The primary goal of the present study has been to uncover the compositional principles of the second-mode tracts. The Roman origin of the core-repertory second-mode tracts is suggested by their use of the Roman Psalter (or the Septuagint, in the case of Domine audiui), and is confirmed by the close relationship of the second-mode tracts in the Old Roman and Romano-Frankish traditions. Textual syntax is an important factor in the formal structure of the second-mode tracts: the phrases tend to divide in accordance with the syntax, or follow textual cues. This study goes beyond an identification of the phrases (cola), commata and syllaba of the second-mode tracts, together with the textual and/or formal contexts in which each is used, by exploring the connections between exegetically important words, unexpected, emphatic or non-formulaic phrases, and non-syntactical text divisions.

The history of the genre and its compositional chronology

The formal and structural characteristics of the second-mode tracts illuminate the history of the genre. The genre's rhetorical characteristics suggest that each tract in its extant form was the product of a single creative effort by an individual or group of individuals, rather than evolving over many centuries, and this creativity almost certainly took place in the papal schola cantorum in Rome before the mid-eighth century. The Old Roman tradition tends to use more standard formulaic phrases and fewer emphatic ones than the Romano-Frankish tradition, suggesting a gradual process of progressive stereotyping within the long oral tradition in Rome.

Attempts to establish a compositional chronology of the second-mode tracts have been characteristic of previous analyses of the genre. I argue that, rather than being a second-mode tract, De necessitatibus is a gradual with a close melodic relationship to the tracts, and that the state of the chant can be understood without needing to account in chronological terms for its incompatibility with the norms of the genre. This is in contrast to previous studies, in which the differentiation of De necessitatibus from the other chants has generally led to it being considered as the latest of the second-mode tracts. Occasionally De necessitatibus has been seen as the earliest second-mode tract, based on the theory that since the ninth-century second-mode tracts show the closest affinities to Deus deus meus and Qui habitat, these two chants are likely to have been the most recently composed, in a musical idiom which was still current.