Advent responsory Ecce Dominus veniet and the diverse chant traditions of late antiquity (Responsories Pt 6)

Source: Gregobase (Sandhofe)

For today's Advent responsory I have selected Ecce Dominus veniet, which is used both on Thursday in the second week of Advent, and on the Second Sunday of Advent.

It's a nice example of Advent texts with something of an eschatological dimension to them.  Here is the text, which is based on Zachariah 14, and Isaiah 40:

R. Ecce / Dóminus véniet, et omnes Sancti eius cum eo, † et erit in die illa lux magna: † et exíbunt de Ierúsalem sicut aqua munda: et regnábit Dóminus in ætérnum * Super omnes gentes. V. Ecce Dóminus cum virtúte véniet: † et regnum in manu eius, et potéstas, et impérium. R. Super omnes gentes.

R. Behold, the Lord shall come, and all His saints with Him, and it shall come to pass in that day that the light shall be great; and they shall go out from Jerusalem like clean water; and the Lord shall be King for ever, * Over all the earth. V. Behold, the Lord cometh with a host, and in His hand are the kingdom, and power, and dominion. R. Over all the earth.

One of the intriguing aspects of this particular responsory is that a recent study has identified it as one of a group of responsories that may have entered into the Roman repertoire from Gaul and/or Spain, since the adaptations to the text are mirrored in a responsory in the Old Hispanic repertoire, and although the melody is different too the Gregorian chant version, the number of notes allocated to each syllable is essentially the same in the Gregorian and Old Hispanic versions (1).

And that brings us nicely to the topic I want to start exploring today, namely, when and where did responsories originate, and how did the repertoire develop to the form that we know know it in?

Pretty much everything about these questions, it has to be said upfront, is highly contested, with no clear answers on many points.

Different chant traditions for responsories?

The repertoire of responsories used today in the Office (to the very limited extent that they are actually used) are examples of Gregorian chant, or as musicologists prefer to call it, Franco-Roman chant, to reflect the fact that what emerged as Gregorian chant somewhere around the twelfth century probably represents (largely) the interaction of two different styles and repertoires of chant, Old Roman and Gallican.

The best known and arguably earliest unambiguous reference to the great responsories of Matins is in the Rule of St Benedict (circa 510-28).  

Roman origins?

For this reason, most liturgiologists have long assumed that responsories originated in Rome sometime in the fifth century with a set of psalm based responsories derived repertoire of refrains used with psalms displaced by the shift from responsorial (soloist sings the verses, people sing the refrain) to antiphonal (two choirs singing alternating verses) singing of the psalms (2).  

They also argue that a particular set of psalm based responsories, used since the eighth century reform of the Matins reading cycle in the period after Epiphany, represent a set of proto-responsories that attest to a shift to a fixed weekly psalm cursus before St Benedict, some time in the late fifth century (3).

The alternative theory is that responsories  - as for several other elements such as hymns - were introduced into the Roman Office at some point, perhaps through the influence of the Benedictine Office.

I'll go into the arguments for and against these theories in due course, but suffice to note now that many musicologists have long been skeptical of the Roman origin theory, and there is a growing body of evidence to support those doubts.

Non-Roman responsory repertoire

Those doubts have rather been amplified by the discovery, in recent decades, that responsories seem to have been a part of all of the major Western chant traditions that we know about from late antiquity and through the early middle ages.  

In some cases, such as Ambrosian and old Hispanic chant, the distinct responsories of these traditions survived long enough to be recorded in some form, and continued to evolve along side the Gregorian tradition.  

Similarly, although Beneventan and Old Roman chant were eventually suppressed in favour of Gregorian, musicologists have been able to identify a number of manuscripts that preserve at least some of the distinctive repertoire or versions of responsories of these traditions.  

The Gallican repertoire dissapeared rather earlier (from the late eighth century onwards, under Pepin the Short, compared to the tenth century for Beneventan for example) and was more thoroughly suppressed, though some work aimed at identifying the traces it has left on the repertoire has been done.

How far back do these various responsory sets go though, and do they all originate from one common source?

More on that anon.

In the meantime, here is a polyphonic setting of the respond to today's responsory by Praetorius to listen to.

 

Notes

(1) Rebecca Maloy, Mason Brown, Benjamin Pongtep Cefkin, Ruth Opara, Megan Quilliam And Melanie Shaffer, Revisiting ‘Toledo, Rome, and the Legacy of Gaul’: new evidence from the

Divine Office, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 31, 1, 1–35, 2022.

(2) The most developed version of the theory is set out in R. Le Roux: ‘Etude de l’office dominical et férial: les répons “de psalmis” pour les matines de l’Epiphanie à la Septuagésime selon les cursus romain et monastique’, EG, vi (1963), 39–148.

(3) For the most recent articulation and summary of this theory, see Lazlo Dobsay, The Divine Office in History, in Alcuin Reid (ed), T&T Clark Companion to the Liturgy, London, 2016, pp 207-238.