ABSTRACT
As with any great responsory, Conclusit consists of two parts, the respond and the verse. The respond is given an individual, fixed artistic melody (composed anew, crafted from traditional materials or somewhere in between), whereas the verse is usually sung to one of eight invariable formulaic tones, freely adaptable to the length of the text and the position of its initial and medial accents. Not every flat appears in each individual choirbook: three appear in only one of them, the remaining three in both. But this was enough for me to infer, first, that the additions were made independently of one another, and second, that they depended on an established local tradition, and not just on an individual’s whim. Michel Huglo tells us that in Gallican chants based on biblical texts “there are characteristic divergences from the Vulgate version”.
