Music, Texts, and Transcriptions

The four chants represent two chant genres: antiphon and responsory. In the following pages, you will find transcriptions of both the music and texts, in addition to recordings of the former and translations of the latter. Each set of chants is preceeded by general comments about the musical features. Particular attention is given to the text parallelism between the Francis/Clare chants, an effect created by the unique text underlay (i.e., the two different texts written under the same musical staff.)

Five students of the Department of Music at Columbia University kindly contributed their voices to the recording of the Francis/Clare chants at the Grotto Church of Notre Dame, New York on April 14, 2015: Elliott S. Cairns, Paula Harper, Anne Levitsky, Isabella Livorni, and Matthew Ricketts. Although historically these chants were likely to be sung by the nuns, male voices are assigned to the singing of the Franciscan chants in order to highlight the differences between the Franciscan and the Clarissan chants. Each chant is intoned by a soloist, and the Magnificat is sung by alternating voices. Qingfan Jiang transcribed the musical examples, and Jane Huber prepared the digital files.