The Passion Gospel tones

Good Friday

I recently had occasion to study the Passion Gospel tones as I set a slight revision of the nrsv translation of the Passion according to St John to the traditional chant.*

John Boe accurately described the Passion tones as three sets of interlocking formulae, of which two sets (the C- and S-formulae) are closely related to the ordinary Lesson tone and to each other and the third (T or ✠) is less closely related. (The letters C, S, and T originally referred to the manner of singing; later the first two were interpreted as referring to the Chronista [evangelist] and Synagoga [all the other dialogue save that spoken by Our Lord], while the T was read as a cross, referring to Christ.)

The flex, metrum, and punctum of each of the three formulae generally pose no problems for English that have not been solved before now: the Liber Usualis (LU) gives paradigms for treating stressed final syllables (in most cases in the Passion settings, solutions corresponding to Paradigm A in the various LU tones are used, though they need not be in English†), and there is by now an established tradition of using synaeresis to handle the proximate stressed syllables frequently encountered in English and very occasionally in Latin. The rest of this article deals with the treatment of short phrases in the various formulae; some variations in the handling of final monosyllables, reflecting the difference between secondary and truly tonic stress; and some issues in the use of the tones for English that are not solved by the Latin examples; while in the process pointing out some features of the tones that are not reflected in some English settings. A chart on the Resources page of this site demonstrates many of these points.

The C-passages in Latin are almost entirely regular. The formulae – whose flex, metrum, and punctum correspond to those of the LU Solemn Tone for Lessons at Matins, with the addition of a single la, the lower minor third, to begin each phrase – may be curtailed freely. The accompanying chart shows two different uses of the punctum for two different stress patterns ending with a monosyllable: ‘...faciébant sè’ and ‘...calefáciens sè’. The special formula leading into the T-passages is of one accent with one preparatory syllable; this too may be abbreviated – even to the point of distilling it down to two iterations of the final to set ‘hoc est’.

The S-formulae are a transposition of and, as Boe terms it, a ‘tonal answer’ to, the C-formulae. Their treatment, however, is slightly more complex. Perhaps for expressive reasons, the S-formulae are almost never curtailed (other than by omission of the intonation); synaeresis is generally used freely in the metrum and punctum so as to include all pitches of the cadences. As with the C-passages, the accompanying chart shows different uses of the formulae for different stress patterns. (Noteworthy is the setting of Israél with Hebrew word-final stress.) By contrast, two S-questions, ‘Quid ad nos?’ and ‘Quid fecisti?’, are shortened; the one other seeming exception to this rule, a shortened punctum ‘dic nobis’ in Luke, can be explained as an elision with the preceding metrum.‡ One very short flex – ‘Hic dixit’ – is also ended abruptly, presumably so as to avoid too quick an alternation between the lower minor third and the reciting note.

Since, as I mentioned at the outset, the T-formulae are somewhat different from the others (the flex, metrum, and question are, however, the same as those of the S-formulae, transposed down an octave), they present some other interesting features as well as challenges for English setting.

The accompanying chart shows some shortened and abruptly ended instances of the punctum; there are so many final monosyllables in the T-passages that one suspects this formula was composed especially to accommodate them. Both preparatory syllables of the metrum are always used, even by synaeresis in case of short phrases; a special, truncated form using this synaeresis but omitting the return to the reciting tone is used in the case of the vocatives ‘Pater’ and ‘Iuda’. One metrum ending in a monosyllable uses the equivalent of Paradigm B, presumably on account of the shortness of the text.

The special, expressive introductory formula sometimes used in the T-passages poses some questions, both in terms of the setting of the Latin and in terms of its use in English, since all pitches must be used in every instance. It is a formula of one accent with three preparatory syllables (the first of which is an inseparable sol–la podatus – a fact not reflected in some other English settings – though in many cases this then forms part of a longer synaeresis). The formula as it stands easily accommodates ‘But if I have spoken rightly’ and ‘You say that...’ (for my solution to this entire phrase, see below). For ‘Woman’, adding the sol to the series of notes already being sung on the first syllable allows the final, unaccented syllable to fall on the final fa. The formula is modified for a proparoxytone by the conversion of the accented sol to a sol–fa clivis so as to throw a secondary stress onto the final fa, as in ‘múlier’ (‘woman’ in precisely the same place) and ‘páter mì’. This suggests a solution for the remaining appearance of this formula in the English text: a (separate) epenthetic note, in this case a sol, to accommodate ‘But às it ís’.

The formula by which the T-passages lead back into the Chronista narrative (also used, at a different pitch level, for the conclusion of the portion preceding the Planctus, or in the 1961 revision that suppressed the Planctus tone, for the conclusion of the entire Passion) is a regular one, consisting of one accent with three preparatory syllables. Several times in the Latin it cannot be used in full; the shortened version is treated in several ways:

·  ‘Tu dícis’ simply begins with the final preparatory neume (a torculus), the accented syllable falling in its normal place.

·  ‘Sátis est’, ‘Égo sum’, and ‘Sítio’ are all treated alike (or rather, the first two are treated like the third, suggesting that the copula is felt as an enclitic): the accented antepenult is set to what is normally the second preparatory syllable, and the final preparatory torculus and the normally accented final are joined to set the penult. (Longer phrases ending with proparoxytones, including those with an enclitic copula or pronoun, set the last accented syllable in its ‘normal’ position, with additional reiterations of the final fa for the remaining, unaccented syllables, again corresponding to Paradigm A for handling final monosyllables in several of the LU tones).

·   A couple of these phrases, though, clearly end with a stressed syllable: ‘séd quod tú’ and ‘nón est hínc’, in which the final word is a contradiction of a previous proposition. Both of these are set beginning with the torculus; the normally accented fa becomes a preparatory note for another fa, on which the accent now falls. This has important implications for setting the English translation, and although it is now common in setting English oxytone cadences to save the drop to the final for the oxytone, the anticipation of the final in this case (because of the weight of the preceding torculus, I think; cf. ‘Cranham’, one of the tunes for ‘In the bleak mid-winter’) does not cause a false accent, and I have followed this pattern in the relevant English phrases.

I mentioned earlier the phrase ‘You say that I am a king’. This should by rights be set to the special introductory formula and then the concluding formula; I have joined these so that the final ( fa) of the former is also the (one) reciting note of the latter (cf. the fusion of the metrum and punctum at ‘Si tu es Christus, dic nobis’ which I mentioned above).

The Planctus (lament) is a special tone used for the burial narrative. The same metrum is used here as in the other tones. The initial formula of the Planctus is of one accent with one preparatory syllable, along with an especially expressive intonation that is never omitted. The accent, which normally falls on a la–ti podatus, falls instead on an anticipated epenthesis (la) in the case of a proparoxytone: a fact not reflected in some other settings of the English Passions. This anticipated epenthesis is called for twice in the nrsv Passion according to St John (one of these also in combination with a synaeresis of the reciting tone and the preparatory note, following the model of the short phrase ‘Venit ergo’, shown in the chart).

The concluding formula of the Planctus consists of one accent with three preparatory syllables and the possibility of an epenthetic note to accommodate a final proparoxytone (though aside from two of the four final verses, there is only one such proparoxytone at the end of a Planctus-verse in all of the four Latin Passion texts). Final stressed syllables can easily be handled as they are in other tones, and though there are ostensibly none in the Latin phrases, it is possible, because of the rising shape, to read two of them thus: ‘corpus Ioséph’ and ‘corpus Iesú’.

The final formula of the Planctus appends a ti–la clivis to the conclusion (or, put another way, requires the epenthetic note and converts the final punctum to the clivis); among the endings of the four Latin Passions, the two proparoxytones are set sol, la, ti–la, while in the case of the two paroxytones the sol and la are fused into a podatus so that the final clivis can still be used. Unfortunately we have no example to guide us in setting the short phrase at the end of the nrsv St John Passion: ‘they laid Jesus there’. Ideally ‘Jesus’ would be set sol, la, leaving ‘there’ to fall on the final ti–la clivis – but this would not leave enough syllables for the whole final formula. Options are to omit the first preparatory neume, to join the first and second or the second and third preparatory neumes, or to follow the synaeresis of sol and la used for the two final paroxytones (in Mark and John), even though this podatus would fall on a weak syllable. In the end I chose this latter, so as to retain the expressive do–re–mi scandicus at this, the conclusion of the Passion; I do not think this results in any false accents, and perhaps even feels more natural than placing an accented syllable on this podatus as in the Latin.

*  The text is that proposed by an episcopally approved working group attempting to address the antisemitism that has too often used the Good Friday Liturgy as an excuse for appalling acts of violence; the proposed revision of the Passion narrative replaces ‘the Jews’ [Ioudaîoi] with ‘Judeans’, ‘Judean leaders’, and other such terms.

†  It is noteworthy that in the metra of the T-passages, a monosyllabic preposition governing and preceding a monosyllabic personal pronoun – ‘in me’, ‘pro te’, ‘de me’ – is set such that the preposition falls in the normally accented position, as in Paradigm A of the LU Prophecy / Lesson Tone. English speakers may find this counterintuitive, and the several examples of the T-punctum ending with a monosyllablic pronoun in the normal stressed position suggest that the prepositions in the aforementioned metra are not necessarily understood to be stressed (W. Sidney Allen’s Vox Latina confirms that such prepositions were in fact, at least classically, de-emphasized). The appropriate settings of equivalent phrases in English will depend, of course, upon whether the preposition or the pronoun is rightfully stressed in the context in question.

‡  Two other questions in the S-dialogue with seemingly too few syllables are not shortened, but rather given full form by synaeresis of the reciting tone with the first preparatory note: ‘Numquid ego?’ and ‘Unde es tu?’ This might be explained by reading the first preparatory note as a liquescent accommodating a hidden syllable. I have chosen to set ‘Where are you from?’ (the second of the aforementioned questions) in shortened form, rather than to follow literally the notes used for ‘Unde es tu?’.