prosan.

1786 T. Busby Compl. Dict. Music Prosæ, certain hymns used in the Romish church consisting of rhyme without measure.

1841 M. Fuller Let. 8 Sept. (1983) II. 230 You showed me in June a prosa that you said you could modify so as to be willing to print it.

1857 N. Amer. Rev. July 164 In an earlier hymn, which may be regarded, in truth, as a foreshadowing of that touching prosa, we find stanzas like these addressed to the Virgin.

1907 A. Orme & E. G. P. Wyatt tr. P. J. Wagner Introd. Gregorian Melodies xiv. 245 A second kind of trope, which also goes back to Tutilo, resembles the Sequences, and is often like them called Prosa, or, when of lesser extent, Prosula.

1929 Exultet Roll (Brit. Mus.) 5 In the South of Italy, at least from the early part of the tenth century till the thirteenth, a custom existed of writing out this prosa..on a separate roll distinct from the other services of the day.

1957 N. Frye Anat. Crit. 275 The emergence of the ‘prosa’ out of the sequence in medieval music.

1998 Music & Lett. 79 421/1 They came to be called sequences once they had been adopted for such use, as did the West Frankish prosae in due course.