I had a little note in one of my Liber's that talked about the Sacred Congregation of Rites allowing the "abrupt mediant cadence" to be used in certain modes (like Mode 2, Mode 8, etc.) for monosyllable words.
I think Bruce Ford also made reference to this in his articles.
Does anyone have a scan or PDF file that talks about this? And the official decree? (clearly laid out?)
This is the decree in question: It is translated in Hayburn's Papal Teaching on Sacred Music on page 471.
There is an interesting reference to this decree in the preface to the 1913 Vesperale: This is translated in Hayburn p. 271.
I am not sure how widespread this usage was. If you are curious about seeing a practical application of this usage, you could look at p. 355 of the Processionarium S.O.P. which explains and gives several examples of the 20th c. Dominican practice for the second mode mediations. (http://www.musicasacra.com/dominican/processionarium-1913-Cormier.pdf ; page 371 of the pdf.
If you have the comments formatted as HTML, you put in and it should show up properly, as long as the image is hosted on some website. I was able to find those two citations on Google Books, and there is a useful feature on that site to make clips of a part of a page, and it then gives you the code to embed it on another website. In this case it includes another HTML code to provide a link to the original source.
Jeff, You probably already know this, but not only was it on monosyllabic words, but on Hebrew words as well (i.e. "Israel"). This was the way it was done in the Dominican Rite until the early 1960's when they adopted the more common Roman mediant on II and VIII. I have many Dominican books marked in this way from the 1940's and 50's. Sarum I believe and other uses did similarly. I remember hearing in an Anglican service just such a mediant with mode II used chanting in english. I hadn't realised it was done in the Roman Chant as well at least in some places it seems.
Jeff, I have at least TWO different Dominican Compline Books and a Dominican Vesperale. Perhaps Fr Thompson already has them scanned on his Dominican Liturgy site? If not, I'd be glad to share what I have.
For the record, people seemed extremely interested in this subject at the turn of the subject. Page 296-297 of the Combe book never fail to fascinate me...
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