Compositional Planning in the Roman Mass Proper

Abstract

The members of the panel have already read a long version of my paper, and therefore I'll address this brief summary of it to you the audience, enabling you to have some idea of what it was that served as starting point for their own papers. The idea behind mine was not so much that my colleagues were to respond to its content as that they were invited to offer examples, from their own areas of expertise, of the liturgical phenomenon I designate by the term planning. By compositional planning I mean a pre-conceived idea that is carried out in the composition of a series of chants over a significant portion of the liturgical year. The best known example of this from the Roman liturgy is the use of numerically ordered psalm texts for the communions of Lent; the weekdays of Lent from Ash Wednesday to the Friday before Palm Sunday derive their texts, in sequence, from Psalms 1 through 26. In my paper I described my experiences in searching out other such examples within my own area of study, the Roman Mass Proper, and I expressed the hope that the panelists would find further instances of the same kind in other liturgical repertories, whether from Mass or Office, or from eastern or western rites. My interest in liturgical compositional planning came about by accident, during a seminar I conducted in the fall of 1989 at Chapel Hill. I had been much impressed by reports of a seminar given by David Hughes at Harvard in which two alleluias an earlier one, Dies sanctificatus, and a later one, Non vos relinquam were both transcibed from more than a hundred manuscripts. The result was that the melody of the earlier chant showed itself to be remarkably stable from manuscript to manuscript, but that the later one displayed much variation. Thus, to oversimplify: early chants are melodi-