43

CHAPTER TWO: MODAL THEORY IN THE CANTUS TRADITION

§2.1 The scale-based concept of mode in the Latin West

Musicians of recent centuries have been taught from childhood to identify modes as

octave-spanning scales on the white keys of the piano: the Dorian beginning on D, the Phrygian

on E, and so on. This pedagogical habit stems from a view of modes as archaic predecessors of

major and minor keys, a view first expounded late in the seventeenth century.1 It oversimplifies

and in other ways distorts a theory of mode introduced by the Swiss humanist Heinrich Glarean

(1488–1563) and popularized by the Italian theorist and composer Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–

1590),2 itself an attempt at refining a doctrine established by Marchetto of Padua in the early part

of the fourteenth century.3 Marchetto, in turn, bases his modal theory on that of Berno of

Reichenau (d. 1048), who constructs from species of diatessaron (perfect fourth) and species of

diapente (perfect fifth) the seven species of diapason (perfect octave) that a contributor to the

multilayered Alia musica (Another Music-Treatise) derives—sometime after Hucbald, whose

1
Joel Lester, Between Modes and Keys: German Theory 1592–1802 (Stuyvesant, NY:
Pendragon Press, 1992), 86–90, 94–5, 111–17, 125–6. Historical developments summarized in
this introduction receive further examination later in this chapter and in Chapter Four.
2
Glareani ΔΩΔΕΚΑΧΟΡΔΟΝ (Basel, 1547); Henricus Glareanus, Dodecachordon: A Facsimile
of the 1547 Basel Edition. Monuments of Music and Music Literature in Facsimile, Second
Series – Music Literature LXV (New York: Broude Brothers, 1967); Heinrich Glarean,
Dodecachordon, translation, transcription and commentary by Clement A. Miller. 2 vols.
Musical Studies and Documents 6 (American Institute of Musicology, 1965); Gioseffo Zarlino,
Le Institutioni Harmoniche (Venice, 1558), Part IV translated by Vered Cohen as On the Modes,
edited with an introduction by Claude V. Palisca. Music Theory Translation Series 7 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Harold S. Powers et al., “Mode” in Grove Music Online,
§III/4/ii–iii.
3
Marchetto, Lucidarium in arte musice plane (1317); Jan W. Herlinger, The Lucidarium of
Marchetto of Padua: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary (University of Chicago
Press, 1985); Powers et al., “Mode” §II/4/ii.
 44

tone system that anonymous writer uses—from descriptions of ancient Greek lyre-tunings (tonoi)

transmitted to the Latin West via the De institutione musica of Boethius.4

This treatise of Boethius had influence on medieval music theory comparable to that of

his logical works on the discipline of dialectic.5 To the limited extent that the De institutione

musica treats scales and modes, however, these are of ancient Greek instrumental music, not of

Christian liturgical chant.6 Until the beginning of the ninth century, furthermore, by which time

the Gregorian repertoire was already established and its melodies for the most part fixed, the De

institutione musica had fallen into “virtual oblivion.”7 Thus although the identification of ancient

Greek tonoi with octave species is certainly ancient, the association of those with the modes of

plainchant is more recent, and spun off from an earlier and altogether different approach that was

established with the Gregorian repertoire around the time of Charlemagne. It was not until

several generations later, perhaps a hundred years or more, that Alia musica first draped the

scales of ancient Greek tonoi over one of the two diatonic systems that Hucbald had meanwhile

adapted from Boethius—draped them upside down, in fact—and equated the results with the

4
Charles M. Atkinson, The Critical Nexus: Tone-System, Mode, and Notation in Early Medieval
Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 171–201 (Alia musica), 202–11 (Berno’s
species theory); T.J.H. McCarthy, Music, Scholasticism and Reform: Salian Germany, 1024–
1125 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), 18–23 (biography of Berno), 64–65 (his
species theory); David E. Cohen, “Notes, scales, and modes in the earlier Middle Ages,” in The
Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 331–38 (Alia musica), 351–55 (Berno and Marchetto);
Powers et al., “Mode” §II/3/ii (Alia musica), §II/4/ii (Marchetto).
5
Calvin Bower, “Boethius,” Grove Music Online, (accessed November 27, 2013); John
Marenbon, “Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/boethius/#8 (accessed November 27, 2013).
6
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Fundamentals of Music. Translated, with Introduction
and Notes by Calvin M. Bower, edited by Claude C. Palisca. Music Theory Translation Series
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), xxxiv, 148–61.
7
Bower, “Boethius.”
 45

eight modes by then already traditional in Gregorian theory and practice.8 Before this conflation

of old and new modalities sometime between 885 (the earliest likely date for Hucbald’s treatise)

and 1036 (the latest for Berno’s), Latin authors did not describe, define, or illustrate the modes of

plainchant in terms of octave-spanning scales.

Hucbald, for example, ascribes to the modes neither scale-pattern nor octave. He does

show the range of possible phrase-beginnings and phrase-endings for authentic modes and their

related plagals, which for modes 1–6 do fill the space of an octave around their finals, but for

modes 7–8 Hucbald shows possibilities ranging over the space of a ninth, from high d to low C.9

He also states that every mode makes use of the synemmenon tetrachord of his tone system,10

which is to say in somewhat later terms that every mode admits b as well as ♮, thus rendering

octave species beyond the pale.

The “white-key” approach, the seventeenth-century view it perpetuates, and the theories

of Glarean, Marchetto, and Berno which led to it, all proceed from the equation of mode with

scale: they describe and define mode as an arrangement of tones and semitones throughout the

space of an octave. Such a concept of mode corresponds poorly with the actual melodic behavior

of the Gregorian repertoire, however, as seen in Chapter One with the Antiphon Missus est

8
Jacques Chailley, Alia Musica (Traité de musique du IXe siècle). Édition critique commentée
avec un introduction sur l’origine de la nomenclature modale pseudo-grecque ad Moyen-Âge
(Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire et Société d'édition d'enseignement supérieur
réunis, 1965); Henri Potiron, “Théoriciens de la modalité,” Etudes grégoriennes VIII (1967): 29–
37, 34–36; “La définition des modes liturgiques,” Etudes grégoriennes VIII (1967): 41–46, 42;
Hiley, Western Plainchant, 461–63; Edward Gollin, “From Tonoi to Modi: A Transformational
Perspective,” Music Theory Spectrum Volume XXVI, No. 1 (Spring 2004): 119–129.
9
Yves Chartier, ed. and trans., L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald de Saint-Amand. Les Compositions
et le traité de musique, Cahiers d’études médiévales (Cahier spécial no. 5), (Montreal: Éditions
Bellarmin, 1995), 202–13; cf. Warren Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three
Medieval Treatises edited, with introduction, by Claude V. Palisca. Music Theory Translation
Series III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 39–44.
10
Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 182; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 31.
 46

gabriel, for example. This patent discrepancy between accepted theory and documented practice

has encouraged a recent trend in academic scholarship to regard mode itself as a pious fiction,

“the Church’s one and only purely musical dogma.”11 Even writers who are friendly toward a

view of mode as an objective phenomenon of music, rather than mere social myth, seem

unwilling or unable to shake off this orientation toward octave-spanning scales.12 But just as no

one subscribed to a scalar paradigm of Gregorian mode before its introduction in the Alia

musica, many did not adhere to it afterwards either. This chapter recovers the history, doctrine,

epistemology, and pedagogical method of the alternative tradition in which mode is conceived

not as a type of scale but as a type of melody.13 This provides not only historical justification for

the structural analysis proposed in later chapters, but also some of its basic concepts and tools.

§2.2 Rival theoretical traditions

David E. Cohen identifies two distinct strands of music theory in the Latin West, the

cantus tradition and the harmonics tradition: the Gregorian repertoire and the “system of eight

‘tones’ or ‘modes’ used by the church to classify and organize those melodies” are the basis of

the cantus tradition, whereas the harmonics tradition proceeds from “concepts, constructions, and

11
Harold S. Powers, “Modal Representation in Polyphonic Offertories,” Early Music History 2
(1982): 43–86, 44; see also his “Tonal Types and Modal Categories in Renaissance Polyphony,”
JAMS vol. 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 428–70; also his “Is Mode Real? Pietro Aron, the octenary
system, and polyphony,” Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis 16 (1992), 9–52; also
Terence Bailey, “Modes and Myth,” Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario 1
(1976): 43–54.
12
For example John Caldwell, “Modes and modality: a unifying concept for Western chant?” in
Music in Medieval Europe: Studies in Honour of Bryan Gillingham, edited by Terence Bailey
and Alma Santosuosso (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 39: “It is the thesis of this essay that the
eight-mode system is inherent in the structure of the octave in the form of two disjunct
tetrachords of the form TST.”
13
Cf. Powers et al., “Mode” §I/3.
 47

procedures of analysis adapted from ancient Greek harmonics.”14 Cohen and others trace efforts

of medieval theorists to integrate these two,15 yet the evidence is strong that in the treatment of

mode they remain opposed into the Renaissance and beyond. Frans Wiering documents a

division extending into the seventeenth century between practicing church musicians who favor

the term tonus for mode defined in reference to the melodic function of the modal final, and

speculative theorists who employ the term modus for mode defined as octave species.16 This

longstanding correspondence of profession, definition, and terminology indicates the persistence

in later centuries of the rival traditions that Cohen observes in their infancy and adolescence.

Regarding gamut and notation a broad consensus may have been achieved shortly after the turn

of the second millennium, but the synthesis of cantus and harmonics traditions never brought

into accord fundamental differences in their respective approaches to the question of mode.

The terms ‘cantus’ and ‘harmonics’ might seem to replicate the bounds of ‘kirchlich-

abendländisch’ and ‘pseudoklassisch’ introduced by Rudolf Steglich in 1911, employed notably

by Bernhard Meier, and translated into English by Ellen Beebe as ‘western ecclesiastical’ and

‘pseudoclassical’ in reference to “systems” of modality.17 Cohen’s terms have certain

advantages, however. First of all, the cantus approach is and always was available to those not in

Holy Orders, although it does assume a familiarity with the repertoire of Mass and Office. Nor

was it a rejection of things ecclesiastical for a monastic such as Guido of Arezzo to incorporate

elements of harmonic theory (the monochord, for example) in his musical doctrine and

14
Cohen, “Notes, scales, and modes,” 308; cf. Atkinson, The Critical Nexus, 168.
15
Cohen, “Notes, scales, and modes,” 339–54; Powers et al., “Mode” §II/2–3.
16
Frans Wiering, “Internal and External Views of the Modes,” in Tonal Structures in Early
Music, edited by Cristle Collins Judd. Criticism and Analysis of Early Music, volume 1 (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 91–93; Wiering, The Language of the Modes: Studies in the
History of Polyphonic Modality (New York: Routledge, 2001), 69–101.
17
Bernhard Meier, The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony [Die Tonarten der klassischen
Vokalpolyphonie, 1974] trans. Ellen S. Beebe (New York: Broude Brothers, 1988), 36 fn.
 48

pedagogical practice; many theorists participate in both cantus and harmonics traditions. The

aspect of the harmonics tradition most strictly pseudo is the jumbled-up assignment of the

Hellenistic names Dorian, Hypodorian, Phrygian, etc. for species of octave, our legacy from

authors of the Alia musica misreading Boethius.18 Yet cantus-based discussions sometimes

employ these familiar names—although Guido, for one, never does—nor are they necessarily

present in harmonics-based teaching.

Steglich identifies fixed systems by institutional status, whereas Cohen identifies

evolving traditions not according to the habits their practitioners might wear but by their habits

of thought. And whereas ‘pseudo-classical’ suggests a lack of authenticity, Cohen’s terms

‘cantus’ and ‘harmonics’ identify the central principle of each tradition without devaluing the

other. Joseph Smits van Waesberghe’s earlier opposition of a monastic cantus tradition with a

quadrivial tradition of musica has historical validity to the extent that the latter term often

signifies the mathematics-based philosophical discipline wholly separate from the art of

performance.19 For Guido, on the other hand, the true master of musica is knowledgeable not

only in harmonic theory but in cantus as well.20

Wiering calls the harmonics-tradition view of the modes ‘internal’ because it takes into

account “musical development,” and the cantus-tradition view ‘external’ in that it posits an

18
Potiron, “Théoriciens de la modalité,” 34–36; Gollin, “From Tonoi to Modi”; Cohen, “Notes,
scales, and modes,” 331–338.
19
Joseph Smits van Waesberghe, Muzikerziehung: Lehre und Theorie der Musik im Mittelalter,
Musikgeschichte in Bildern, III/3 (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1969), 8–12;
referenced in Calvin M. Bower, Review of Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three Medieval
Treatises, translated by Warren Babb; edited, with introduction, by Claude V. Palisca. Music
Theory Translation Series III. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. JAMS vol. 35, no. 1
(Spring 1982): 157–67, 160.
20
See Dolores Pesce, “Guido d’Arezzo, Ut queant laxis, and Musical Understanding,” in Music
Education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Russell E. Murray, Jr., Susan Forscher
Weiss, and Cynthia J. Cyrus (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010),
25–36.
 49

absolute function for the modal final.21 This study argues for the opposite conclusion: that

harmonics-tradition measurements of mode reflect features of Gregorian melody that are

primarily accidental and external, whereas cantus theory is attuned—however often more

intuitively than rationally—to its internal structural process.

That being said, and inasmuch as developments within the cantus tradition do result in a

“western ecclesiastical system” by the end of the eleventh century, Wiering summarizes it

admirably: “The connection of modes and scales is rather weak, but the existence of two pitches

with a particular function in each mode, the final and the reciting note, is fundamental.”22

§2.3 Melodic prototypes and modal qualities of the oktōēchos

The cantus tradition illustrates, describes, and defines mode not as a kind of scale but as a

kind of melody. Its characteristic document is the tonary, the earliest known of which dates to the

end of the eighth century.23 Most tonaries preface each of the eight principal divisions of

Gregorian repertoire—each of the eight modes—with a brief melody or two, the primary

function of which is not liturgical but pedagogical. These compositions do not appear in the

earliest-surviving tonary-fragment, so it remains unclear whether they entered Western tradition

with the eight-mode system before A.D. 800, or whether they were adopted sometime

afterward.24 Beginning in the ninth century, however, such melodies become commonplace in

surviving tonaries and other documents of the cantus tradition. Their meaning and function have

21
Wiering, “Internal and External Views,” 90; The Language of the Modes, 71.
22
Wiering, The Language of the Modes, 5.
23
Michel Huglo, Les tonaires: Inventaire, analyse, comparaison. Publication de la Société
française de musicologie, Ser. III, Vol. II (Paris: Heugel, 1971), 26–29. This earliest tonary
classifies chants for the Mass, further evidence that the eight modes were more than a practical
system for matching Office antiphons with recitation-tones; see also §1.3 above.
24
Terence Bailey, The Intonation Formulas of Western Chant (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1974), 7–8.
 50

long puzzled modern scholars. Sometimes called “intonation formulas,” sometimes “type-

melodies,” they are, it shall be argued here, not only typical melodies in the modes but melodic

prototypes of the modes.

The paradigmatic antiphons that begin to appear in western sources in the ninth century

have non-latinate vocables for texts, such as “Noanoeane” for Mode 1 and “Noeagis” for Mode

2. Aurelian says he asked a Greek to translate these into Latin; his informant replied that among

his people they were considered untranslatable cries of joy: upon further reflection the Greek

added that “In our language they are perceived as similar to what those driving [animals at] the

plough, or otherwise what those running messages and calling out a make-way, are wont to let

out”—but only their cheerful varieties—and also that they were perceived to “contain within

them the modulatio of the modes.”25

Aurelian would not have to travel far to find a Greek speaker to consult: visitors from the

Eastern Empire were plentiful and influential in his post-Carolingian milieu. Modern scholars

agree with Aurelian’s sense that these melodies were adapted from Byzantine practice, although

the Byzantine manuscript tradition does not bear witness to them until some centuries later.26

Thus Aurelian’s treatise and the treatises attached to the Metz tonary are the earliest extant

25
“Etenim quendam interrogavi Grecum: ‘In Latina quid interpretarentur lingua?’ Respondit se
nihil interpretari sed esse apud eos letantis adverbia… Memoratus denique adiuncxit Grecus
huiusmodi, inquiens: Nostra in lingua videntur habere consimilitudinem qualem arantes sive
angarias minantes exprimere solent, excepto quod haec letantis tantummodo sit vox nihilque
aliud exprimentis; estque tonorum in se continens modulationem.” Aureliani Reomensis Musica
Disciplina, ed. Lawrence Gushee (CSM 21, 1975), 84; translation mine, cf. Joseph Ponte,
Aurelian of Reóme: The Discipline of Music (Musica Disciplina) Colorado College Music Press
Translations 3 (Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music Press, 1968), 25; cf. also Bailey, The
Intonation Formulas, 20. On modulatio see §1.3 above.
26
Bailey, The Intonation Formulas, 13.
 51

evidence of these melodies in any tradition, Eastern or Western.27 Example 2.1 reproduces

Terence Bailey’s comparison of later Byzantine formulas (ēchēmata) in the left-hand column

with Western formulas transcribed in the right-hand column, the latter from the Commemoratio

brevis de tonis et psalmis modulandis (Brief Remembrance on Modes and Psalms Melodic).28

This anonymous monastic treatise, dating from the end of the ninth century or beginning of the

tenth, is the earliest to record the eight Noanoeane in pitch-specific notation. As in a tonary, the

Commemoratio brevis places each of these as the first example for its respective mode.29

27
Bailey, The Intonation Formulas, 5, 7; Walther Lipphardt, Der Karolingische Tonar von Metz
(Münster Westfalen: Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen 43, 1965), 12–13, 21,
32–33, 36, 40–42, 49, 62. The entire manuscript containing the Metz tonary is now online at
http://bm.mairie-metz.fr/clientbookline/Mediatheque/oeb/ms351/index.htm; material relating to
the tonary begins on the page indexed there as 134.
28
Terence Bailey, Commemoratio brevis de tonis et psalmis modulandis, Introduction, Critical
Edition, Translation (Ottowa: University of Ottowa Press, 1979); Hans Schmid, ed. Musica et
scolica enchiriadis una cum aliquibus tractatulis adiunctis (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981), 157–178.
29
Bailey, Commemoratio brevis, 30–45; Schmid, Musica et scolica, 158–162.
 52

Example 2.1 Byzantine Intonation Formulas and Western Melodic Prototypes30

Important distinctions are to be observed between the Western melodies and their

Byzantine counterparts. Each Byzantine formula begins on a different note of the D-to-d octave,

and each returns to that same starting-note at the end (Plagios Protos D, Plagios Deuteros E,

Barys F, Plagios Tetrardos G, Protos a, Deuteros ♮, Tritos c, Tetrardos d). Thus the Byzantine

melodies match well the description “intonation formula,” for each prepares a beginning note in

30
Bailey, The Intonation Formulas, 12.
 53

its intervallic context. The Commemoratio brevis melodies, on the other hand, begin with the

corresponding notes of the Byzantine formulas but do not necessarily end there; the Western

antiphons end on the modal final. Furthermore, each emphasizes the melodic tone that functions

as tenor in the recitation tones of its mode, whether as first note (Modes 1, 5, and 7), as highest

note (Modes 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8) or with a widening of the vowel creating what I call a timbral

accent: the modern trumpeter imitates this effect with the onomatopoetically named wah-wah

mute (Modes 2 and 3: “e” to “a”; Modes 4, 7, and 8: “no” to “e”). The Western formulas do

more than suggest the proper intonation to begin singing: they demonstrate where and how each

mode sustains its own particular voice, where it falls to rest, and how it proceeds toward that

ultimate goal.

These are the modes in a nutshell.

For not only are these Western formulas so concise that each completes its modal trek to

the final in a single phrase, not only do they stand as the core text of early cantus-tradition modal

pedagogy, and not only are they meant in that tradition to represent the modes in the heart of the

student, they also describe melodic motion within a tightly circumscribed modal nucleus.31 These

melodies of the Commemoratio brevis vary in intervallic range from a mere third, in the formula

for Mode 6, to a sixth for that of modes 3 and 5; none spans the octave. Even within this melodic

core some notes are skipped over (F in Mode 3, b/♮ in Mode 7), suggesting a pentatonic rather

than diatonic basis for the modes thus demonstrated.32

The syllables are also closely circumscribed. The western formulas begin consistently

with “No-,” rarely “Na-” and occasionally “A(n)”; the latter is employed consistently as

31
See Dolores Pesce, The Affinities and Medieval Transposition (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1987), 5 et passim; also Jacques Chailley, “Du pentatonisme à
l’octoéchos,” Études grégoriennes XIX (1980), 165–84.
32
See Chailley, “Du pentatonisme.”
 54

penultimate, often prefaced by “(n)o-(n)e,” and usually moving in authentic modes to the final

syllable “ne.” For the plagal modes the vowel of the final syllable is usually “i” sometimes

preceded by “g” and sometimes followed by “s”; these consonants appear in no other position.

“N” appears anywhere but the close. Vowels are a, e, i (sometimes spelled y), and o; diphthongs

are not employed.33 These vocable patterns may be seen as a step towards solmization, but

solmization they are not. They help the melodic prototypes isolate the eight species of Gregorian

melody from their normal liturgical and text-bearing functions, but they do not abstract

individual notes from within that melodic flow. Rather than analyzing mode into constituent

parts, these melodies encapsulate the basic shape of the whole.

Variation within the manuscript record testifies to the character and function of these

melodies as holistic modal prototypes. Example 2.2 reproduces Bailey’s comparative edition of

the Mode-8 formula, eleven variants for an antiphon of only four to nine notes.34 As a group,

these have little in common in terms of individual melodic motions, and in terms of the gamut,

not a single pitch. All are circumscribed within a diatessaron (perfect fourth), which in most

cases reaches down from c to G, but in Variant 3 this span is from F to C. Most versions begin

on the lowest note of this limited range, but Variant 9 begins on the step above, and Variant 11

starts at the top of the span. Some versions fill the space between these two notes with deuterus ♮

or E at the ditone (major third) over the final, whereas others leave that space empty. No

immediate motion is common to all eleven variants except the whole-tone descent to the final.

33
Bailey, The Intonation Formulas, 48–57.
34
Bailey, The ntonation Formulas, 57; see 91–95 for sources of variants 1–10 and their dating
([late ninth or] tenth to eleventh century); 28 for the twelfth-century source of variant 11.
 55

Example 2.2 Variants of the Mode-8 “Noeagi(s)”35

35
Bailey, The Intonation Formulas, 57.
 56

Yet for all their variation in surface detail, these are remarkably uniform in terms of the

audible trajectory of the melody as a whole. Each progresses—usually after an initial ascent—

from a tone of tritus quality (F in variant number 3, otherwise c) down the diatessaron, passing

through an intermediate degree (D in variant number 3, otherwise a) situated a whole tone above

the tetrardus final. With the prototype-antiphon of each of the other modes the manuscript record

displays similar variety of detail and no less unity of overall shape, of Gestalt.36

For the cantus tradition judges modal identity not by the quantitative measure of the scale

on which melody travels but by the qualitative measure of the journey itself, which in turn

chiefly depends on the quality of final destination. This qualitative orientation is reflected in the

early theoretical notation of cantus-tradition sources: much of Example 2.2 is transcribed from a

pre-Guidonian system in which each melodic note is identified as an avatar of one or another of

the four modal qualities protus, deuterus, tritus, and tetrardus. The Musica enchiriadis introduces

this “dasian” notation (its symbols recalling the daseia, indicator of the “h” sound in Greek) with

the following explanation:

Not just any pitches [soni] are called tuned pitches [ptongi], however, but those
that, by virtue of rule-governed distances between them, are suitable for melody.
Of these a certain order thus both in going higher and lower is naturally extended,
so that always four, and four of the same arrangement, follow one another. And
the individuals of these four are correspondents each so dissimilar [literally: so
diversely dissimilar among themselves] that not only do they differ in height and
depth, but in that very height and depth each has by its own nature a
distinguishing quality, which in turn for each of these the calculable distance from
one to another above and below is determining.37

36
See Bailey, The Intonation Formulas, 48–56.
37
“Ptongi autem non quicumque dicuntur soni, sed qui legitimis ab invicem spaciis melo sunt
apti. Eorum quidem sic et intendendo et remittendo naturaliter ordo continuatur, ut semper
quattuor et quattuor eiusdem conditionis sese consequantur. At singuli horum quattuor sic sunt
competenti inter se diversitate dissimules, ut non solum acumine differant et gravitate, sed in
ipso acumine et gravitate propriam naturalitatis suae habeant qualitatem, quam rursus his singulis
ratum ab invicem acuminis et laxionis spacium format.” Schmid, Musica et scolica, 3–4.
 57

The treatise then gives dasian notation and intervallic analysis of this tetrachordal

arrangement in a vertical diagram represented here in Example 2.3. At left, 2.3a shows the figure

as it appears in Schmid’s critical edition from medieval sources;38 2.3b shows two of the

theoretically limitless number of possible realizations in specific tones of this abstract intervallic

arrangement: D to G (bass clef), and a to d (tenor clef).

Example 2.3 Musica enchiriadis: the modal tetrachord

2.3a 2.3b

The treatise explains:

The first and lowest is called in Greek protos, or archoos; the second deuterus, a
whole-tone distant from the protus; third the tritus, a semitone distant from the
deuterus; fourth tetrardus, a whole-tone distant from the tritus. By a continuous
multiplying of these an infinitude of pitches is woven, even so long as tetrachord

Translation mine, cf. James McKinnon’s in Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, Revised
Edition, Leo Treitler, general editor (New York: Norton & Company, 1998), 189–90; also that of
Raymond Erickson in his Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis, edited by Claude V.
Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 1–2. Both Erickson and McKinnon—as if
unable to reconcile modal quality defined through any unit short of the octave—interpret the four
tetrachordal pitches treated here as the four tetrachords of varying registers introduced only later;
the same error infects the otherwise excellent introduction to the notation given by David Hiley,
Western Plainchant, 393–94.
38
Schmid, Musica et scolica, 4.
 58

is followed by tetrachord of the same arrangement, until either ascending or

descending they run out altogether.39

Here the Musica enchiriadis borrows ‘tone’ and ‘semitone’ from the harmonics tradition

to give a rational account of sounding qualities perceived intuitively. Much as modern children

can learn to recognize by ear the chord qualities major, minor, diminished, and augmented, so

those trained in the cantus tradition recognize the tonal qualities protus, deuterus, tritus, and

tetrardus. It is a separate task to analyze the constitutive intervallic relationships that together

render those emergent qualities.

The treatise illustrates the “continuous multiplying” of this tetrachord with a figure

reproduced here as 2.4a. 40 This shows the arrangement of tonal qualities replicating itself as if

without limit in the descending direction. The treatise explains:

For, as this little example shows, whether upward or downward you lead the
pitches in series until the voice fails, such as it were [hereditary or official]
succession of tetrachords shall not cease. The potency of these four sounds,
furthermore, begets dominion over the eight modes, as will be discussed later in
its proper place. By their companionable diversity all harmony is united.41

Only after thus examining the modal tetrachord in isolation and in the abstract, after thus

demonstrating the ability of this tetrachord to replicate itself in an unbounded registral

39
“Primus qui et gravissimus Grece protos dicitur, vel archoos; Secundus deuteros, tono distans
a proto; Tertius tritos, semitonio distans a deutero; Quartus tetrardus, tono distans a trito. Horum
continua multiplicatione sonorum infinitas texitur, et tamdiu quaternis quaterni eiusdem
conditionis succedunt, donec vel ascendendo vel descendendo deficiant.” Schmid, Musica et
scolica, 4; cf. Source Readings, 190; cf. Erickson, Musica enchiriadis, 2.
40
Schmid, Musica et scolica, 5.
41
“Ut enim haec descriptiuncula ostendit, sive sursum sive iusum sonos in ordine ducas usque in
defectum vocis, huiusmodi velut tetracordarum successio non cessabit. Horum etiam quattuor
sonorum virtus octo modorum potestatem creat, ut postea suo loco dicetur. Horum sociali
diversitate toto adunatur armonia.” Schmid, Musica et scolica, 5; cf. Source Readings, 190; cf.
Erickson, Musica enchiriadis, 2–3.
 59

continuum, and only after intimating with a seeming paradox the four constituent tonal qualities

as governors of mode and unifying forces of harmony, only then does the Musica enchiriadis

introduce a concrete and specific system by which melodies of the repertoire may be notated for

purposes of further investigation. That system is reproduced here as Example 2.4b and

transcribed in 2.4c. Its non-diatonic disposition, with augmented octaves between what are here

transcribed as low B-flat and ♮, between F and f-sharp, and above middle c, has puzzled

harmonics-trained readers for centuries. What kind of scales are these? The answer, it should be

clear by now, is that these are not scales at all in what has become the usual sense. The pitches of

this system do not divide the octave as in harmonics teaching, but extend through higher and

lower registers the cantus-tradition modal tetrachord.

 60

Example 2.4 Musica enchiriadis: multiplication of the modal tetrachord

2.4a Abstract replication 2.4b Registral differentiation

2.4c The latter transcribed

 61

Here symbols previously assigned to the basic abstract tetrachord appear without

alteration as the second-lowest tetrachord, that of the finals. These are so called “because all

melody must finish in one or another of these four.”42 They have harmonic value as well as

melodic function: melody of each maneria is not only “ended by its own pitch,” but also

“governed” by it.43 The protus, deuterus, tritus, and tetrardus signs correspond respectively to the

D, E, F, and G of Guidonian notation as in the transcription above, but are endowed as if by

nature with modal identity as well as relative position. The same symbols appear again in the

graves below and the superiores and excellentes above, but reversed or rotated to differentiate

register. Thus in dasian notation every pitch is identified primarily by tonal quality, and by

position only secondarily.

Such modal clarity is sacrificed in the alphabetical notation of the c. 1000 Dialogus de

musica once attributed to Odo of Cluny, which in turn forms the basis for Guido’s staff notation

and our own.44 Nor was this sacrifice made unconsciously: as if to make up for a deficiency in

the system itself, both the Dialogus and Guido’s Prologue to his Antiphoner include a figure

assigning modal quality to each letter-named tone.45 Example 2.5 gives the lower part of

Guido’s version. It puts alphabetical symbols in scalar order, with roman numerals above and

below indicating the maneria governed by each: Γ rules and has the quality of Modes 7 and 8

(tetrardus), A Modes 1 and 2 (protus), B Modes 3 and 4 (deuterus), etc.46 This fourfold modal

42
“Terminales sive finales dicuntur, quia in unum aliquem ex his quattuor melos omne finiri
necesse est.” Schmid, Musica et scolica, 7.
43
“Sui sono … regitur et finitur.” Schmid, Musica et scolica, 7–8.
44
GS I:251–64; sections translated in Source Readings, 198–210; TML ODODIA TEXT
www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/9th-11th/ODODIA_TEXT.html (accessed October 12, 2013).
45
Dolores Pesce, Guido D’Arezzo’s Regule Rithmice, Prologus in Antiphonarium, and Epistola
ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation (Ottowa: The Institute of Mediaeval Music,
1999), 430–31; Source Readings, 211–14.
46
Pesce, Guido’s Regule, 430; Source Readings, 213.
 62

identity of the individual note, which Guido calls modus vocum and rationalizes in terms of tones

and semitones, is an important consideration for him as for the Dialogus author.47 Since it is not

preserved in the alphabetic notation itself, however, this sense of tetrachordal modal identity is

destined to fade away over subsequent ages. As with any new technology, the Dialogus gamut

brings loss along with profit.

Example 2.5 Guido of Arezzo: Modal qualities of individual tones (modi vocum)

VII I III V I III V VII I III V I

Γ A B C D E F G a ♮ c d
VIII II IV VI II IV VI VIII II IV VI II

The Dialogus takes a crucial step in the articulation of cantus-tradition modal theory by

defining mode—tonus or modus—as “the measurement that makes distinction of all song in its

ending.”48 “Quoted or paraphrased, this has probably been the most popular definition of

mode.”49 This “omnis cantus definition,” as Wiering calls it,50 formalizes the discernments of

earlier writers, however. We have just seen that the Musica enchiriadis recognizes the final as

47
Guidonis Micrologus, ed. J. Smits van Waesberghe, CSM 4 (1955), 117–18; Babb, Hucbald,
Guido, and John, 63; see Pesce, The Affinities, 12–13, 18–22.
48
“Tonus vel modus est regula, quae de omni cantu in fine dijudicat.” Note that it is really “the
measurement,” not “a measurement”: mode (as a general principle) measures all or every song;
any specific measurement (one mode or another) would render distinction only of those it
matches. The Dialogus very clearly separates this formal definition of mode as a genus (GS
I:257, cf. Source Readings, 207) from description of the number and kinds of species, that is, the
eight modes, which comes later in the treatise (GS I:258–9, tr. in Source Readings, 208–09); it
also differentiates between the ending (finis) of song in general and the specific final note
(finalis) of specific song. (On genus and species, see §2.4 below.) Oliver Strunk’s 1950
translation, “A tone, or mode, is a rule which classes every melody according to its final”
(Source Readings, 1st ed., 113) mistakes definition for description, and genus for species;
subsequent translations reproduce the same errors. Cf. Powers et al., “Mode” §I/3; Wiering,
“Internal and External Views,” 91; The Language of the Modes, 5; Atkinson, The Critical Nexus,
214, etc.
49
Wiering, “Internal and External Views,” 91; The Language of the Modes, 5.
50
Ibid.
 63

modal governor.51 Similarly, the universality of the eight-mode system is already attested in the

treatise attached to the Metz tonary52 as well as by Aurelian, who relates the following historical

anecdote to his patron, a descendant of Charlemagne:

Since there were no few cantors who asserted that some antiphons existed which
could be fitted to the measure of none [of the eight modes], therefore Charles,
your worship’s God-fearing majestic ancestor and father of the whole world,
ordered them to increase by four, of which the added vocables are preserved here
below:

ANANNO NOEANE NONANNOEANE NOEANE

Even because the Greeks were boasting that by their native ingenuity they had
determined the modes to be eight, he wished to increase their number to twelve.53

The Emperor’s plan backfires. Not to be outdone by the Latins, the Greeks invent four

new modes of their own, the vocables of which Aurelian likewise records:

NENOTENEANO NOEANO ANNO ANNES

Which modes, although it may be, have been invented in modern times by Latins
as well as Greeks to have unusual syllabic signatures, nevertheless modulatio
always reverts to the previous eight of them. And just as in grammatical discipline
no one can overtop the eight parts [of speech] so that he lays on further parts,
neither has anyone power to increase the quantity of modes; for unless someone
were to create a modulatio of altogether alien genus, he could not render modes in
greater abundance.54

51
See fn. 43 above.
52
See §1.3 above.
53
“Extitere etenim nonnulli cantores qui quasdam esse antiphonas quae nulle earum regulae
possent aptari asserverunt; unde pius augustus avus vester Carolus paterque totius orbis iiii
augere iussit quorum hic vocabula subter tenentur inserta: ANANNO [etc.] Et quia gloriabantur
Greci suo se ingenio octo indeptos esse tonos, maluit ille duodenarium adimplere numerum.”
Aureliani Disciplina, 82; cf. Ponte, The Discipline, 24.
54
“Qui tamen toni modernis temporibus inventi tam Latinorum quam Grecorum licet litteraturam
inequalem habeant, tamen semper ad priores octo eorum revertitur modulatio. Et sicuti quit nemo
viii partes grammatice adimplere disciplinae ut ampliores addat partes, ita ne quisquam tonorum
valet ampliare magnitudinem; quia nisi quis alterius fecerit generis modulationem prorsus nec
 64

Neither the command of the most powerful man on earth nor the cleverness of the most expert

liturgical musicians could do so, “for up to and through such time these were devised, the entire

ecclesiastical repertory, Roman as well as Greek, in antiphons, responsories, offertories,

communions [etc.] had run their course through these earlier modes.”55

Aurelian’s exercise in the history of music theory shows that relations between Eastern

and Western empires were uneasy even at their best. During the eleventh century, which saw the

severance of already-weakened ecclesiastical and political ties with Byzantium, Western

musicians supplemented the antiphons sung to the Greek-inspired Noanoeane vocables with

similar melodies that were settings of Latin texts. Based on familiar passages from the New

Testament, these also appear in tonaries at the head of each modal division. After a period of co-

existence which lasted into the twelfth century,56 the Noanoeane fell into disuse;57 the Latin

formulas continued to circulate into the fifteenth century. The pedagogical advantage of these,

besides familiarity of idiom, is the opening word of each being the numeral of the mode thus

realized in prototype. Example 2.6 reproduces the most widespread set of these as given in the c.

1100 music-treatise of Johannes.58 Here are the texts of the first four, along with the scriptures

referenced and their translations in the King James Bible. Primum querite regnum dei: Seek ye

first the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33); Secundum autem simile est huic: And the second

tonorum poterit maiorem reddere magnitudinem.” Aureliani Disciplina, 82–83; cf. Ponte, The
Discipline, 24.
55
“Cum usque ad hoc tempus quo hi reperti sunt, omnis ordo tam Romane quam Grece ecclesiae
in antiphonis, responsoriis, offerendis, communionibus per hos priores decucurrerit tonos.”
Aureliani Disciplina, 83; cf. Ponte, The Discipline, 24.
56
See for example Huglo, Les tonaires, plate IV: photograph of page from the c. 1122 Liber
magistri (Book of the Master), Piacenza Biblioteca Capitolare C. 65, wherein Mode 2 is
represented by both the more recent Latin formula and the earlier “Noeagis.”
57
Bailey, The Intonation Formulas, 39–40.
58
Johannis Affligemensis, De Musica cum Tonario, ed. Joseph Smits van Waesberghe. CSM 1
(1950); transl. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John. For more on this treatise and its author, see §2.6
below.
 65

[commandment] is like [the first] (Mark 12:31); Tertia dies est quod haec facta sunt: Today is

the third day since these things were done (Luke 24:21); and Quarta vigilia venit ad eos: The

fourth watch of the night he cometh unto them (Mark 6:48).

Some localities developed other sets of Latin-texted prototypes, notably the Saint-Gall

group beginning Primum mandatum amor dei est (“The first commandment is the love of God”),

which is included in Hartker’s tonary.59 Another set of Latin formulas with texts less colorful and

more abstract are the Ecce modus primus exercises which the student performs for the master in

Scolica enchiriadis.60 These translate as “presenting Mode 1; presenting Mode 2,” etc. The

treatise assumes such familiarity with these formulas that it does not bother to notate them.

Example 2.6 includes yet another set of pedagogical formulae, appended here to the

Primum querite melodies (as was customary in tonaries with the Noanoeane melodies also) in

the form of post-cadential melismas. These neumae, as they were called, were incorporated into

the liturgy itself as caudae (codas), “special prolongations” of the final antiphon of the

Benedictus at Lauds, of the Magnificat at Vespers, etc., on solemn occasions.61 Neuma, a loan-

word from Greek, is literally ‘gesture,’ thus in chant a melodic figure, the melodic setting of a

single syllable, a complete melodic phrase or air, and hence (by the twelfth century) the visual

notation of any or all of the above. “Confused and amalgamated” with pneuma, ‘breath,’62 these

modal airs came to mean all that and more: “In time they seem to have acquired an almost

mystical significance, as representations of the ‘breath’ of the Holy Spirit.”63 In the thirteenth

59
PM II/I, 1–4, 193, 195–202, 456–458; Huglo, Les tonaires, 234–35, 240, 247.
60
Schmid, Musica et scolica, 79; Erickson, Musica enchiriadis, 46.
61
Hiley, Western Plainchant, 331–33; Bailey, The Intonation Formulas, 16.
62
David Hiley, “Neuma,” in Grove Music Online (accessed November 27, 2013).
63
Hiley, Western Plainchant, 333.
 66

and fourteenth centuries they became tenors for polyphonic motets, and in the seventeenth

century they were customarily played on the organ.64

Example 2.6 Johannis De Musica: Primum querite antiphons with neumae65

As with the Noanoeane group, the Latin melodic formulas and the neumae generally

emphasize the tenor of the corresponding recitation tones before moving through a modal

64
Huglo, Les tonaires, 389.
65
Johannis De Musica, 86; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 120–21.
 67

nucleus—here somewhat expanded—to the final. Only the melodies of Mode 4 (deuterus plagal)

deviate from this rule by emphasizing the third-degree G above the E final, rather than the

fourth-degree a that functions as the reciting note for Mode 4 in modern liturgical books.

Recitation on the third degree in Mode 4 is notable in some of the oldest chants of the repertoire,

for example in the Antiphon of the Easter Introit Resurrexi.66 In the same liturgy, however, we

find another Mode-4 chant, the Offertory Terra tremuit, with clear emphasis on the fourth

degree.67 Both deuterus modes, the authentic (Mode 3) and its plagal (Mode 4) exhibit a

flexibility of reciting note, with the tendency for the higher note to be favored in later centuries.

Also as with the Noanoeane melodies, the tone above the tenor—if included at all—

clearly functions as an upper neighbor, such as the d above the reciting-tone c of the Mode-3

neuma. This is the only neuma that spans an octave. Of the Latin antiphons—measuring from the

beginning of the melody to the initial note of the last text-syllable, invariably the modal final

approached by descending step—none reaches farther than a minor seventh. Among the

combinations of Latin antiphon with post-cadential neuma, only those of Modes 1, 3, and 8 fill

out the octave, and only in the case of Mode 8 does this octave conform to the octave prescribed

for it (D–d) in the harmonics tradition.

For rather than reflecting ancient Greek harmonic theory, the Noanoeane, Primum

querite, and neuma prototypes represent a western adaptation of the oktōēchos (“sound divided

into eight categories”),68 a musical theory and practice that originated in seventh-century

Palestine—probably in Jerusalem—and which was quickly adopted and subsequently retained in

66
Cf. LU 777–78.
67
Cf. LU 780.
68
Peter Jeffery, “The Earliest Oktōēchoi: The Role of Jerusalem and Palestine in the Beginnings
of Modal Ordering,” in The Study of Medieval Chant: Paths and Bridges, East and West, in
Honor of Kenneth Levy, edited by Peter Jeffery (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2001), 148
fn.
 68

“Latin, Byzantine, Slavonic, Syrian, Armenian, and Georgian repertoires” of Christian liturgical

chant.69 Among the Latin traditions, only Gregorian chant adopted this system, doubtless from

Byzantine sources: hence the Greek-derived terms protus, deuterus, tritus, and tetrardus for

tonal quality, and authenticus and plagalis for melodic character. Modern scholarship tends to

characterize the system as a Greek and therefore foreign imposition on the Gregorian

repertoire.70 In its Palestinian origins, however, in its rapid diffusion through Western Asia, the

Middle East, and Europe through Greek texts and liturgical practices, and in its tenacity over the

course of centuries, the oktoechos is analogous to Christianity itself. We should regard its

expression in Gregorian chant not as a foreigner, but as a naturalized citizen of the Latin West.

This is not to dispute that the eight-mode system was “[adapted] by Carolingian theorists

to an existing body of traditional liturgical song with which it had not originally been

associated,” nor does it deny “classification, adaptation, and adjustment” of the repertoire to fit

the theoretical system.71 It does however challenge the hypothesis that the fit between the

Gregorian repertoire and the octenary system “is not to be explained as the natural reflection of

an inherent homology.”72 In the absence of significant homology there could be no musical

reason for adopting and maintaining the system in the first place. If the application of the eight-

mode system to Gregorian chant was no more than a Carolingian political conspiracy, why then

did it not fade away during subsequent regimes, as did the Greek-derived Noanoeane texts? The

octenary system was in place in the Gregorian repertoire well before there were named pitches,

interval theory, or scales attached to it;73 were not these also applied after the fact, and to the

69
Jeffery, “Oktōēchos,” in Grove Music Online (accessed October 5, 2013).
70
Powers, “Tonal Types,” 428, e.g.
71
Powers et al., “Mode” §II/1/ii.
72
Ibid.
73
Cohen, “Notes, scales, and modes,” 313–14.
 69

same body of liturgical song? Yet modern scholars have no trouble accepting these more recent

theoretical impositions as inherent homologues with the chant repertoire.

Because the modal system was applied to the classification of Gregorian melody before

diastematic notation, we may never know how the repertoire behaved before the introduction of

either.74 In any event the eight-mode system fits remarkably well with the Gregorian repertoire

as handed down to us in the earliest notated manuscripts, much better than the octave-species

principle borrowed from the ancient Greek science of harmonics.

§2.4 Introduction to Aristotelian Division

But to understand and fairly represent what medieval sources have to say requires some

account of the broader culture that produced them. This section examines a curiously neglected

aspect of the intellectual context and vocabulary of these sources and of music theory in the

Latin West generally: the legacy of logic in the tradition of Aristotle. In Chapter One we saw

how Hartker adapted the notation of modal logic to the notation of musical mode and differentia,

for example. Several studies have treated the more subtle Aristotelian vocabulary of late-

medieval music theory,75 but little attention has been paid to the basic set of logical terms and

concepts that inform the discipline throughout its history.76 An introduction to those

74
Peter Jeffery, Re-envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of
Gregorian Chant (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 107; but see Jean Claire,
“Les répertoires liturgiques latins avant l’octoéchos, I: L’Office ferial romano-franc,” Etudes
grégoriennes XV (1975), 5–192.
75
Recently, for example, John Haines and Patricia DeWitt, “Johannes de Grocheio and
Aristotelian Natural Philosophy,” Early Music History 27 (2008): 47–98. David E. Cohen lists
earlier publications by Gushee, Haas, Tanay, and Yudkin in “‘The Imperfect Seeks Its
Perfection’: Harmonic Progression, Directed Motion, and Aristotelian Physics,” Music Theory
Spectrum 23, vol. 2 (2001), 147 fn.
76
A partial exception: “To Carolingian logical and dialectical studies we may probably trace the
musical terms differentia and diffinitio (or definitio), which appear during the ninth century in
connection with categories of psalm tones or modes … Each psalm tone … has several possible
 70

fundamentals, and a brief sketch of their Western reception, demonstrates what it means for the

cantus tradition to employ as it does the Aristotelian “predicables”—basic tools of definition—

that are genus, species, and differentia.

For these are fundamental elements of medieval education, rudiments of the logical

discipline taught to youth in monasteries and cathedral schools from the Early Middle Ages

onward, and the common study of “all undergraduates in the arts faculties of medieval

universities.”77 From before the Carolingian period until the twelfth century, however, the Latin

West knew little of Aristotle but in translations and commentaries by Boethius and Martianus

Capella of a few ancient secondary texts, notably Porphyry’s introduction to the Categories; this

intellectual foundation became known as the “old logic” after scholars translated into Latin a

more complete Aristotelian canon, along with contributions by later Arabic, Greek, Jewish, and

Persian philosophers.78 Those additional texts and methods then formed the basis of the “new

endings, and each of these is identified as a differentia or diffinitio. Like the term modus, which
was a fundamental concept in both music and logic, these two terms could be used for specific
subcategories in both fields.” Nancy Phillips, “Music,” in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and
Bibliographical Guide, ed. F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg (Washington, DC: Catholic
University Press, 1996, repr. 1999), 300. C.W. Brockett, Jr., “Saeculorum Amen and Differentia:
Practical versus Theoretical Tradition” Musica Disciplina 30 (1976) quotes Boethius applying
‘differentia’ to mathematical quantity and Cassiodorus in turn applying the quantitative species
of ‘differentia’ to musical pitches and intervals, 28, also Odorannus of Sens defining ‘differentia’
in general, 13; Brockett treats the latter as another species of differentia, not recognizing in it the
genus that comprehends all. William David Deason, “A Taxonomic Paradigm from Boethius’ De
divisione Applied to the Eight Modes of Music” (DMA diss., Ohio State University, 1992) treats
Aristotelian aspects of the interval-species theory developed by Berno of Reichenau and his
followers in the eleventh century; the topic is further treated as part of the history of the same
“South-German School” in McCarthy, Scholasticism and Reform, 109–46.
77
Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 116.
78
See Bernard G. Dod, “Aristoteles latinus,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval
Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, 45–79 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
 71

logic” studied along with the old throughout the first year of university training.79 Logic, the ars

artium, provided a common basis for discussion in every discipline, be it liberal, monastic, or

otherwise.

In Aristotle’s logic the διαφορά (diaphora) is the criterion by which one makes what in

Latin is called divisio—the separation of species within a given genus.80 For example,

‘terrestrial,’ ‘aquatic,’ and ‘aerial’ establish divisions within the genus ‘animal.’81 Such an

attribute that distinguishes within the genus is called by Latin commentators the differentia. Thus

we discover in Aristotelian dialectic the model for the organization as well as the terminology of

the medieval tonary.

That document, as we have seen, divides the genus ‘melody’ into eight species. The

Commemoratio brevis makes this explicit: “And so we divide melody into eight modes (toni)—

for that is what we name them—whose differentias and proprietates (properties, characteristics)

the ecclesiastic chanter, unless impeded by slow-wittedness, is at fault not to know.”82 Here the

word differentias is employed in the general sense, as distinctive traits that make each species

different from its fellows (in this case eight species of melody), not the narrow musical-technical

sense, ‘varieties of terminal cadence for a given recitation tone.’ For the latter the

79
For the full two-year curriculum in thirteenth-century Paris, see Michel Huglo, “Study of
Ancient Sources of Music Theory in the Medieval Universities,” in Music Theory and Its
Sources: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. André Barbera (University of Notre Dame Press,
1990), 152–54.
80
On divisio as derived from Aristotle’s Categories via Porphyry, see Haines and DeWitt,
“Johannes de Grocheio,” 82 fn.; on genus and species in late-medieval treatises, see ibid., 90;
also Jeremy Yudkin, “Notre Dame Theory: A Study of Terminology, Including a New
Translation of the Music Treatise of Anonymous IV” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1984),
60–61.
81
Robin Smith, “Logic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), 52.
82
“Itaque in octo tonos, quos ita nominamus, melodiam diuidimus, quorum differentias et
proprietates ecclesiasticum cantorem, nisi ingenii tarditate obstante, culpabile est ignorare.”
Bailey, Commemoratio brevis, 28; translation mine.
 72

Commemoratio brevis employs the term diversitates (diversities).83 It is Aurelian who first

applies the term differentia to the seculorum amen.84 The name stuck, and with good reason: as

the prototype-melody provides a model by which to recognize the mode as species of melody, so

the seculorum amen provides the means to divide each of these eight melodic species into

subspecies. (Aristotelian division is a recursive process.)

What we gain from considering the Logical origin and significance of the term differentia

is the understanding that the seculorum amen may not be merely the variant of recitation formula

that a number of loosely related antiphons happen to be sung with, but the distinctive trait by

which a species of antiphon may be distinguished within the mode as a genus. Sometimes there

is commonality in the initial notes or melodic gestures of the incipits by which the antiphons are

indexed in the tonaries, but just as often there is none. Perhaps modern scholarship has laid too

much emphasis on the immediate connection from the end of the recitation tone to the beginning

of the closing antiphon, and not enough on the broader agreement between the recitation tone

and the whole antiphon for which the incipit acts as a cue. The medieval employment of the

Aristotelian term differentia for the termination of the recitation tone suggests that such a

cadential formula may reflect something about the antiphon’s melodic structure, something that

might otherwise prove difficult to pin down. The tonary’s division of melodic repertoire into

subgroups, with seculorum amen as differentia, puts into practice the Gospel principle of

knowing the tree by its fruit.85

83
Bailey, Commemoratio brevis, 56, 109.
84
Brockett, “Saeculorum amen and Differentia,” 28; see Aureliani Musica, 87, 89, 103, 113,
120–21, 126; Ponte, The Discipline, 27–28, 36, 42, 47–48, 52.
85
Matthew 7:15–20.
 73

§2.5 Epistemology of the cantus tradition

With these Aristotelian tools in hand we can more easily differentiate between harmonics

and cantus concerns and doctrines, thus avoiding the false assumption of harmonics-tradition

meaning in cantus-tradition discourse. Where the Musica enchiriadis defines mode, for example,

it makes reference to the ancient Greek tonoi, but in such a way as to make clear—if we read the

Latin properly—that these belong to a genus alien to that of plainchant:

Modes or tropes are species of modulationes, of which was spoken above, such as
protus authentic or (vel) plagal, deuterus authentic or (vel) plagal; otherwise (sive)
Dorian mode, Phrygian, Lydian, etc., the names of which are derived from those
of tribes.86

Here four plainchant-modes are separated from three tonoi by the conjunction sive, which

expresses exclusion—unlike the inclusive vel that connects authentics with plagals. Thus protus

authentic and Dorian are not being compared or equated. Rather, each happens to be the first

example of its respective genus: protus authentic illustrating definition 1 (plainchant mode),

Dorian definition 2 (ancient Greek tonos). Here the modes of cantus theory with which the

treatise is chiefly concerned, and the tonoi of the harmonics theory from which it derives names

and mathematical descriptions for select intervals, are related by terminology but otherwise

incomparable, like apples and oranges. Perhaps careless reading of this passage led the principal

author of Alia musica to posit correspondences between authentic protus and Dorian, between

authentic deuterus and Phrygian, etc., that did not exist in Greek theory, in the treatise of

Boethius, nor in the plain language of the Musica enchiriadis.

86
“Modi vel tropi sunt species modulationum, de quibus supra dictum est, ut protos autentus vel
plagis, deuteros autentus vel plagis, sive modus Dorius, Frigius, Lidius, et ceteri, qui ex gentium
vocabulis sortiti sunt nomina.” Schmidt, Musica et Scolica, 22; cf. Erickson, Musica enchiriadis,
12 [inclusive vel and exclusive sive both rendered simply “or”].
 74

For the eight tonoi of Boethius and the eight modes of liturgical chant are not simply

different approaches to the same problem but answers to different species of inquiry. The first,

based on instrumental practice, seeks in mathematics a rational basis for the pitches through

which melody flows. The second, based on vocal practice, describes the shape and character of

the movement itself.

The cantus tradition offers guidance that is exemplary rather than prescriptive. Hucbald

teaches in the cantus tradition, for example, when he defines melodic intervals in terms of

motion within the Antiphon Missus est gabriel and other chants of the repertoire.87 Here no

mathematical definition is offered, but an appeal to the ear familiar with the given melody. We

participate in this tradition when we teach beginning students that the ascending octave is the

first interval of “Somewhere over the Rainbow.”

That particular motion is not employed in Gregorian chant, however. The intervals

recognized in the cantus tradition are those through which the voice moves from one note to the

next in chant melody, and the octave is not among them. Hucbald illustrates and lists nine

melodic intervals: first semitone, then tone; thereafter he combines these fundamental categories

to obtain larger motions, each a semitone wider than the last (tritone included!), up to four tones

with a semitone—a span the size of a major sixth.88 Theorists may recognize here an early

description of abstract pitch interval (ip) conceptually independent of mode, scale, and octave

division.89 Hucbald goes on to generalize this additive process of interval construction.

“Wherefore if you add tone and semitone, the sound next in position springs forth, unto the ninth

87
Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 142; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 16–17. See
§1.2.
88
Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 140–47; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 16–19.
89
See Joseph N. Straus, Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 2005), 8.
 75

pitch,” he writes, a generic summary that French and English translators have imagined as a

prescription to add yet another tone-plus-semitone to achieve a tenth interval and pitch, the

octave—which term both misleading and misled they import into their translations, here

defective.90

Hucbald, on the other hand, makes clear he conceives the octave as belonging to a

generic category altogether separate. Having already stated that no pitch interval greater than that

of the major sixth is found in chant, and that even this span is difficult for the voice to

negotiate,91 he writes:

Now do not think these pitch differences are to be reckoned among the
consonances, which are the stuff of musical philosophy. For consonance is one
thing and interval another. Consonance indeed is of two sounds the calculable and
concordant combination, which shall in no other wise consist except by two
sounds mutually raised so that they simultaneously convene upon one modulatio,
as it is when man’s and boy’s voice sound in like manner, namely indeed in that
which they customarily call “organization.”92

Hucbald may intend modulatio here only in the sense of ‘harmonic proportion’ (the voices

convene on a stable harmonic node, such as fifth or octave), but perhaps also in the sense of

90
“Quod si adieceris tonum et semitonium, in nonam uocem mox sonus prosiliet.” Chartier,
L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 148, tr. 149; Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 19. Quod si
usually means “thus, in view of which, accordingly,” as in my translation above; the relative
pronoun for which Babb mistakes this quod would in this context require either the dative cui or
the preposition ad. In Chartier’s French translation, Hucbald’s major sixth mysteriously
disappears, its ninth place usurped by an “octave” composed of ip 8 conjoint with ip 3, that is, ip
11—the major seventh.
91
Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 144; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 16–17.
92
“Non autem putandum est has uocum discrepantias reputari inter consonantias. De quibus
musicae pertractat subtilitas. Aliud est enim consonantia, aliud interuallum. Consonantia
siquidem est duorum sonorum, rata et concordabilis permixtio, quae non aliter constabit, nisi
duobus altrinsecus editis sonis, in unam simul modulationem conueniant, ut fit, cum uirilis ac
puerilis uox pariter sonuerint, uel etiam in eo quod consuete organizationem uocant.” Chartier,
L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 148; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 19.
 76

‘melodic progression’ (the voices convene on the same melody): an excellent description of the

parallel-organum technique of his time.

Of the genus ‘consonance’ so defined—for which the Enchiriadis treatises employ the

term symphonia—only the diapente and diatessaron belong also to the genus of melodic

intervals. Thus for Hucbald, as in the Enchiriadis treatises, the octave is a feature of harmony,

not of melody. And mode is—again as in the Enchiriadis tradition—a melodic process, one

oriented toward the final:

Four [notes corresponding to the tetrachord D–G] … are suited for bringing to
completion four modes or tropes, which we now call toni, that is, protus, deuterus,
tritus, tetrardus. Thus each of these four notes rules as its own subjects twin
tropes: the principal, which is called authentic, and the subsidiary, which is called
plagal … Thus because no matter how variably hither and thither chant-melody
may be driven about, by necessity is it all led back to one or another of these same
four. Even for this reason are they called finals, since they take unto themselves
all ending of that which is sung.93

The cantus tradition emphasizes the melodic function of the final, generally without

rumor of octave species—none is found in the Enchiriadis treatises, for instance, nor in the

works of Guido. Guido does describe the octave-spanning disposition of tones and semitones

relative to pitch-classes A–G (omitting b, which he finds problematic), but this in a discussion of

affinities, similarities of quality shared by pitches with similar surroundings of tone and

93
“Quatuor … quatuor modis uel tropis, quos nunc tonos dicunt, hoc est, protus, deuterus, tritus,
tetrardus, perficiendis aptantur: ita ut singulae earum quatuor chordarum geminos sibi tropos
regant subiectos, principalem, qui autentus, et lateralem, qui plagius appellatur … ita ut ad
aliquam ipsarum quatuor quantauis ultra citraque uariabiliter circumacta, necessario omnis,
quaecumque fuerit, redigatur cantilena. Unde et eaedem finales appellatae, quod finem in ipsis
cuncta, quae canuntur, accipiant.” Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 200; cf. Babb,
Hucbald, Guido, and John, 38–39.
 77

semitone.94 Guido describes such affinities as incomplete at the diapente and diatessaron, and

complete only at the diapason. The expression of this greater affinity is an advantage of the

Dialogus system over notations that assign each pitch its own sign unrelated to others in the

same pitch class, for example the a-to-p letter-notation of the Dijon gradual-tonary.95 Guido

objects to the Dialogus system’s b, however, because it makes G sound protus instead of

tetrardus, a deuterus instead of protus, etc.96 Guido’s desire, as expressed in Example 2.5 above,

is for every note to retain its modal quality as in the dasian notation of the Enchiriadis tradition.

But the system he adopts from the Dialogus de musica makes this impossible.

Like the Enchiriadis treatises, the Dialogus assigns to only one tetrachord the role of

finals: that of D, E, F, and G. Guido then makes explicit what may be inferred from the

Dialogus’s own chart of modal affinities within the gamut: namely that a, ♮, and c may also, by

virtue of their affinities to the regular finals, take on that melodic function; Guido prefers such

transposition, in fact, to the employment of b.97 Thus it is not the disturbance of the octave

species that Guido objects to in the use of b—since affinity is incomplete at the 5th, transposition

by that interval, which he recommends, has the same effect. What Guido seeks to avoid is

unnecessary change in local tetrachordal quality, which for the cantus-trained musician is the

primary measure of mode.

This tradition’s chief concern is the training of young people to sing the repertoire. Guido

follows the Dialogus in advocating the use of the monochord, in the harmonics tradition an

94
Guidonis Micrologus, 117–32; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 63–65; Pesce, The
Affinities, 18–22.
95
PM VII, Antiphonarium tonale missarum, XIe siècle: Codex H. 159 de la Bibliothèque de
l’École de Médicine de Montpellier (Solesmes: 1901); see Atkinson, The Critical Nexus, 162–65.
96
Guidonis Micrologus, 124–26; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 64–65; Pesce, The
Affinities, 20–22.
97
Ibid.
 78

instrument of scientific demonstration, as a means for children to practice singing in tune.98 For

the documents and practices of the cantus tradition reflect the concerns of the practical vocal

musician. Its model and raison d’etre is the flexible and error-prone intonation of the

unaccompanied voice in motion, not the stable pitch relationships described by plucked strings as

in ancient Greek theory and its extension in the medieval harmonics tradition. The relative

positions of pitches in ancient Greek theory are modeled after and named for the arrangement of

strings of an instrument—the kithara. Once tuned, the row of strings creates an inflexible set of

tones in pitch order: a scale. The unaccompanied voice, however, articulates melodic motions

within an infinite spectrum of pitches. It is the motion of the melody that one hears in the voice,

a motion whose points of arrival may or may not correspond closely with an inert scale, and

which in the chant repertoire certainly does not.

As with voice teachers today, the cantus tradition speaks to students in a language that is

qualitative rather than quantitative, and informed by analogies with other disciplines. Thus we

read in the version of De octo tonis attributed to Alcuin:

Tonus is the minimal part of musical measure. Just as the minimal part of
grammar is the morpheme (littera), and as the minimal part of arithmetic is the
unity, even in the same way as discourse arises and is built up from morphemes,
or the multiplicative sum of numbers from the unity, even so from the line of
pitches and toni every chanted melody is modulated.99

Note that arithmetic is included in the discussion as an analogue to music, not its justification as

in the harmonics tradition. If there seems to be confusion here between tonus as a musical pitch

98
GS I: 252–53; tr. Source Readings, 200–201. Pesce, Guido’s Regule, 458–61; tr. Source
Readings, 216. Guidonis Micrologus, 91–92; tr. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 59.
99
“Tonus est minima pars musicae regulae. Tamen sicut minima pars Grammaticae littera, sic
minima pars Arithmeticae unitas: et quomodo litteris oratio, unitatibus acervus multiplicatus
numerorum surgit, et erigitur; eo modo et sonorum tonorumque linea omnis cantilena
modulatur.” GS I: 26; TML ALCMUS TEXT http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/6th-
8th/ALCMUS_TEXT.html (accessed November 27, 2013).
 79

and tonus as a mode then perhaps the confusion is our own, conditioned as we have been by

training in the harmonics tradition to seek mode in scale rather than in tonal quality.

Guido further develops the analogy with verbal grammar: as in the final letters or

syllables of the Latin word we perceive case and number of noun, person and tense of verb, etc.,

so with the conclusion of a chant the mode is fully revealed in the final.100 Guido observes that

the notes of a mode “in an amazing way seem to draw a certain semblance of color” from the

final toward which they tend; he also notes—and this is typical of the cantus tradition—that this

observation is “evident to trained musicians only.”101

For the epistemology of the cantus tradition is more experiential than rational. Wisdom is

gained not by calculation, but by listening through to the end: “For at the beginning of a song,

you are ignorant of what may follow; when indeed what shall have passed is concluded, you

see.”102 Modal knowledge in the cantus tradition has more the character of revelation than

reasoning. The trained musician, says Guido, recognizes the mode of a melody as spontaneously

and intuitively as one might recognize the nationality of persons Greek, Spanish, Italian,

German, or French.103 Thus we learn that mode holds melodies together like glue, that a trained

musician recognizes the mode reflexively, and that tonal quality is the basic unit of melody, but

we are almost never offered an explanation how so.104 Mode in the cantus tradition is not

something to be explained so much as something to be experienced in singing.

100
Guidonis Micrologus, 145; tr. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 67.
101
“Et praemissae voces, quod tantum exercitatis patet, ita ad eam aptantur, ut mirum in modum
quandam ab ea coloris faciem ducere videantur.” Guidonis Micrologus, 139–40; tr. Babb,
Hucbald, Guido, and John, 66.
102
“Incepto enim cantu, quid sequatur, ignoras; finito vero quid praecesserit, vides.” Guidonis
Micrologus, 144; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 67.
103
Guidonis Micrologus, 158–59; tr. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 69.
104
Potiron, “Théoriciens de la modalité,” 31.
 80

The tradition does not lack philosophical richness or musical insight, however. For

example, the dialogue between master and disciple that is Scolica enchiriadis distinguishes

between melodic surface and tonal structure. Having been instructed that the quality of final

determines mode, the student seems to suspect a tautology: “Does not the potency therefore of

the final pitch alone produce whatever mode, as accounting for the trope or mode this or that

pitch may be said to be of, in that the end of the melody settles on it?” To which the teacher

replies, “Chiefly a certain power of whichever trope is perceived accounting for whichever final

pitch it stands upon, in that the trope in the act of ending settles on it.”105 The final is not merely

a melodic stopping point, in other words, but the terminus of a structural process.

The pedagogical technique of cantus-tradition theory is based on the singing of chants

and the memorization of melodies that function as paradigms of that dynamic process. The

Noanoeane prototypes were so fundamental to ninth-century pedagogy that they served as

prerequisite for instruction in tetrachords, notes, intervals, theoretical notation, even the location

of notes on the (pre-Guidonian) hand.106 Guido, speaking of the later Primum querite melodies,

employs a metaphor that would resonate with his intended audience of young choristers:

comparing a chant to these pedagogical formulas is like comparing the size of a robe to that of

the body: which does it fit?107 Just as important to cantus-tradition pedagogy, however, are the

liturgical melodies themselves, especially those involving psalmodic recitation. In his discussion

105
Emphasis mine, implied by parallel structure: “[D.] Ergone solius soni finalis virtus quemlibet
modum efficit, ut ob id tropus vel modus illius aut illius soni dicendus sit, quod in eo finis meli
constiterit? [M.] Praecipue quidem videtur vis cuiuslibet tropi ob id in quolibet finali sono
consistere, quod in eo tropus finiendo constiterit.” Schmid, Musica et scolica, 82; cf. Erickson,
Musica enchiriadis, 48, also Pesce, The Affinities, 10.
106
Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 168–71, 182–83, 190–97; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido,
and John, 26, 31, 35–37. Schmid, Musica et scolica, 14–20, 77–78, 82; cf. Erickson, Musica
enchiriadis, 8–12, 45–46, 49; Tilden A. Russell, “A Poetic Key to a Pre-Guidonian Palm and the
Echemata,” JAMS 34, no. 1 (Spring 1981), 109–18.
107
Guidonis Micrologus, 150–51; tr. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 68.
 81

of how to recognize modes, Guido says of the pedagogical and formulaic liturgical melodies as a

group, “It is a wonder if someone who does not know these understands any part of what is being

said here.”108

As the student progresses through experience toward greater knowledge, so over the

course of centuries the cantus tradition progresses in discernment. We have seen that Musica

enchiriadis defines mode in its plural species, as modulationes. The Dialogus takes the further

step of defining mode as a genus: the measurement that makes distinction of all song in its

ending. Having derived eight modes from four tetrachordal qualities, and having attested, in

agreement with the Dialogus, that every song is subject to, and takes its measure from, the mode

of its final—to which doctrine he swears an oath, no less—,109 Guido defines mode not as a

song-artifact (cantus) but as a singing action (cantio): “For tropus is a species of chanting, even

what is called mode.”110

108
“Quas qui non novit, mirum est si quam partem horum quae dicuntur, intelligit.” Guidonis
Micrologus, 154; tr. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 68.
109
“Iure dicamus quia omnis cantus ei sit modo subiectus et ab eo modo regulam sumat, quem
ultimum sonat.” Guidonis Micrologus, 145; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 67.
110
“Est autem tropus species cantionis qui et modus dictus est.” Guidonis Micrologus, 157; cf.
Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 69. Babb’s reading here, “‘Trope’ is the aspect of chant which
is also called mode” hardly fits the context: here at the end of his Chapter 13 Guido is not
switching gears to introduce tropus as an aspect hitherto unconsidered: he has been discussing
the subject of mode from Chapter 10, wherein he already introduces tropus as a synonym for
modus. Elsewhere in the treatise (116, 123, 144, 197, 233) Guido uses the term ‘species’
always in the proper Aristotelian sense as a differentiated member of a larger set (the genus),
never for an ‘aspect’ of a single entity. Immediately after defining tropus and modus as “species
cantionis,” Guido goes on to say (in Chapter 14) that the trained musician recognizes them in the
same holistic fashion as colors, smells, and national dress, that they have ethical qualities which
regulate the behavior of humans and demons, and that they are ultimately mysterious to all but
“Divine Wisdom” (divinae sapientiae, tr. Babb). Thus tropus as species cantionis is not to be
understood as an “aspect of chant,” but a “species of chanting,” or perhaps, since it belongs to
and influences spiritual forces, “species of incantation.”
 82

§2.6 Johannes and the theory of melodic functions

Thus in stages the cantus tradition develops a theory of melodic function, which it

communicates chiefly by means of example, analogy, and metaphor. Among medieval sources,

the c. 1100 music treatise of Johannes provides the most complete and explicit survey of this

theoretical system in analytic language and musical example.111 This author, often identified

erroneously in the later Middle Ages as Pope John XXII, more recently imagined as an

Englishman (John Cotton) or Netherlander (Johannes Afflighemensis), was likely a monk

“working within the south-German intellectual milieu.”112 Whatever his nationality, Johannes is

the first to identify explicitly the melodic function second in importance only to that of the

final—a function that the cantus tradition had until then recognized only intuitively—and the

first to specify by letter-name the tones that fulfill that function in dyadic relation with the final.

The Musica of Johannes contains little else that is new, but it encapsulates much that is

essential. Building upon the recognition of the final tone as governor and arbiter of modal

identity, Johannes, “the most illuminating of the medieval writers on the modes,”113 adds to this

legacy by recognizing the fundamental modal function located on the reciting-note or tenor

common to the recitation tones of any given mode. Theogerus of Metz, also of the south-German

school, had already identified for each mode the psalmodic reciting-note as where its ‘seculorum

amen’ begins—for no matter what the generic variety (psalm, canticle, or introit), and no matter

111
Johannis De Musica; tr. in Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 101–187. See §2.3 above,
Example 2.6, and fn. 56.
112
McCarthy, Scholasticism and Reform, 47–50; see also Claude V. Palisca, “Johannes Cotto,”
in Grove Music Online (accessed November 27, 2013).
113
Palisca, “Johannes Cotto”; cf. Heinrich Bellermann, Der Contrapunkt, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Julius
Springer, 1887), 111: “[Johannes] zu den kenntnissreicheren Theoretikern seiner Zeit gehört.”
On the importance of Johannes’s treatise to musicology in general see Michel Huglo, “L’auteur
du traité de Musique dédié à Fulgence d'Affligem,” Revue belge de Musicologie / Belgisch
Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 31 (1977), 19.
 83

the differentia, the reciting note always carries through to the first syllable of the termination

formula.114 From this liturgical practice Johannes abstracts a structural principle:

For just as there are eight modes (toni), even so there are, in relation to the same,
eight tenors. ‘Tenor,’ moreover, derives from teneo (I hold, I sustain), as ‘radiant’
from ‘radiate’ and ‘splendor’ from ‘splendid.’ And indeed in music we call tenors
where the first syllable of saeculorum amen of whatsoever mode is begun.115

By toni here Johannes clearly intends ‘modes’ and not ‘psalm tones,’ for there were

already in his day no fewer than nine such tones including the Tonus Peregrinus. Nor can he be

referring to the recitation tones in general as eight, for besides the nine tones for psalms there

were and are an additional eight canticle tones, eight introit tones, etc., the differences among

which the ecclesiastical chanter cannot afford to ignore, many of which terminate with

saeculorum amen. It would be an error and a cause of confusion, for example, if one monk were

to sing the Magnificat to the psalm tone while the rest of the choir sang the appointed canticle

tone. The tenor is the same so long as the mode is the same, but the surrounding modulatio is

different.

Thus it is erroneous to say that in this passage “the practical distinction between mode

and psalm tone is obliterated in respect to the tenor.” 116 For reasons just enunciated we can be

certain that Johannes is speaking of psalmodic practice in general, not of the psalm tone in

particular, and speaking of that practice as a particularly clear context for identifying the modal

114
GS II:183–96, 192–94; TML THEMUS TEXT http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/9th-
11th/THEMUS_TEXT.html (accessed November 27, 2013). On Theogerus, see McCarthy,
Scholasticism and Reform, 34–37; also Fabian Lochner, “Theogerus of Metz,” in Grove Music
Online (accessed November 27, 2013).
115
“Sicut autem octo sunt toni, ita et octo eorundem sunt tenores. Tenor autem a teneo, sicut a
niteo nitor et a splendeo splendor dicitur. Et tenores quidem in musica vocamus, ubi prima
syllaba saeculorum amen cuiuslibet toni incipitur.” Johannis De Musica, 82; cf. Babb, Hucbald,
Guido, and John, 117.
116
Powers, et al., “Mode” II/3/d.
 84

function exemplified by the liturgical tenor of the psalm-, canticle-, and introit-tones. It is true

that “the chapter title itself—‘on the tenors of the modes and their finals’—attributes the psalm-

tone element to the mode,” but only to the extent that Johannes attributes to the mode the tenor

held in common by psalm-, canticle-, and introit-tones. It is not Johannes who confuses which

elements are practical and which theoretical, but his modern commentators.

Johannes goes on to specify the four pitches of the gamut that regularly act as tenors, and

to specify their respective assignments among the eight modes, for which he also supplies the

four regular finals:

1. Tenor F in Mode 2 (final D);

2. Tenor a in Mode 1 (final D), Mode 4 (final E), and Mode 6 (final F);
3. Tenor c in Mode 3 (final E), Mode 5 (final F), and Mode 8 (final G); and
4. Tenor d in Mode 7 (final G ).117

Johannes notes the asymmetry of the tenors, F and d functioning as such in one mode each,

whereas a and c are each the tenor of three; this he contrasts with the symmetry of the finals,

each of which functions for one authentic mode and one plagal.118 Thus the eight tenors of which

Johannes speaks are not these four psalmodic tenor notes each considered as a monad, but must

be understood as the set of eight species of tenor each demonstrates in relation to a final, that is

to say, as a member of a modal dyad. In liturgical practice the recitation tone does not

necessarily touch upon the modal final reached at the end of the antiphon; Johannes’s meaning

cannot therefore be limited to the formal function of the reciting note or tenor in the liturgical

117
Johannis De Musica, 82–83; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 118.
118
Ibid.
 85

tone of recitation, but must comprehend the abstract modal function realized in the complete

musico-liturgical utterance of recitation-with-antiphon.119

Having thus defined the set of modal tenors as locations of psalmodic tenors in relation to

their respective modal finals, Johannes goes on to characterize the musical and pedagogical

functions of these eight species of tenor in a sentence of considerable poetic charm:

Quasi enim claves modulationis [modulationes] tenent, et ad cantum

cognoscendum nobis aditum dant.120

Discrepancies in the manuscript tradition make translation difficult. Some of the more than

twenty known sources of the treatise give the first phrase as “Quasi enim claves modulationis

tenent”; others read the same but for “modulationes” with ‘e’ substituting for ‘i’ in the final

syllable.121 Each reading makes sense; indeed each works in several senses, for each involves a

pun. Gerbert’s reading, Quasi enim claves modulationis tenent,122 translates “For they [the

tenors] hold as it were the keys of modulatio.” Here Johannes plays on the word claves, which,

like its French cognate clefs and the English ‘keys,’ carries both musical and non-musical

associations. In music theory, claves are letter-named positions in the gamut, at least from the

mid-twelfth century through the Renaissance.123 What evidence links this terminology to

Johannes, writing around 1100? Aribo, in his music treatise of around 1070, calls letter-named

119
Cf. Powers et al., “Mode” §II/3/d.
120
Johannis De Musica, 82; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 117.
121
Ibid.
122
GS 2:243; TML JOHMUS TEXT http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/9th-
11th/JOHMUS_TEXT.html (accessed July 21, 2011).
123
See Fritz Reckow, “Clavis,” in Eggebrecht, Handwörterbuch. For the preservation in
England of the medieval sense of the term well into the seventeenth century, see Jessie Ann
Owens, “Concepts of Pitch in English Music Theory, c. 1560–1640,” in Judd, Tonal Structures,
183–246; see also in the same volume Candace Bailey, “Concepts of Key in Seventeenth-
Century Keyboard Music,” 247–274.
 86

steps of the gamut claves in no less than nine instances.124 Johannes borrows extensively from

Aribo, for example adapting his four-fold figure of intersecting circles to demonstrate the

common pentachord within the ambitus of authentic and plagal modes of each maneria.125

Johannes, who could hardly have been ignorant of Aribo’s usage of claves, does generally prefer

the Guidonian term litterae for positions of the gamut. If we allow Johannes in this particular

sentence to employ ‘claves’ in a musical-technical sense, we find him attributing the term

tenores to the property of reciting tones to dwell upon, sustain, and hold in place the tones of

melody (claves modulationis), as if grasping them and not letting go. If he were writing in

English, Johannes might say they are called tenors because they are tenacious.

The choice of Johannes to call melodic tones claves here (instead of his more usual

litterae, notae, or voces) may be explained by the opportunity it provides for additional levels of

punning. If in addition to the narrow music-theoretical meaning of the word clavis we consider

its commonplace sense as ‘door-key,’ then claves and tenent take on new meaning in the phrase

claves tenere, “to hold the keys.” In Christian tradition this calls to mind the Apostle Peter, to

whom Christ promises the keys to the kingdom of heaven.126 For instance, it is to Peter’s

authority as keeper of the heavenly gate that the seventh-century King Oswius accedes, in Bede’s

account, to settle a dispute between Scottish and Roman liturgical traditions: “for this man is the

gatekeeper … who is proven worthy to hold the keys (claves tenere).”127 This sense of the phrase

124
Aribonis de Musica, ed. Joseph Smits Van Waesberghe. CSM 2 (1951), XXV (dating the
treatise); 4, 21, 27, 32, 54 (letter-named notes referred to as claves).
125
Aribonis de Musica, 18–20; Johannis De Musica, 94; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John,
124. On Johannes’s borrowings from Aribo, see Johannis De Musica, 29–30.
126
Matthew 16:19.
127
“Quia hic est ostiarius ille … qui claves tenere probatur.” Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis
Anglorum, Book III, Chapter 15, §25; online at www.thelatinlibrary.com/bede/bede3.shtml#15
(accessed November 27, 2013). Chapter 66 of the Rule of St. Benedict prescribes the duties of
the ostiarius, gatekeeper of the monastery, under the authority of the abbot; see §3.1 below.
 87

claves tenere illuminates the hierarchy of modal functions: if the final is the mode’s governor,

then the tenor is his appointed deputy, the keeper of the keys. Yet another musical-technical

sense Johannes may have intended relates to the practical maintenance of keyboard instruments:

when an organ is being tuned, someone must “hold keys” while the tuner adjusts the pipes; thus a

tone is sounded for a long time and in connection with another against which it must be tuned.

This may be only a happy coincidence, however, as it is unclear whether the organs of

Johannes’s time and South-German milieu even had keys (claves), or if the organist had to pull a

sliding tongue (lingua) directly out of the wind-chest in order to admit air to a pipe.128

Johannes’s modern editor adopts the more difficult reading “Quasi enim claves

modulationes tenent.”129 Instead of the genitive singular modulationis we have the accusative

plural modulationes which results in “For as if they were door-keys, they hold modulations.”

Could Johannes be likening melodic motions around the sustained tenor to the bulges and

grooves on the straight shaft of a door-key? Research into the technical vocabulary of the

medieval locksmith may be necessary to resolve this puzzle.

Modulationis better justifies Johannes’s term ‘tenor’ by allowing claves tenent to signify

both “they sustain the notes” and “they act as steward for a higher authority.” With the reading

modulationes, on the other hand, the connection between ‘tenor’ and the usage Johannes

proposes is—well, tenuous at best. With claves no longer functioning as the direct object of

tenent (modulationes being held now, not keys), why should tenent (they hold or maintain) be

used here, and not the more idiomatic habent (they have)?130 In any case, as the sentence

128
See Barbara Owen, et al., “Organ” §IV.4–6, in Grove Music Online (accessed October 3,
2013).
129
Johannis De Musica, 82.
130
“Modulationes” is the reading that Smits Van Waesberghe finds in the majority of the thirteen
manuscripts on which he bases his edition; he relates that Gerbert had only three sources at his
 88

continues, the notion of key-as-unlocking-agent is developed with the following phrase “et ad

cantum cognoscendum nobis aditum dant.” As a whole the sentence might best be translated

“For they hold as it were the melodic keys, and give us access to understanding of song.”131

Johannes employs a notable poetic subtext also in his choice of comparisons for the

etymology of the term ‘tenor.’ This comes from teneo (I hold or sustain), he says, as nitor from

niteo (I shine), and splendor from splendeo (I shine, I am splendid). Thus Johannes likens the

tenor to the radiant sun which governs from above, as indeed every recitation-tone tenor is raised

up and sustained above the final until it sets with the cadence of the antiphon.132

Johannes identifies yet another melodic function in the initial ascent to the tenor. This

function arises in the opening segment of the recitation tone, also known as the ‘intonation,’

which Johannes dubs the gloria for its appearance with the opening word of the doxology Gloria

patri. Example 2.7 reproduces Babb’s transcription of Johannes’s example, in which for each of

the eight modes the gloria’s initial ascent to the tenor is juxtaposed with a typical seculorum

amen proceeding from the same. Thus Johannes reduces the two-hemistich recitation tone to a

paradigmatic initial ascent, tenor, and termination. Bearing in mind that the seculorum amen may

disposal, one of which has since been destroyed: Johannis De Musica, 3, 82. Since the two
surviving manuscripts Gerbert consulted belong to the “modulationes” camp, the lost manuscript
must have supplied him with “modulationis.” (The recent destruction of manuscripts reminds us
that we cannot assume the reading found in the majority of surviving sources was the reading of
the majority in the Middle Ages.) The anonymous 12th-century De tractatu tonorum, an early
adaptation of Johannes’s treatise, also gives the “modulationis” reading: Marius Schneider,
Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit: Historische und phänomenologische Studien (Berlin: Gebrüder
Bornträger, 1934; reprint ed., Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), 110.
131
Cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 117.
132
Johannes dedicates the treatise to his abbot Fulgentius ( “most shining” or “most illustrious”;
cf. the English cognate ‘refulgent’): Johannis De Musica, 44; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and
John, 101. By citing synonyms of that name’s root-word fulgeo (I shine, I flash [as in lightning]),
Johannes associates his patron with his own flash of insight and signal contribution to musical
science.
 89

or may not reach the final of the mode, note that in this example the terminations of the plagal

(even-numbered) modes descend to the final; those of corresponding authentic (odd-numbered)

modes end higher.

Example 2.7 Johannes: Modal Intonation, Tenor, and Termination133

Thus Johannes identifies three distinct melodic functions in Gregorian chant: that of the

gloria which rises to the tenor at the beginning of the recitation tone, that of the tenor which

133
Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 119; cf. Johannis De Musica, 85.
 90

carries through the first syllable of seculorum amen, and that of the final of the antiphon. This

last function he illustrates for each of the eight modes in a separate figure shown above as

Example 2.6 (66). Johannes at no point juxtaposes the eight modal tenors with their respective

finals as abstract pairs in modal order 1–8 as did the authors of many later treatises, some forty

of which are surveyed in the Appendix to this dissertation and examined in Chapter Four below.

Johannes and his audience of practiced chanters seem to have found sufficient the examples

given here in Figures 2.6 and 2.7, as indeed for each mode the tenor identified in Example 2.7 is

prominent in the corresponding melody of Example 2.6. Making explicit what Johannes leaves

implicit, Table 2.1 compares the modal finals of Example 2.6 with the tenors of Example 2.7,

giving for each of the eight modes the particular pairing of final and tenor that Johannes

identifies in terms of letter-named steps. Table 2.1 also calculates the resulting interval over the

final identified in terms of tetrachordal quality.

 91

Table 2.1 Modal finals and tenors described by Johannes, with resulting intervals

Mode1 Final D, Tenor a Diapente (perfect fifth) over protus

Mode 2 Final D, Tenor f Semiditone (minor third) over protus

Mode 3 Final E, Tenor c Diapente-plus-semitone (minor sixth) over deuterus

Mode 4 Final E, Tenor a Diatessaron (perfect fourth) over deuterus

Mode 5 Final F, Tenor c Diapente (perfect fifth) over tritus

Mode 6 Final F, Tenor a Ditone (major third) over tritus

Mode 7 Final G, Tenor d Diapente (perfect fifth) over tetrardus

Mode 8 Final G, Tenor c Diatessaron (perfect fourth) over tetrardus

Thus the cantus tradition discovers in each mode a particular dyad of final and tenor, in

every case a relationship of harmonic consonance. One might object that some of these dyads

aren’t perfect intervals: that of Mode 2 is a minor third, that of Mode 6 a major third, and that of

Mode 3 a minor sixth. Didn’t medieval theorists take the perfect octave, fourth, and fifth as

consonances, and didn’t they consider thirds and sixths to be dissonant?134 The answer to which

is the following: theorists of the harmonics tradition may indeed classify only perfect intervals as

consonances (especially after Marchetto), but this is not always the case with their colleagues of

the cantus tradition. For Guido, Johannes, and others, consonance (consonantia) is the category

of interval by which chant melody moves harmoniously, a category that includes imperfect as

well as perfect intervals—and usually not the octave. We must differentiate the concept of

harmony in the cantus tradition from that of the harmonics tradition.

134
I am grateful to Daniel Zimmerman for bringing up this question.
 92

Guido, for example, recognizes six intervals by which note follows note in Gregorian

chant: tone, semitone, ditone, semiditone, diatessaron, and diapente; these he calls consonances

(consonantiae)135 and locates them within the broader realm of intervals in general.136 Guido

recommends diligent study and training in these six consonances, “since by so few articulations

all harmony is formed (cumque tam paucis clausulis tota harmonia formetur).”137 With this use

of the word harmonia Guido refers to the abstract principle of harmony, the joining together of

disparate elements, as manifested in melodic tones. This invocation of the muse signals that

Guido intends consonantia as consonance properly speaking: not just a sequence of tones but

their agreement or concinnity, something of greater scope and weight than might have been

suggested by terms Guido employs elsewhere for musical construction, such as cantio for the

action of chanting or modulatio for the sequence of tones in melodic realization.

Guido’s list of consonances includes both the ditone (major third) as heard in the Mode-6

final-tenor dyad F-a, and the semiditone (minor third) as heard in the Mode-2 dyad F-D. The

diapente-plus-semitone (minor sixth) of the Mode-3 dyad E-c exceeds the span of Guido’s

largest consonance the diapente (perfect fifth), as indeed direct leaps of the sixth are extremely

rare in the Gregorian repertoire. In Chapter 11 of the Micrologus, however, Guido notes the

diapente-plus-semitone between final E and opening-note c in the Mode-3 antitype Tertia dies

est as an exception to the rule that the opening note of a chant should agree with the final through

one of these six consonances.138 See Example 2.6 (above) for this melody as communicated by

Johannes in a version very similar to Guido’s.

135
As they are called in the earlier Dialogus: GS I: 255–6, tr. in Source Readings, 205.
136
Guidonis Micrologus, 102, 105; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 61.
137
Guidonis Micrologus, 105–06; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 61.
138
Guidonis Micrologus, 140–41; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 66.
 93

In a discussion of two-voice organum, Guido admits the ditone and semiditone as

“concords” (concordiae)—legitimate practical simultaneities—and in his musical examples

touches upon both the Mode-6 dyad F-a and the Mode-2 dyad D-F as part of organa on the

Mode-6 type-melody Sexta hora sedit ad puteum.139 Thus we find in Guido:

1. the major third and minor third numbered among the consonances and conceived as

elements of abstract harmony,

2. the minor sixth between the Mode-3 final E and tenor c cited as an exception to the rule

that beginning notes should relate to the modal final through such consonance, and

3. major and minor thirds as legitimate harmonic intervals in the practice of organum.

Guido makes exception a second time for the extraordinary relationship of E and c in

chants of the deuterus authentic (Mode 3) when he says that only in that mode is it allowed for

beginnings and endings of medial phrases to rise higher than a fifth above the final.140 Hucbald

had observed that no chant begins or cadences higher than the fifth degree above its final,141 to

which the Dialogus had admitted the exception of the diapente-plus-semitone c over E of Mode

3.142 Guido further specifies that chants of the protus and tritus plagal (Modes 2 and 6) do not

begin or end phrases higher than the third degree above the final, whereas chants of deuterus and

tetrardus plagal (Modes 4 and 8) begin as high as the fourth degree.143 Guido thus finds in the

repertoire a generally-observed upper limit for phrase beginnings and endings that corresponds

139
Guidonis Micrologus, 201–202, 212; tr. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 78, 81.
140
Guidonis Micrologus, 154–55; tr. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 68–69.
141
Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 202; cf. GS 1:119b; tr. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and
John, 39.
142
GS I: 257; tr. in Source Readings, 207.
143
Guidonis micrologus 155; tr. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 68–69. Compare the
observation of the Dialogus that beginning on the fifth degree determines the mode to be
authentic, §4.6 below. On the Mode-3 tenor’s shift, from the fifth degree over the final in
Hucbald’s time to the sixth in Guido’s, see §4.11 below.
 94

precisely to the tenor of each and every mode: the sixth degree in Mode 3, the fifth in modes 1,

5, and 7; the third degree in modes 2 and 6; the fourth in modes 4 and 8 (compare Table 2.1

above). Yet Guido draws no explicit connection between these two phenomena (perhaps

allowing the student to experience his own modal Anschauung?), nor is that connection made

explicit even in the treatise of Johannes.

Having dispelled the notion that all medieval theorists considered thirds and sixths to be

dissonances, having indeed observed Guido’s admission of major and minor thirds in organum,

and having found in Guido’s rules for the upper limit of beginnings and endings of phrases an

exact correspondence with the liturgical tenors of psalmody from which Johannes abstracts the

concept of the modal tenor defined in relation to the modal final, nothing prevents us from

understanding the modal dyad of final and tenor as a harmonic entity. It would be wrong not to

acknowledge that terms such as ‘consonance’ and ‘mode’ are contested in the Middle Ages,

however.

Hucbald, for example (as quoted in §2.5 above), does borrow from Boethius the

definition of perfect octave, fifth and fourth as species of consonantia which he distinguishes as

a theoretical category separate from the intervals by which Gregorian melody moves: of the latter

he lists nine, from semitone to major sixth, and for most of these he cites examples from the

repertoire both in ascent and descent.144 The examples he cites for the tritone are settings that a

later source with diastematic notation indeed shows skipping directly from ♮ to F and vice

versa.145 This interval is extremely rare in chant, however, b being substituted for ♮ in most cases

of direct connection with F, and precisely to avoid the tritone that Hucbald demonstrates with

144
Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 142; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 5–6, 19.
See also §2.5 above.
145
PM XII, 254/13 and 105/11, as noted in Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 17.
 95

these examples. In the context of the phrases they inhabit, however, each of Hucbald’s examples

could very well be sung with ♮: in each case that note can be heard striving upward toward c

which follows more or less directly. Hucbald illustrates several instances of chants that include

both the synemmenom tetrachord (which includes the pitch later noted b) and the diezeugmenon

tetrachord (which includes the pitch later noted ♮) and although he offers no particular reason for

the substitution, he does mention that they both appear in all modes and remarks that melodies of

the tritus (modes 5 and 6) rarely lack such mixture.146 As for the major and minor sixth, Hucbald

manages to find at least one example of each as a direct leap in Gregorian chant.147

Johannes also lists nine intervals (modi) “by which melody is woven together,”148 but his

list differs somewhat from Hucbald’s: Johannes leaves out the tritone and adds the unison, which

Hucbald regards as no interval at all.149 Of these nine, Johannes says, six are called consonances

(consonantiae): the same six that Guido recognizes. Johannes volunteers that these are so called

because they often sound together or perhaps because they are related to the mathematical ratios

sesquioctava (9:8), sesquitertia (4:3), sequialtera (3:2), or duplum (2:1), but he is unwilling to

further explain how these harmonics-tradition consonances might be seen to justify those of

chant practice.150

Later chapters of this dissertation explore the theoretical and historical ramification of the

functional theory put forward in the treatise of Johannes. Gregorian recitation formulas,

moreover, remain the basis for modal discernment throughout the history of the cantus tradition.

Yet in this tradition, as in the liturgical chanting of psalms, canticles, introits, and so forth, it is

146
Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 180–84; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 30–31.
147
Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 142; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 17.
148
Johannis De Musica, 67; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 110.
149
Chartier, L’Œuvre musicale d’Hucbald, 138; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 13–14.
150
Johannis De Musica, 67–68; cf. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 110–11.
 96

not the recitation formula that gets the last word, but the final of the concluding antiphon. In

theory as in practice, the recitation tone depends on the antiphon.

Finally, although the treatise of Johannes is the first to make explicit verbal reference to

the psalmodic tenor as a fundamental modal degree, the pedagogical formulas and the liturgical

chants that he and previous authors recommend for modal understanding make this connection

already unmistakable in the language of sounding music. Guido recommends specifically the

responsories of Matins and the psalms of the Office.151 What these repertoires have in common is

formulaic recitation: Office chants with psalm verses in simple reciting tones, responsories with

more elaborate solo verses that also sustain and decorate the modal tenor. It is tempting to

imagine that all Gregorian melody may have developed from the elaboration of these and similar

recitation-formulas. The musical evidence of the sources and the modal theory of the cantus

tradition suggest, however, that all chants of the repertoire, whether formulaic or idiomelic,

simple or complex, enact in full or in part a singular melodic process, each according to the

measurement of one or another of eight modes—and that these modes are marked to some extent

by scale and ambitus but more fundamentally by a play of melodic functions, among which those

of tenor and final are most strongly determining.

151
Guidonis Micrologus, 154; tr. Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 68.