When I was an undergraduate attempting to write canons, it would have been convenient to have known that composers cheated. By the time I was a don, in turn trying to teach undergraduates to write canons, I now had this knowledge, though I would doubtless have called it ‘composers' expertise’; but, unfortunately, I was still not aware of the precise way in which this expertise was employed. Later, I found out that many canons (such as those of Bach's ‘Goldberg Variations’) were written on the scaffolding of a ground bass; although Bach's use of this bass is here obvious, as it is in Pachelbel's more mundane canon on the same ground, composers would often cover their tracks by removing the scaffolding from the finished work.

Since the realization, at the beginning of this century, that the treatise Speculum musicae had been incorrectly attributed to Jehan des Murs by its first editor, Edmond de Coussemaker, the actual author of this voluminous work of music theory from the early fourteenth century has remained a shadowy figure. The most certain detail of the author's identity is his name, contained within an acrostic spelled out over the initials that begin each of the seven books of the treatise, rendering the given name IACOBUS. The provenances of the three surviving manuscript sources, all dating from approximately a century after the proposed date of Speculum musicae, suggest an Italian bias to the transmission of the work, but, as physical documents, the manuscripts have yet to yield any clues to the author's origins. The treatise itself is a bit more helpful. Besides offering the author's name, clues within the text have allowed for the formulation of the following hypothesis concerning the career of Jacobus: that he was probably born in the diocese of Liège, that he was a student in Paris in the late thirteenth century, and that he returned to Liège to complete the final books of his treatise, Books 6 and 7 of Speculum musicae. In what follows, I will first briefly evaluate the evidence previously marshalled to support this hypothesis, and I will then discuss new information pertinent to the biography of the author.

Ave virgo mater dei, an English three-voice composition from around 1300, combines two structural devices typical of English music of this time: voice-exchange and hocket. Like many of its companion pieces in the so-called Worcester Fragments, only a portion of the original script (shown in Fig. 1) has survived. Recovery of this composition is aided by a number of immediate clues as to how the music (including what has been lost) must originally have been set out in the manuscript.

Chant from the Greek tradition continues to be explored in its various manifestations by performers with very different interpretational approaches. Lycourgos Angelopoulos has continued his pioneering work both liturgically and in concert, though he has not recorded a great deal recently. His two most recent discs, which fill significant gaps in the recorded repertory, date from 1993 and 1994. The first (5) is a concert recorded in 1990, particularly interesting in that it contains two pieces from the Athonite tradition as practised today: the mode 1 kathisma from the Akathistos Hymn as notated by Fr Georgios Rigas (d. 1958) and verses from Psalm 135 in four modes as sung by the much beloved Deacon Dionysios Firfiris, proptopsaltis of the cathedral of Karies on Athos until his death in 1990. The psalm verses are sung in Angelopoulos's own transcription. The second disc (7) brings together a collection of magnificent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century compositions for Christmas. It includes a particularly impressively structured koinonikon by the Constantinopolitan Daniel Protopsaltis (d. 1789), which includes a fine kratima (a melody sung to nonsense syllables) before the final alleluia. The performance style of the Greek Byzantine Choir is, as ever, tasteful, technically brilliant (the precision of the ornamentation alone leaves one amazed) and inspired. Worthy of emphasis is the fact that this repertory is being sung by a choir. Choral (as opposed to solo) psaltic singing is undergoing something of a revival in Greece at present. A number of good choirs are working in the field, but the Greek Byzantine Choir remains the only one to have been extensively recorded and distributed outside Greece.