Historiographical Problems of the Tonus Peregrinus Historiographical Problems of the Tonus Peregrinus

The forms and liturgical functions of the collateral psalm tone tonus peregrinus (hereinafter referred to as “t. p.”) are well known to any student of Western psalmody. The question of its origin, on the other hand, is commonly approached not only with opacity but sometimes also with a sense of impropriety, or even a manifest lack of interest. Vague assertions about Jewish or “eastern ” provenance and drastic simplifications seem to suffice for the purposes of modern historiography. This is all the more surprising as early twentieth-century ethnomusicology, in alliance with contemporaneous research into synagogal traditions, led to some important and relevant insights, even if these should be regarded as tentative rather than conclusive. Modern musicology seems therefore to have sidestepped two once widely discussed problems in the historiography of Gregorianism: 1.) the extent to which the t. p. is set aside from the other psalm tones; and 2.) whether or not it can be said to have a more immanent Jewish ancestry than that possessed by the main corpus of Western psalmody? No theorists before 1700 discuss the origins of the t. p. directly, but the question has been subject to much discussion and considerable disagreement since the first stirrings of modern musicology in the eighteenth century. The gentleman-scholar Roger North, in his Memoires o