The Liturgy, Its Music, and Their Power to Persuade

This chapter devotes to a study of two aspects of the liturgy that emerge from the details of Ademar's treatment: the use of rhetorical gestures in the texts of the chant in support of Saint Martial's rank as apostle, and the creation of elaborate melismatic chants, some to be sung by Ademar himself, to persuade by purely aesthetic means. In the early eleventh century, the scriptorium at Martial returned to the sequence when it produced Pa 1120, the Mass book that formed part of the program to codify the abbey's repertory of liturgical music. Ademar created his own sequentiary as part of his responsibilities for providing the music in Pa 1121, writing the rubrics, musical notation and the texts of the partially texted sequentiae, while drawing on the sequence melodies preserved in Pa 1120 and the sequentiaries in Pa 1118 and 1084. Keywords: Ademar; liturgical music; Saint Martial