A Western liturgical chant is a musically heightened delivery of a religious, often psalmic, text. Communicating the sense of this text correctly in order that the singers and listeners could meditate on it was one of the central roles of medieval Western chant. Medieval theorists make it clear that cadences on modally significant notes, usually coinciding with syntactical breaks in the text, were a major factor in this communication.

Having established what the verbal text is, the first step in the analysis of any chant must therefore be to identify the text's syntactical divisions. In syllabic chants, this may be a necessary preliminary to identifying the cadential notes and their hierarchy. By contrast, since the second-mode tract phrases are generally formulaic with clearly defined cadences, identification of the phrase boundaries is rarely contentious. This chapter outlines the broadest level of structural organisation within the second-mode tracts – the division of the biblical text into tract verses and half verses – before turning to the way in which musical phrase divisions within the tract verses articulate and reinforce the textual grammar. There is generally little or no choice about how the words might be divided into musical phrases without compromising clarity of syntax and, because of the formularity of the genre, phrase divisions which contradict the textual syntax are easily identified and demand to be accounted for.

Verse divisions in the Bible and in the second-mode tracts

While the verses of psalms and canticles were not numbered in early-medieval Psalters, the texts were copied per cola et commata, ‘laying out each of the constituent parts of the periodus on a new line’. This makes the medieval understanding of their verse structure readily recoverable. In what follows, I have drawn primarily on the early Insular Roman Psalter tradition. The earliest Roman Psalter manuscript is the early-eighth-century Vespasian Psalter from Canterbury; the first Italian manuscripts of the Roman Psalter date only from the eleventh century, and the Insular manuscripts are thus the closest one can get chronologically to the early-medieval Roman tradition.