daniel persigehl — essays

The Wandering Tone

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Most of the psalm tones are homebodies. Each has a single reciting note — a tenor, the pitch on which the bulk of each verse is chanted — and it holds that note faithfully through both halves of the verse, bending only at the mediant and the ending. The tonus peregrinus is the exception. It will not stay put: its second half recites a whole step lower than its first. [The tenor drops from la to sol between the two halves of the verse — hence peregrinus, “foreign” or “wandering.” The effect is subtle sung but unmistakable once the ear knows to listen for it.]

It is old, and the old theorists already treat it as an oddity — a tone that does not behave, filed among the regular eight with an apology. [Already flagged as irregular in the Commemoratio brevis (9th c.); cf. the discussion in Willi Apel, Gregorian Chant (Bloomington, 1958), pp. 208–212, where the tone’s antiquity and its Eastern parallels are laid out at length.] By long tradition it is wedded to a single psalm, In exitu Israel — Psalm 113 in the Vulgate numbering — whose opening is itself about going out: Israel leaving Egypt, a people picking up and moving. [Vulgate/Septuagint numbering; the Hebrew tradition divides the same material as Pss. 114–115. The association of tone and psalm is ancient and very nearly universal in the Western books. Cf. also the glossary at Beatus vir on the numbering question generally.]

I do not think the pairing is an accident, though I cannot prove it was designed. A tone that migrates mid-verse, set to the psalm of a migration; a melody that refuses to settle, carrying the words of a people who could not settle either. Whoever first joined them had an ear not only for pitch but for sense. The wandering is the point.

Why a Dead Language

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

The question comes every year, usually around October, usually from a bright student who has just realized that no one in the hallway speaks Latin and suspects, not unreasonably, that he is being asked to memorize a corpse.

It is a fair question and it deserves better than the usual answers. “It helps your SAT vocabulary” is true and beneath the subject. “It trains the mind” is true and unfalsifiable. Neither is why anyone who loves the language loves it.

Here is the honest version. A living language is a river you stand in; you cannot see its whole length, because it is still moving and you are wet. A language that has stopped moving can be seen entire. Latin is finished, and because it is finished it can be known in a way no living tongue can be — its whole literature is gathered, its grammar described to the last exception, its long argument with itself concluded. To learn it is to be handed two thousand years of one conversation, complete.

That the speakers are dead is not the defect. It is the condition of the gift. The dead cannot change their minds, and so they can finally be listened to.

In Praise of the Small Page

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

There was a stretch of the web, now mostly gone, when a personal page was a small and finished thing. It loaded at once. It held a few hundred words, a list of links to friends, perhaps a photograph that took a moment to paint itself down the screen. You read it, and then you went somewhere else.

What replaced it was not better, only larger. A page today may carry more code than the collected works of an ancient author, most of it spent watching you read. [The surveillance is the point, not an accident of growth. A page that sells nothing and counts no visitors has no reason to be heavy.] The text itself, the part you came for, is a thin seam in a thick rock of machinery.

I do not think the old way was primitive so much as sufficient. A page that loads instantly, works without scripts, and says one true thing has solved the problem that a page exists to solve. The improvements worth keeping from the years since — that the type can resize for a small screen, that the characters of every language can be written down without ceremony [Unicode did in one table what a century of competing national character sets could not: every script a reader might need, addressable at once. Cf. the old mojibake of a Japanese page opened in the wrong encoding — a problem that simply no longer exists.] — are improvements of reach, not of weight. They cost nothing and they ask nothing of the reader.

So this is a small page, and means to stay one.