A model for the Roman liturgical order for processions on Sundays
was Easter, the festal day described in Ordo Romanus I,
rather than the preceding Sunday, perhaps a more obvious pattern for
a procession within the Proprium de
tempore.Michel Andrieu, ed.,
Les Ordines Romani du haut Moyen Age, 5 vols. (Louvain,
1931, 1948–61) II, 68–9, Ordo I, 5: ‘nam
prima feria regio tertia, id est paschae, secunda feria’, etc. ;
I, 7: ‘Diebus itaque sollemnibus, id est
Pascha’. ‘Id est’ might be interpreted ‘for
example’. Note that Easter is only one example of the papal
processional procedures found only in this ordo. See John F.
Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship,
Orientalia Christiana Analecta 228 (Rome, 1987), 131–2. The
present study originated as a paper for the session ‘Music for
Festal Days’ at the 34th International Congress on Medieval
Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 1999. The singing by the
Hebrew people of Hosanna and Benedictus qui venit
to acclaim the one progressing into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday would
seem to be the ideal archetype for a procession with song to
replicate a biblical event, reported uniformly in all four
Gospels.Matt. 21:8–9; Mark
11:8–10, Luke 19:36–8 (with different wording); John
12:12–13. The Old Testament presaging of Benedictus is
Psalm 117:26. The visual replay with the symbols of olive
branches and palm fronds and the commemorative Palmesel,
integral to the procession, have been studied in critical detail by
Karl Young and many who have followed in the wake of his
pathbreaking The Drama of the Medieval Church. Much of the
music has been expertly studied by Terence
Bailey. On musical and prayer
formularies from the typikon and early Western patristic citations
(i.e. Bede, Aldhelm, Amalarius and Drogo of Metz), see Hermann J.
Gräf, Palmenweihe und Palmprozession in der lateinischen
Liturgie (Kaldenkirchen, 1950), 10–15, 30–2. See
also Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols.
(Oxford, 1962), I: 90–8, 519, 527, 533, 549; Terence Bailey,
The Processions of Sarum and the Western Church (Toronto,
1971), 33–40 (Examples 6–14); 166–7
(Table 2). (The acclamation Benedictus qui
venit–Hosanna in excelsis that follows the Sanctus of the
Mass precluded movement by its position within the liturgy.) By the
time of the pilgrim Egeria, who visited Jerusalem in the early 380s,
the commemoration of the Evangelists' historiae had
engendered a meeting at the very spot where in biblical times
infants, strewing palms sang the celebrated
Benedictus verse, now converted into a
refrain.‘Et jam cum coeperit
esse hora undecima [die dominica] legitur ille locus de
evangelio, ubi infantes cum ramis vel palmis occurrerunt Domino,
dicentes: Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Et statim
levat se episcopus et omnis populus; porro inde de summo monte
Oliveti totum pedibus itur. Nam totus populus ante ipsum cum hymnis
vel antiphonis, respondentes semper; Benedictus qui venit in
nomine Domini’. [Peregrinatio ad loca sancta]
Itinerarium 31, 1, ed. Pierre Maraval, Egérie:
Journal de Voyage, Sources Chrétiennes 296 (Paris,
1982), 274; trans. John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels to
the Holy Land (Jerusalem, 1981), 133. Other translations and
descriptive material are found in Cyrille Vogel, Medieval
Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. William
G. Storey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen (Washington, DC, 1986), 11. On
the date of Egeria's report, see Peter Jeffery, ‘The
Earliest Christian Chant Repertory Recovered: The Georgian Witnesses
to Jerusalem Chant’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 47/1 (1994), 2–3. Perhaps a half-century before,
Chrysostom (Homilia habita in magnum hebdomadam 2) had
allied the Hosanna exclamation with the exhortation
‘Praise the Lord, O my soul!’ of Psalm 145. See James
McKinnon, ed., Music in Early Christian Literature
(Cambridge, 1987), 83 (no. 175); cf. Thomas J. Talley, The
Origins of the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, MN, 1991),
186. For the Palm Sunday agendas according to other Eastern practices
(e.g., Armenian, Georgian and the Anastasis Typikon) see Baldovin,
The Urban Character, 77, 80–1, 98.