Unknown Passion Tones in Sixteenth-Century Hispanic Sources

Abstract

HE RECITATION Of the Passion, as is well known, differs markedly from the liturgical reading of scripture; in the latter, a continuous pattern is used, whereas the text of the Passion is distributed among three different readers, each assuming a different role: the part of the narrator, the part of Christ, and the part of the Jews and disciples. The earliest sources of liturgical readings of this text already show a clear distinction of three pitch levels, but at this time all three parts were sung by one reader.' The words of Christ were performed at a solemn pace and lower pitch than was the actual narration, which proceeded at a pitch level between that of Christ and the higher range assigned to the crowd and the other persons later subsumed under the term synagoga. Once this reading pattern was fixed in musical notation on exact pitch levels, there emerged one particularly important and widely used tone combination which became the official Roman Passion tone in the sixteenth century: the F model with the three pitch levels focusing respectively on f, c', and f'. Beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this tone combination occurs in a considerable number of sources, especially in Germany.2 It shares the same alternating voice levels with the polyphonic Gospel reading, which seems to have enjoyed great popularity in the same region.3 Not unlike the three-part Gospel reading with its different levels of recitation alternating with short polyphonic sections, the three voice levels of the Passion tone in F also furnish the simultaneous recitation tones