciosus, appears in

73 Also catalogued in Barclay i977, 1:61, melody no. 24, although the source of the tune is not given.

74 On the musico-liturgical role of Saint-Denis as the royal necropolis, see Walters [Robertson] 1984, o107-o9, 164-76.

75 Currently housed in the Bodleian Library; catalogued in Huglo 1982, 143, but without identification of the source of the Benedicamus.

76 Melody also listed Barclay 1977, 1:59 (no. 19), without the source of the melisma.

77Catalogued as no. 411 in Huglo 1982, 152. See above, n. 39. 78 See Huglo 1982, 154, for two other sources for this melody (no. 411): F:Pa

13762, and F:Pn, Musique, Reserve, 1750. Barclay 1977, i:88, catalogues it as melody no. 99 and provides only one modern concordance.




a source that reaches back to the eleventh-century beginnings of the notation of Benedicamus melodies, and several others were popular by the twelfth century. Clearly, the derivation of the Benedicamus from the melisma Flos filius, which Abbot Peter discussed in 1146, was neither innovatory nor a one-time occurrence. This process of borrowing was already standard when he applied it to Flos flius, and it encompassed other melismas as well.79 No doubt further sources for the twelve Benedicamus already mentioned and new concordances for the others will emerge as more collections of Benedicamus are explored. For the moment, however, these twelve Benedicamus do not account for all of the chants in the two extraordinary series from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille. Is it true that the remaining tunes were proper to the two abbeys?

VI

To respond to this question, we must turn to two other forms of medieval music: the responsory trope, and polyphony. A relationship exists between the Benedicamus at Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille and the responsory trope, because the parent melismas of some of the Benedicamus based on responsories also served as sources for responsory tropes. These concordances are found in the catalogue of responsory tropes compiled by Helma Hofmann-Brandt (197i). Table 4 shows that seven Benedicamus melismas from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille were known elsewhere as responsory tropes set with prosula texts.

Again, Clementiam and Flos flius (Example 2, Nos. 9 and i o) figure prominently in this list, as expected. But the presence of the melismas Quid te, Commenda, Alacriter, and Occumbere (Example 2, Nos. 4, 6, 8, and 18) attests the use of these tunes outside Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille, inasmuch as they have not yet been found as Benedicamus in other houses. Moreover, the number and diversity of concordances given by Hofmann-Brandt for the thirteen responsory tropes in Table 4 demonstrate the far-reaching influence of these familiar and no doubt pleasing melodies. Their dual role underscores the notion that the reuse of melismas in different guises was not only permissible throughout the middle ages, it was a highly desirable means of re-composition.80

79 Cf. Huglo's conservative view (1982, I 18-20) that "le cas du c6l6bre B.D. de Fulbert [flos filius] est probablement l'exemple le plus ancien d'un verset empruntant son neuma a une piece du grand office."

80 For other correspondences with the melismas that were sung as Benedicamus at Exeter, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Corneille, see Holman 1963, 42-44. Discussion of the movement of popular melismas from one responsory to another can be found in



TABLE 4

Correspondences between Melismas for Benedicamus and Responsory Tropes

Benedicamus Melisma from Responsory Trope (from Sources for Tropes (from Hofmann- Parent Saint-Denis (see Example 2) Hofmann-Brandt 197 ) Brandt 197 ) Responsory

4. Quid te 204. Facere quo duce F:Pn, lat. 12o44, fols. 6o-6ov, 61 Cornelius centurio 216. Factus sospes F:Pm 386, fols. 96-97

F:TO 159, fols. i8ov-8iv 549. Quid te maerore affligis Montblanch, Archivo de la Iglesia de

aegre Santa Maria (no number -

i3th-i 4th c. antiphoner) 6. Commenda 469. O rerum summo mulier F:AN ii2 (o4), fols.72v-73 O felix felicis

F:Pa 279, fols. 426v-27 F:R(m) 245, fols. 252-52v F:R(m) 251, fol. 136v Vend6me, Bibl. mun., 17 E, fols.

43 IV-32 8. Alacriter 586. Salute corporea F:Pn, lat. Io2o, fol. 2o2v Valerius igitur 9. Clementiam 123. Clementem te praebe Barcelona, Bibl. Central, M 662 Qui cum

rex E:Gm 19 audissent Montblanch, Archivo de la Iglesia de

Santa Maria (no number -

i3th-i4th c. antiphoner) Montblanch, Archivo de la Iglesia de

Santa Maria (no number - i5th c. antiphoner), fols. 149v-50

F:Pn, n.a.l. I5 35, fols. 5-5v 592. Sancte Nicolae reatus A:KN IoIo, fol. i

D:Mbs, Clm I2201c, fols. 68v-69 593. Sancte Nicolae tu nos I:CFm XLVII, fols.

i47v-48; 15 Iv

594- Sancte Nicolae tu vota D:W 522, fol. 130

46

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TABLE 4, continued

Benedicamus Melisma from Responsory Trope (from Sources for Tropes (from Hofmann- Parent Saint-Denis (see Example 2) Hofmann-Brandt 197 i) Brandt 197 i) Responsory

io. Flos filius 613. Sol iustitiae fecundans GB:Lbm, Egerton 2615, fol. 62 Styrps jesse, Ver.

Vlrgo dei 701. Unigenitus a deo CS:Pnm XII A 21 fols. 152V-53

CS:Pu U. B. IV H 12, fols. 18i-8iv Prague, knihovna vywehradskai, V C

6, fols. I62v-63 18. Occumbere 447. Omnia dura spernendo F:SQ 9, fol. 235v 19. Vernabantur 115. Christo regi nostro laus F:AUT S. 178, fols. 28-28v Christi miles

712. Vernabant nunc F:TO 149,

fols. 466v-67 supernorum

713. Vernabas roseo Vincenti F:B 66, fols. 344-44v CH:Fcu L. 61, fol. 227v CH:Fcu L. 322, fol. 255

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Neither Saint-Denis nor Saint-Corneille cultivated responsory prosulae to a great extent, but they did perform the untexted melismas within their original responsorial settings. In practical terms, it has been noted that the recycling of this material as music for the Benedicamus domino was a boon for those who executed the offices

daily. In terms of the evolution of the plainchant repertory, it bodes

something further, for there is an important functional distinction between any given Benedicamus melisma and a responsory prosula constructed on the same music. On the one hand, the Benedicamus occupies a position in the divine service that is entirely separate from its source, even though it imitates the parent chant closely in terms of music. The Benedicamus therefore illustrates both the freedom with which medieval liturgists turned part of a chant into an independent entity and the fact that these particular melismas were not considered to be bound to their original responsories.81 The responsory prosula, on the other hand, is connected most of the time to its melismatic source by liturgical placement, although the final examples of this genre grow musically freer of their models in the later stages of development. 82

The peripatetic Benedicamus melismas from Saint-Denis and Saint- Corneille turn up in one other musical guise: polyphony. As mentioned above, the tenors of some polyphonic compositions employ the melodies Flosfilius, Clementiam, and Balaam, which were likewise sung as Benedicamus in the two French abbeys.83 But these Benedicamus series

Stiblein 1949-51, cols. 81 1-16; Steiner 1970, Steiner 1973, Steiner 1979, Kelly 1974, and Arlt 1970, :

IO--15. 81 Holman 1963 holds the view that practically all responsory melismas are later

additions or tropes, while Steiner 1973 considers that many melismas were implanted in responsories when they were composed.

82 Kelly 1974, 47o, discusses the performance of the responsory prosulae at Exeter Cathedral, where the prosula is sung immediately after its responsory, alternating sections of the prosula with the corresponding portions of the untexted melisma (passage drawn from Dalton i909, 1:69). On the musical construction of responsory prosulae, see Kelly 1977, Steiner 1980, and the citations in the two preceding footnotes. For further references to the manner of execution of responsory prosulae, see Hofmann-Brandt 197I, 1:148-66.

83 Indeed, several of the responsories and alleluias that contain these and other melismas were "polyphonized" in the oldest extant repertory of polyphony from Winchester Cathedral, preserved in GB:Ccc 473 (inventory of manuscript in Reaney 1966, discussion of organa at Winchester in Holschneider 1968, and facsimiles in Frere I894): Responsories Vir inclitus (fols. I89v-9o), Benedicat nos (fol. 182), Hodie martyrum (fols. 177v-78), Benedicamuspatrem (fols. I82-82v); and AlleluiasJuravit (fol. 173), Posuisti (fol. 172v), Surrexit dominus (fol. 165). These are not, of course, polyphonic Benedicamus, but rather polyphonic responsories and alleluias. The melismas for two other Benedicamus melodies from Exeter, Judea mariam and the simple tone, are set as polyphonic Benedicamus. On Judea, see Barclay 1977, 1:39. The




include two melismas, previously unnoticed, which also functioned as tenors in polyphony. The Benedicamus Preciosus and Surrexit dominus are the same melodies that occur in the Notre Dame repertory as tenors for two- and three-voice organa and clausulae on the Responsory Preciosus (023) and Alleluia Surrexit dominus (MI 7), respectively.84 In addition, the tenor of the two-voice organum and clausula on Preciosus in the Florence manuscript is the source for the French motet He! mounier porrai je moudre.85

This identity of melismas, on the face of it, calls to mind Frank Harrison's suggestion that the Notre Dame clausulae might have been used as independent compositions either in the mass or, more important for this study, as Benedicamus substitutes in the office.86 In fact, a similar set of relationships exists for the melisma Flosfilius eius. Norman Smith has pointed out the tenor concordance between the monophonic Benedicamus Flos in the Exeter missal and the polyphonic settings in the Notre Dame sources of Benedicamus domino I, built on the tenor Flos (Smith 1964, 1:90-91). He combined this information with Friedrich Ludwig's discovery that the fifth clausula on this Benedicamus in the Florence manuscript is identical to the W2 clausulae

simple tone from Exeter is set polyphonically in the Notre Dame manuscripts F, fols. 89-89v (published in Dittmer 1966); W2, fol. 90 (Dittmer 1960). Ludwig 1964, 1/i :67, catalogues this melody as Benedicamus IV.

84 023 and M 17 taken from Ludwig's classification of the two-voice versions of these pieces, based on their appearance in the Magnus Liber (Ludwig 1964, 1/1:67 [023], 7' [MI7]). The Responsory Preciosus exists in F both in two voices (fols. 79v-8o) and in three voices (fols. 32v-3 3v), and in a two-voice clausula on the syllables -(O)osus in the fifth fascicle of F (fol. I68v). The Alleluia Surrexit dominus (et occurrens mulieribus) is preserved in two voices in F (fols. 111-12) and in Wi (Baxter 1931 , fols. 28v-29v [-32v-33v]); and in a two-voice clausula in the fifth fascicle of F (fols. I59v-60).

85 Edited in Tischler 1982, 2:Io78 (no. 175), 3:154; commentary and relevant bibliography in Tischler, 1985, 2:58, 83; 3/B:no. 175, and Gennrich 1957, 80 (no. 823). The motet is preserved in W2, fol. 232; and in the manuscript F:MO, H. 196, fol. 269v (ed. in Rokseth 1935-39)-

86 "If the 'replacement' theory of the function of the clausulae be rejected, it must follow that they were from their origin self-sufficient compositions, either descant sections detached from existing responds . .. or new pieces composed on the same and other neumae. As extraritual items, their performance during the Mass would have been permitted by a licence analogous to that which allowed Benedicamus substitutes at the end of the office... The clausulae on office responds form a comparatively small proportion of the clausula repertory, amounting to about sixty of the four hundred and sixty-two in the Florence manuscript. The neumae of these 'office' clausulae could have been derived either from the neumae of responds of the office, or from those Benedicamus melodies which had earlier been derived from the same neumae. The clausulae, and later the motets, whose tenors were taken from office responds were probably sung as Benedicamus substitutes on feasts to which they were appropriate" (Harrison 1963, 124-25, 127)-




on Eius and Sancto from the two-voice organal Responsory Styrpsjesse, Verse Virgo dei (Ludwig 1964, 1/1:67). Manfred Bukofzer likewise provides examples of certain clausulae on the text Benedicamus domino which conclude two conductus in F and WI.87 From this and similar evidence, Smith reasons: "it seems very likely that at least some of the exceptional clausulae examined thus far must have served some special purpose."88

To seek further corroboration of Harrison's theory in the melismas Preciosus and Surrexit dominus, however, presents a seemingly insur- mountable obstacle: in this case, none of the polyphonic Benedicamus domino in the Notre Dame repertory are based on either melisma. The two- and three-voice Benedicamus in the Magnus Liber, whose use was permitted by Parisian Bishop Odo of Sully in I I98,89 are set to only three melismas: Flos filius, Clementiam, and Quem queritis, and to a handful of simple tones.90 The relationships that Smith and Ludwig outlined for Flos filius are of course enhanced by the presence of actual polyphonic Benedicamus on Flosfilius. This link is not present between the monophonic Benedicamus on Preciosus and Surrexit at Saint-Denis

87 Bukofzer 1953, 65-78. See also his discussion of two clausulae on Benedicamus domino in the Saint-Victor manuscript which likewise appear in conductus; ibid., 83-88. On the Saint-Victor clausulae, see also Stenzl 1970, 33-34, 64-65, 74-75, 204-205 and 214. Falck 1981, 6-8, treats the twelve conductus in the Notre Dame repertory that end with Benedicamus domino. For further bibliography, see Anderson 1972 and 1975.

88 By "exceptional clausulae," Smith means the later ones with multiple tenor statements, not the earlier, shorter clausulae (1964, 1:81-92). The function of clausulae has elicited comment beyond the views of Harrison and Smith. Ludwig 1964, I/1:78-79, considered that they were strictly Ersatzkompositionen. Waite 1961, 147-52, likewise believed that they were used solely as replacement in organa. Sanders 1962, 281 (n. I5 ), proposed "that before long more and more of these pieces came to be written not for the church, but as a sort of clerical chamber music .. ." Stenzl 1970, 178-79, concludes that "the clausulae are none other than the multi-voice form of the written-out melismatic tropes" [translation mine], and that the newer clausulae might have functioned, as Harrison suggests, in the canon of the mass or as Benedicamus domino.

89 ,. .. I add that the responsory and the Benedicamus will be sung in triplum or quadruplum or organum; moreover the responsory will be sung by four subdeacons wearing silk copes" (". .. hoc addito quod responsorium et Benedicamus in triplo, vel quadruplo, vel organo poterunt decantari; alioquin a quatuor subdiaconis indutis capis sericis responsorium cantabitur"), Guerard 1850, 1:74.

90 See the discussion of the Benedicamus in the Notre Dame manuscripts in Barclay 1977, 1:353-530, and the convenient table that identifies the tenor of each setting on pp. 354-57. When the motet supplanted the clausula as the most current genre in the mid-thirteenth century, only the Benedicamus on Flosfilius (BD I) and Ckmentiam (BD VI) were used as motet sources. Baltzer (1985) has recently suggested that four motets in the Notre Dame manuscripts based on these Benedicamus settings might have served as Benedicamus substitutes in the liturgy of the cathedral (I thank Professor Baltzer for sharing the contents of this study with me before its publication.)




and Saint-Corneille, on the one hand, and the polyphonic responsory and alleluia at Notre Dame, built on these same melismas, on the other. There would have to be a substantially larger number of soloistic portions of the responsorial chants in the Magnus Liber appearing as monophonic Benedicamus outside Notre Dame, or perhaps instances of the words Benedicamus domino lying under or visibly erased from the beginnings of clausulae, before it would be reasonable to posit the presence of "hidden" Benedicamus at Notre Dame, contrafacted from responsories or alleluias or their clausulae.91 Nev- ertheless, the coincidence of the melismas Preciosus and Surrexit dominus as Benedicamus at Saint-Denis, Saint-Corneille, and in a number of other places with the polyphonic responsory and alleluia at Notre Dame once again establishes not only the existence of these tunes in various houses and at diverse times, but also their utility as

appealing foundations for different types of pieces. And the mere

suggestion of unwritten Benedicamus brings us back to the question of why the versicle appears so sporadically in musical manuscripts.

VII

Clearly, the Benedicamus was marked early on for a significant role in some of the most impressive moments of the daily ritual. At the same time, however, the monophonic settings of the chant are baffling, for the method of notating them does not begin to coalesce before the end of the thirteenth century, much later than the chants of the ordinary of the mass and the repertories of sequences.92 Even then, true collections of Benedicamus are both hard to find and wildly inconsistent in the degree and method of their preservation. As of now, only three thoroughly documented traditions can be cited: at Exeter, presumably representative of the whole Sarum Rite, and in the French Benedictine monasteries of Saint-Denis and Saint- Corneille. Indeed, without the survival of the three Benedicamus series from these establishments, there would be virtually no written musical record of them at all, since none of the remaining thirteen graduals and notated missals that have survived from these houses

91 I am indebted to Norman Smith and Craig Wright for their thoughts on the Benedicamus in the Notre Dame repertory.

92 Hughes 1982, 147 (Figure 7.6) graphically illustrates that while kyriales occur frequently in missals, Benedicamus chants are rarely contained in them. The presence of Benedicamus in his source NMi should be added, for this is the Exeter missal GB:Mr, lat. 24!




contain the versicle.93 These written-out collections argue persua- sively that not only the notation of the Benedicamus but also a sophisticated system of liturgical assignments were in place well before the middle of the thirteenth century, at least in these places. Why is there so little evidence elsewhere?

The first part of the answer probably rests in the very nature of the versicle. The Benedicamus never experienced the burgeoning of a sizable, newly created repertory that the sections of the ordinary of the mass and the sequences knew. Instead, the festal music for the chant grew largely through processes of extraction and retexting of renowned melismatic and sometimes of non-melismatic passages from several other chant forms: responsories, alleluias, antiphons, Kyries, and sequences. But this still does not solve the riddle of why there are relatively few written traces of these ornate tunes.

In fact, it was the actual performance of these Benedicamus that probably kept them alive. In broad terms, we have seen that the singer(s) would simply adapt the text of the Benedicamus to the model by replacing the original words with the succinct phrase Benedicamus domino. This was possible because those assigned to execute the versicle had already memorized the chant from which it was derived. Their task was made all the easier when the same person(s) who sang the Benedicamus also sang its parent source, as frequently occurred. Indeed, in the many instances where the chant was drawn from the choral portion of the model, the choir, too, could participate in this extemporaneous singing, for they already knew the music that was to be recycled as Deo gratias.

This is a synopsis of how the Benedicamus was performed, but the few surviving examples of these melodies reveal much more about the actual mechanics of the process. The creation of a Benedicamus by associating it with a preexisting model mirrors in many respects the kind of oral composition that Leo Treitler has outlined for the transmission of chant before the development of musical notation.94 In

9 Apart from F:Pn, lat. I107, only the Saint-Denis antiphoner F:Pn, lat. 17296 records music for six Benedicamus on fol. 171, as mentioned earlier. None of the four remaining graduals and notated missals from Saint-Denis from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries (F:Pm 384; F:Pn, lat. 9436; F:Pn, lat. 10505; GB:Lva 1346-1891) contains a single melody for the Benedicamus. The same is true of ten other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century missals and graduals that have survived from Saint-Corneille: F:Pn, lat. 16823; lat. 16824; lat. 16825; lat. 16826; lat. 16828; lat. 17318; lat. 17319; lat. 17321; lat. 17322; and F:AM i6i.

4 The main statement of this theory is found in Treitler 1974. Subsequent expansions of his ideas are given in many articles, particularly Treitler 1975, i981,




order to "compose" a Benedicamus, a soloist first had to recall the parent melody. He did this by "reconstructing" the model with the help of four main "signposts."95 The first signpost, the cue to the source of the Benedicamus, served as initial stimulus, as mentioned earlier. These cues, notated in the missals or buried in the instructions in ordinaries, specify, for example, Benedicamus ut Secundum ordinem (see Example 2, No. I). Secundum ordinem immediately brought to mind the first few notes of the melisma Secundum ordinem from the Alleluia Juravit. The soloist, thus prompted, then began to recompose this familiar tune, but with a different text: Benedicamus domino. His natural response was to set Be- of Benedicamus to the opening three-note neume (d-e-d), in the same way that he would have sung Se- of Secundum. He would then continue to place the next syllables -ne-di-ca-mus almost one-to-a-note, just as the corresponding syllables -cun-dum of Secundum fall. When he reached the do- of domino, which matches the text or- of ordinem, the second signpost would take over: the assonance between the old chant and the new words Benedicamus domino. For some thirty-three pitches, then, the vocalise on the vowel -o- was in fact the same, whether he was singing do-mino or or-dinem. This was quite an advantage, for it meant that the great majority of the Benedicamus Secundum ordinem had exactly the same o-sound as its parent source. The third signpost also came into play during the chanting of the melisma: the repetitive structure of the music (AAB), which served as a convenient point of reference for the improvising soloist.96 The fourth signpost, the points of articulation and phrasing of the parent melody, also helped lead him through the long melisma, just as they told him where to underlay the text -mino for the final cadence.

Obviously not all of the four signposts are evident in every one of the Benedicamus in Example 2. In general, however, when one is absent, the others fill the gap. In Alacriter (Example 2, No. 8), assonance is not possible, due to the sequence of vowels in the original text alacriter cucurrerunt, which do not match those in Benedicamus domino. In this case, the fourth signpost, articulation and phrasing, is the factor which determines where the break between Benedicamus and

1982, and 1984. The ensuing discussion borrows both from Treitler's ideas and from his vocabulary.

95Treitler applies the "reconstructive" theory of memory, first developed by Frederic Bartlett, to the transmission of plainchant; see Treitler 1974, 344ff., and 1975, I1-12.

96 The repeating form AAB is found in several other melismas: Commenda, Clementiam, Clemens, Vernabantur (AA'B), and Aromatibus (Example 2, Nos. 6, 9, 13, 19, and 24)-




domino comes. The melody has a clear medial cadence on a which the soloist would have remembered as an intermediate goal. It is here that his voice would naturally seek to end the word Benedicamus, since he would recall that this is also the point at which the first word of the model, alacriter, finishes. Whenever possible, however, the soloist seems to have relied most heavily on the second signpost, assonance. He never missed a chance to align domino with similar words in the parent sources: domui (Example 2, No. 3), domine (No. 14), domini (No. 15), dominus (No. 2 I). An especially telling case of assonance is seen in Occumbere (No. 18), where the lengthy melisma on do- matches exactly the one on oc-. The music for the previous word Benedicamus, meanwhile, was improvised through a kind of Vorimitation of the first five pitches of the subsequent syllable do- (oc- in the original chant).

Through this kind of dynamic, oral composition, it is easy to see why a goodly portion of the music for the ornate, monophonic Benedicamus would not require notation. And yet, this notion of "latter-day" oral composition is no mere vestige of the pre-notation era.97 Although the transmission of the Benedicamus seems to be similar to that which Treitler proposes for Gregorian chant, the material involved is fundamentally different. In the case of the unnotated Gregorian repertoire of the pre-ninth century, Treitler considers that "the basis of an oral composition is a framework that is described in terms of two kinds of elements: themes and formulas. . ."(1974, 355). He defines "formulas" as "standard passages" that operate within a "formulaic system," which is "the system of constraints of a melody or a phrase" (i974, 352). Further on, Treitler explores the relationship between "formulaic system" and melodic model (1974, 360):

A formulaic system can be transmitted only through melodies, but that is not to say that the singer can assimilate it only as melody. He learns one melody and he imitates its pattern in inventing another like it. At some point his inventions do not refer back to the models of concrete melodies but are based on his internalized sense of pattern.

Certainly, there are "formulas" that recur from one Benedicamus to another, but these are secondary to the material of the model melodies themselves. This is the case because the melismas which form the Benedicamus are in fact borrowed directly from the parent sources and

97 For Treitler, the notion of oral composition "is meant to apply only through the eighth century at the latest for the Gregorian tradition;" Treitler 1974, 372, and 1975, 14 (n. 27).




given new life as independent chants. 98 Generally, these melismas are

longer than Treitler's "formulas," and their connection with the model is more critical, probably because the parent melody, by the thirteenth century, was to a certain degree fixed through its existence in notated form. Consequently, while the soloist for the Benedicamus was not governed by a "formulaic system" per se, he did reconstruct the parent melisma from the sum of its parts, piecing the model together in relatively large "blocks" that he remembered with the assistance of the signposts. The degree of fidelity of these "blocks" of Benedicamus to the original chant was determined in the very act of creating them, but there was a sense of referring back to the actual model that probably did not exist in the earlier era when neither the model nor the newly composed chant were written. The performance of the Benedicamus was spontaneous, but it was a step closer to the "literate" musical tradition that gradually took hold as written processes began to prevail in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries."

What use was' this kind of oral composition in the thirteenth century? In other words, why not write the Benedicamus down, when the means to do so was readily available? Three answers come to mind. The training of young singers emphasized the role of memory, and this role is in keeping with the performance practice of the Benedicamus melodies that has been described. In addition, scribes virtually never wrote out anything that could be found elsewhere in a book; they preferred rather to refer to the material in the one place where it was notated.100 This kind of painstaking economy was evident in the production of manuscripts of music throughout the middle ages. Finally, the existence of unnotated Benedicamus supports the commonly held idea that a degree of spontaneity characterized the performance of the medieval liturgy.

98 I differentiate here between the Benedicamus melisma and the better known "wandering melisma." The latter is an internal passage which can move from one chant to another within a single genre, or even between two or more genres (see the bibliography in n. 80 above). The Benedicamus melisma, on the other hand, is a separate entity, removed from its source both by liturgical placement, as shown earlier, and by the fact that it can stand as a closed form. As such, its nearest "relative" is the responsory trope, which, however, remains connected to its source to a much greater degree.

99 See the discussion of musical "literacy" in Treitler I98i. '00 The existence of a commune sanctorum at the end or in the middle of a

manuscript is testimony of this economy. Here the musical and textual material for the veneration of any number of saints was organized into collections for those who were martyrs, confessors, and the like. The formularies for these saints in the body of the manuscript did not repeat these texts and music; rather, they contained cues such as quere in commune.




If the musical vestiges are not plentiful, the non-musical traces of this unwritten tradition are more abundant, and these lie hidden under other cloaks. Ordinaries and customaries, for instance, lend

strong credence to the assumption that the Benedicamus domino did not need to be notated in manuscripts. As previously shown, the ordinaries from Saint-Denis and Saint-Corneille, when assigning a melody for a Benedicamus, use rubrics such as Benedicamus ut Preciosus.101 Other chants are designated without the word ut, for example, the responsory at vespers is the Responsorium Preciosus.'02 The presence of ut in the case of the Benedicamus implies that the piece might not be found in written-out form. Similar verbiage in the Black Book of Lincoln Cathedral uses the word sicut: "Et [Benedicamus] cantatur eodem modo sicut In perhenni seculorum tempore."'03 Similarly, the Sarum missal employs the word super: "Et cantus hujus versus Balaam dicatur super Benedicamus cum Alleluya ad utrasque vesperas et ad matutinas secundum usum Sarum Ecclesiae."104 Those who turned to the ordinary just before vespers were thus directed to perform the Benedicamus "as," or "like," or "on" a portion of a responsory, an alleluia, or some other form of chant.

The thirteenth-century Sarum ordinary likewise suggests that the Benedicamus was expected to be performed ad hoc. This book records music for only two Benedicamus melodies: the simple tone for feasts of three lessons and simplex feasts, and a Benedicamus with alleluia for Easter season.'05 Nowhere does this book preserve melodies for duplex festivals, though it does give detailed information on how to borrow Benedicamus melodies from responsories on these occasions. 106

10' F:Pm 526, fol. 183v; F:Pn, lat. 976, fol. 136v; Paris, Archives nationales, L 863, no. 10, fol. I25v.

102 F:Pm 526, fol. i83; F: Pn, lat. 976, fol. 136v. 103 Bradshaw and Wordsworth 1892, 1:369. See n. 63 for a translation of this

passage and for references to two identical uses of the word sicut in relation to the melodies for the Benedicamus.

1o "And the melody for this verse Balaam is sung on the Benedicamus with Alleluya at both vespers services and matins according to the usage of the Sarum church" (Dickinson [1861-83] 1969, cols. 85-86).

05o Frere 1898, 1:275. See the specific instructions for the use of these two melodies on pp. 254-55.

1o6 One final rubric may also be pertinent. The twelfth-century troper from the cathedral of Laon, F:LA 263, preserves the following directive: "We sing as many Benedicamus as everybody knows" ("Tot benedicamus quod novit quisque canamus," fol. 141v). This instruction occurs at the end of some material for compline, far removed from the only Benedicamus in the manuscript on fol. 131, which was discussed above (p. 40). It seems to imply that the Benedicamus is omitted from the troper because there was no need to write down something that was known to all. But it is unclear whether the rubric refers to troped or to untroped Benedicamus. The one




If soloists could sing the Benedicamus without reading from a book, why, then, do the fully rubricated series from Exeter, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Corneille exist? The answer probably lies in the nature and purpose of the three sources. The manuscripts from Exeter and Saint-Denis are notated missals, books which Andrew Hughes has suggested stood as "complete, final, reference or master copies from which all questions may be answered and from which standardized rites could be copied" (1982, 123). The gradual from Saint-Corneille, too, is like a reference in its scrupulous adherence to the Saint-Denis rite. These three thirteenth-century books, then, as well as the few others that may come to light, are singular in their elaborate and careful preservation of the full Benedicamus series. They record the entire range of possible melodies for their respective houses, perhaps in an attempt to fix in writing how the Benedicamus was being composed orally, just on the eve of the gradual abandonment of the practice.'07 Sources from other establishments-and even the remaining extant books from Exeter, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Corneille- tended not to write down all, if any, of the tunes they might have sung. It was simply understood, or it was prescribed in their ordinaries and customaries, that chants for the Benedicamus were to be shaped from other material.

I have suggested that much of the repertory of festive melodies for the monophonic Benedicamus that were drawn from other sources were created ex tempore from preexisting material. They could, in fact, be performed spontaneously through underlay of the words Benedicamus domino, so that the notation of concrete Benedicamus artifacts, based on the melismas of responsories, alleluias, and other monophonic forms, was virtually optional at least until the end of the thirteenth century, after which time written out collections of Benedicamus appear more frequently. A number of allusions to the unwritten tradition are

Benedicamus in this source, as mentioned earlier, is untroped and is built on the melody Balaam. Moreover, its rubric is similar to the one given here. On the other hand, F:LA 263 is a troper, and so the reference could be to some popular Benedicamus poems.

107 The earlier twelfth-century record of Benedicamus at Saint-Denis in F:Pn, lat. 17296 (Figure 2), on the other hand, is a truer witness of the actual fluidity of the oral tradition, as the two variant readings of one and the same melody, Alacriter (see n. 45 above), illustrate. Hucke (i98o, 466) has cited a precedent for this notion of writing down a tradition in order to preserve it in his discussion of the reasons for recording Old Roman chant in the eleventh century.




embedded in ordinaries and customaries, and further traces are evident in the general disorganization of collections of Benedicamus up until the very end of the middle ages.

But where they are notated, these Benedicamus attest the existence of a repertory of melismas that was even more diverse, more widespread, and more multifunctional than we have imagined. On a broader scale, the use of chant segments as Benedicamus is at least directly analogous to their function as tenors in multi-voice compositions and as responsory tropes. That these passages for Benedicamus, responsory trope, and tenor in polyphony were identical in a growing number of instances is more than mere happenstance; it underscores the principle that renowned fragments of chant could move with ease from one genre to another, independent of what are presumably their original surroundings. Certainly these monophonic Benedicamus are archetypical of these processes, an ingenious use-and reuse-of music in the middle ages.

The University of Chicago

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ABSTRACT

This inquiry into the monophonic Benedicamus explores: i) the performance practice of the chant; 2) a thirteenth-century collection of twenty-six melodies for the Benedicamus; 3) the liturgical placement of the versicle; and 4) the dissemination of certain Benedicamus melodies. The article advances the thesis that the performance practice of the Benedicamus accounts on the one hand for its prestige in the liturgy and on the other hand for the fact that the monophonic Benedicamus built on preexisting material could be improvised without the aid of notated sources. It argues that certain melodies for the Benedicamus were more widely disseminated than has previously been sup- posed, and that these chants are interconnected with other musical forms: responsory tropes and polyphonic responsories, alleluias, and motets. The melodies examined represent both the end of the early era of monophonic Benedicamus, a tradition which was often unnotated, and the beginning of a later practice of writing out the collections of the chant.

