| Abstract | Paper-a:
Within the basic repertory of Gregorian chant, there is a small number of chants described by theorists as defective, even as antiphonae bastardae. The 'defects' consist in a pitch structure that was evidently difficult to reconcile with a diatonic scale system and a fully developed theory of mode. Theorists generally looked upon these chants with some suspicion, designating their modal usage as 'commixture', a mingling of two or more modes, and recommending against such usage, allowing the existing chants because of their antiquity. A theoretical tradition grew up discussing certain problem chants. Eventually, theorists began to acknowledge this phenomenon as positive, even rhetorical.
This paper examines several of these chants as rhetorical - how the commixture of modes serves the rhetoric of the expression of specific aspects of the texts. It illustrates such usage as a general emphasis upon isolated significant words to more specific pointing out of spatial analogies and more specific expressions as drawing attention to the way the text mentions singing.
The discussion draws upon the excellent layout of early modal theory in Charles Atkinson's The Crical Nexus. It compares the earliest versions of the pieces with the Cistercian reform, which explicitly aimed to eliminate commixtures as impure.
Paper -b:
The so-called Mandatum ceremony on Maundy Thursday, the Washing of the Feet, based on the narrative in the Gospel of John 13: 1-17, was considered – by Karl Young and his followers to be a liturgical ceremony which 'could have' been turned into a drama, but did not. In a modern discourse where the notion of 'liturgical drama' is no longer generally accepted to refer to a well-defined medieval phenomenon, the ceremony needs a new discussion as a part of the celebrations on Maundy Thursday with special representational features. In this paper, and based on a newly discovered ceremony in an 11th-century Aquitanian fragment, I intend to discuss this ceremony, liturgically, musically as well as in relation to the biblical text at its basis.
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