"The responsory is the oldest form of the ecclesiastical song employed in the Church... The responsorial song consists of a song built up of strophes or of verses sung by a soloist, and of a recurring refrain or responsum sung by the congregation after each strophe or verse." —Jungmann, The Early Liturgy, p. 285.
How's that work? Funny you should ask. Some examples here and here.
6 comments:
Aww... the links don't work.
Elizabeth,
I'm confused why they don't work for you; I got them to work.
Sunday, 21 April
St. Anselm
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anselm/
I guess it must be my computer's security settings then. Thanks.
What strikes me about the responsories is how hard they are to translate, because of how cleverly composed they are. While largely straight out of Scripture, so often they rely on ambiguities or rather multiple senses of connecting words to achieve beautiful unity of confession that ties everything together (perhaps sometimes too clever to avoid drawing attention to its cleverness). Mayes has done a service (via the Leipzig Brevier) etc. in BPB in giving us the simpler tones to sing these Breviaries to.
Breviaries => Responsories. duh!
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