Latin songs with refrains most often feature single melodic lines—Christopher Page once wrote that such songs have “bold and ingratiating musical settings,” and the popularity of these works with early music ensembles certainly underscores their approachability and singability. Among the few refrain songs with polyphonic settings, a handful set the stanzas polyphonically and the refrain monophonically, highlighting the formal structure by means of a change in musical texture. More than marking form, the setting of refrains in a single melodic line is suggestive of how refrains represent a moment of coming together, an opportunity to sing as if with one voice, quasi una voce.
Today’s Tuesday Tune is Exultantes in partu virginis, a refrain song surviving in several sources with and without notation between the 12th and 16th centuries. Its later copying in an elaborately troped Circumcision Office (January 1) from Le Puy-en-Velay includes in an appendix a polyphonic voice to be added to the otherwise monophonic song. But, this polyphonic addition only applies to the stanzas and not the refrain. The result—as you can hear in this recording by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois—is that rich yet simple polyphonic stanzas alternative regularly with a one-word monophonic refrain, gaudeamus (first couple of stanzas with translation below).
As I explore in Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book, the refrain in devotional Latin song brought individuals and communities together in the moment of performance through the acts of remembering together, responding collectively, and worshipping communally. Drawing on the rhetoric, grammar, form, and musical texture of Latin refrain songs, I illustrate how poets and composers embedded ideas about performance, community, and communal participation in their compositions. Exultantes in partu virginis is one example in Chapter 3 that focuses on both the grammar of the refrain itself—namely the first person plural of “gaudeamus,” “let us rejoice”—and on how musical form and texture work together to craft a layered experience of singing as if with one voice by literally bringing voices together in monophony for the repeated refrain.
More on the refrain and its multivalent meanings in performance, including its possible connection to dance, in Chapter 3, “Singing the Refrain: Shaping Performance and Community Through Form,” of Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song.
Grenoble, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 4413, fol. 28r, middle stanzas and refrain of “Exultantes in partu virginis”
1. Exultantes in partu virginis
Quo deletur peccatum hominis
Ad honorem superni numinis
Gaudeamus.
2. Facta parens, non viri coitu
Quem concepit de Sancto Spiritu
Virgo parit sed sine genitu.
Gaudeamus.
etc.
1. Exulting in the birthing of the Virgin
by which the sins of man are expunged,
to the honor of the supreme divinity,
let us rejoice.
2. Made a parent without congress with a man,
the Virgin gives birth to the one she conceived
through the Holy Spirit, but without generation;
let us rejoice.
etc.
Source: Grenoble, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 4413, fols. 27v-28v (monophonic) and 162r (polyphonic supplement)
Selected Bibliography
Arlt, Wulf. "Einstimmige Lieder des 12. Jahrhunderts und Mehrstimmiges in französischen Handschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts aus Le Puy." Schweizer Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 3 (1978): 7-47.
———. "The Office for the Feast of the Circumcision from Le Puy." Translated by Lori Kruckenberg, Kelly Landerkin and Margot E. Fassler. In The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography: Written in Honor of Professor Ruth Steiner, edited by Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer, 324-343. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Chevalier, Ulysse. Prosolarium ecclesiae aniciensis: Office en vers de la Circoncision en usage dans l'église du Puy. Paris: A. Picard, 1894.
Connor, Steven. "Choralities." Twentieth-Century Music 13, no. 1 (2016): 3–23.
Crocker, Richard L. "Two Recent Editions of Aquitanian Polyphony." Plainsong and Medieval Music 3, no. 1 (1994): 57-101.
———. An Introduction to Gregorian Chant. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Fuller, Sarah. "Aquitanian Polyphony of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries." 3 vols. PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1969.
Page, Christopher. Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100-1300. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1987.
Peraino, Judith A. "Listening to the Sirens: Music as Queer Ethical Practice." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 4 (2003): 433-470.
———. Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.
Quasten, Johannes. Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity. Translated by Boniface Ramsey. Washington, D.C.: National Association of Pastoral Musicians, 1983 [1973].
Treitler, Leo. "The Aquitanian Repertories of Sacred Monody in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries." PhD diss., Princeton University, 1967.
© Mary Channen Caldwell, January 18, 2022.