A wordless melody associated with the alleluia of the Mass in the Franco-Roman liturgy. In his Liber officialis (c830) Amalar of Metz identified as sequentia a melisma replacing a repetition of the alleluia after the verse. Such sequentiae are first documented as additions to the Compiègne antiphoner F-Pn lat.17436, a manuscript dated to the end of the 9th century. Hence sequentiae, without texts, are attested before (texted) sequences (i.e. prosae), and it was formerly assumed that the latter developed from the former; Anselm Hughes in his Anglo-French Sequelae (London, 1934) proposed that the term ‘sequela’, not previously used in a musical sense, be taken to denote ‘the melody … in this primitive [wordless] condition’, so as to avoid ambiguity with the word ‘sequence’. But the ambiguity is not intolerable, and the view that the sequentia represents a primitive condition of the sequence is in any case debatable. The relationship of these terms continues to be argued, but the tendency in recent scholarship has been to use ‘sequentia’ as Amalar used it – an expanded melisma to replace the usual repetition of the jubilus after the alleluia verse, and ‘sequence’ for the genre – melodies with or without words. See Plainchant, 6(iv); Prosa; Sequence (i), §6.
RICHARD L. CROCKER