THE OLD HISPANIC RITE AS EVIDENCE FOR THE EARLIEST FORMS OF THE WESTERN CHRISTIAN LITURGIES

Abstract

I have prepared for our discussion today in the first instance by reread ing several of the most recent contributions to our topic by our distin guished chair, Kenneth Levy.1 His has been a salutary activity for us all in recent years, for it has reminded us of the importance of painstaking comparative studies in the face of tempting efforts to shift the narrative strategies governing our efforts to understand the early history of litur gical chant in the West. As in every other branch of musicology, the sto ries we like to tell depend for the most part on the kinds of stories we like to tell. For a time, we only told stories about written versions of im mutable works created by heroic composers. With a good deal of help from other disciplines, we then began to tell stories that privileged pro cesses other than writing and that dissolved the work itself into a func tion of ?depending on the repertory in question? orality of perfor mance or the analyst. To recognize the importance of narrative strate gies in our work and their multiplicity has itself been salutary. But it will continue to be salutary only to the extent that we continue to en gage in the process of testing these strategies against what we can learn the hard way and to the extent that we continue to remain willing to change strategies ?even new ones? for the sake of telling a better, ri cher story. Much of the history of musicology is captured in the title of a recent novel by Lamar Herrin: The Lies Boys Tell. This does not mean that boys and girls both should not continue to work hard at telling bet