The Relationship between the Festal Office and the New Sequence: Evidence from Medieval Picardy

Abstract

The new sequence emerged in the decades around 1100 as a poetic and musical renewal of a long-established proper chant of the mass. These new specimens of the genre demonstrate not only that their poet-composers turned to accentual verse for technical and formal inspiration and away from pre-existing melodies as the structural source and supplier for the text, but also that they sought out different approaches to modality, melodic vocabulary, and text-music relationships in their musical settings. A close analysis of the melodic and textual variants as well as the transmission history of Celeste organum demonstrates that how new sequences were known in their earliest iterations and how they initially functioned liturgically often differed significantly from later instantiations. In many cases, the most innovative melodic features of the new sequence appear to have been unsuccessfully transmitted. These ‘disruptions’ suggest conscious redacting of received models in order to make the pieces conform better to the musical style of the early sequence and the established context of the Gregorian mass. Furthermore, medieval Picardy appears to have been an important region for the production, circulation, and reception of the new sequence in its earliest phase of transmission.