ABSTRACT
One of the watersheds in the history of Western music is the point in the thirteenth century when notators began to indicate measured silence. Indicating not just silence, but silence that has a precise duration, is what made possible many of the sophisticated uses of silence as an integral part of later Western art music. Second-mode tracts are builtup of standardized phrases, so there is rarely if ever any ambiguity about whether a musical gesture is a cadence or not. The longest of the second-mode tracts, Deus deus meus and Qui habitat, take in the region of ten minutes to perform. The chapter explores the uses of silence in Gregorian chant, a repertory that appears to have been created on Roman models in late-eighth-century Francia. It considers silence within the psalms chanted by the whole monastic community. In Benedictine monasteries, the recitation of the entire Psalter within the Divine Office was one of the major components of monastic duty.
