inception in the exigencies and inspiration of the Alleluia chant or jubilation. During the celebration of the Mass, as the Gradual ended in its last Alleluia, the choir continued chanting the final syllable of that word in cadences of musical exultings. The melody or cadence to which this final a of the Alleluia was chanted, was called the sequentia. The words which came to be substituted for its cadenced reiteration were called the prosa. By the twelfth century the two terms seem to have been used interchangeably. Thus arose the prose Sequence, so plastic in its capability of being moulded by melody to verse. Its songful qualities lay in the sonorousness of the words and in their syllabic correspondence with the notes of the melody to which they were sung.[1]
In the year 860, Norsemen sacked the cloister of Jumièges in Normandy, and a fleeing brother carried his precious Antiphonary far away to the safe retreat of St. Gall. There a young monk named Notker, poring over its contents, perceived that words had been written in the place of the repetitions of the final a of the Alleluia. Taking the cue, he set to work to compose more fitting words to correspond with the notes to which this final a was sung. So these lines of euphonious and fitting words appear to have had their beginning in Notker's scanning of that fugitive Antiphonary, and his devising labour. Their primary purpose was a musical one; for they were a device—mnemotechnic, if one will—to facilitate the chanting of cadences previously vocalized with difficulty through the singing of one simple vowel sound. Notker showed his work to his master, Iso, who rejoiced at what his gifted pupil had accomplished, and spurred him on by pointing out that in his composition one syllable was still sometimes repeated or drawn out through several successive notes. One syllable to each note was the principle which Notker now set himself to realize; and he succeeded.
- ↑ The verbal Sequence or prosa was thus a species or trope. Tropes were interpolations or additions to the older text of the Liturgy. The Sequences were the tropes appended to the last Alleluia of the Gradual, the psalm chanted in the celebration of the Mass, between the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel. Cf. Leon Gautier, Poésie liturgique au moyen âge, chap. iii. (Paris, 1886); ibid. Œuvres poétiques d'Adam de Saint Victor, p. 281 sqq, (3rd ed., Paris, 1894).
