7 - The Understanding of the Genre in the Earliest Notated Witnesses: The Evidence of the Second-Mode Tracts Composed by c. 900

Summary

The earliest surviving notated examples of the core-repertory second-mode tracts date from the late-ninth century. It might be argued that the melodies of these chants in the first surviving sources do not accurately reflect their original state, instead being fundamentally affected by the technology of writing. Were this so, one would expect all second-mode tracts in the early sources to share similar traits, characteristic of a written tradition. Four non-core-repertory second-mode tracts appear in one or more of the notated sources dating from before c. 920. Their melodic state provides valuable evidence about the ninth-century understanding of the genre. If notating the core-repertory second-mode tracts affected their melodic shape, then Confitemini, Tu es petrus, Audi filia, and Diffusa est gratia, composed close to or at the time when notation of the Mass Proper chants was becoming widespread, would be expected to use similar compositional procedures, demonstrating the same concern for textual grammar and rhetorical expression, and using the same musical grammar. My focus here is on the earliest state of these four non-core-repertory tracts, and I have not generally considered their transmission history beyond the tenth century.

The set of chants in Table 22 comprises chants appearing for the first time in ninth- or tenth-century manuscripts. While any of the chants first appearing in Fle1, Lei or All1 might be as old as those appearing in the manuscripts dated to c. 900, it is impossible to confirm this and I have therefore largely discounted them here, since my focus is on the understanding of the genre at the time of its earliest extant notation, not on the understanding of the genre after it had been regularly notated for half a century or more. While a notated incipit for Gaude maria appears in the margin of Ext2, thus placing this chant within the earlier substratum as well, the text stops after the second word, ‘maria’, and there is no notation after the first word, confirming only that the chant is a second-mode tract beginning with phrase 0b. I have therefore not considered this chant further. Within the earliest notated manuscripts, several non-core-repertory second-mode tracts appear as considerably later additions which are irrelevant to this study.