The non-liturgical songs of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England were recorded, for the most part, not in dedicated song books, but on occasional pages in manuscript miscellanies. Away from the context of fully musical books, there were no fixed procedures for the layout of music, and scribes devised new approaches to layout as they worked. This article considers three Latin songs from such sources and explores the evidence for experimentation, both in scribal technique and in musical procedures, that may have contributed to their specific manuscript presentations.

Idiosyncratic to the Milanese liturgy were the processions after Matins and Vespers to the two ancient baptisteries of St John the Baptist and St Stephen. These processions, held throughout the year except in Holy Week, were provided with a very large repertory of antiphons (psallendae). The observances are documented in the Ambrosian antiphoners, in the Manuale, and in the ordinal, but to answer some of the important questions left unanswered in these books has required a detailed analysis and comparison of evidence that is in certain respects contradictory.

When in 1028–9 Adémar de Chabannes created his apostolic liturgy for Saint Martial, patron saint of the abbey that bears his name in Limoges, he preserved most items in the Divine Office from the existing liturgy for the saint that venerated him as a confessor-bishop. For the last two responsories of the third nocturn of Matins, however, Adémar provided new compositions that depart from the prevailing style of this genre: the penultimate responsory, Gloriosus est, is entirely newly composed, while the final responsory, O sancte dei apostole, consists of a new introduction that is prefixed to the existing final responsory of Matins, O Marcialis princeps. The newly composed material contains music that is much more dramatic in conception in comparison with the typical undulating style of the genre, and with this music, Adémar makes a strong statement about Martial's new status as an apostle.

Last year (2005, no. 6), we greeted a recording that seemed to be directed in a special way to chant scholars. Two more discs of similar interest have arrived, the newest one an interpretation of the conflict, shall we call it, between Roman and Frankish cantors during the introduction of Roman chant into the Frankish kingdom (no. 1 in the list below). The chants were chosen for specific characteristics of Old Roman and Gallican style, but the stage is set by beginning with ‘Gregorius praesul’. Most of the selections have been recorded only rarely, and the Old Roman offertory ‘Deus enim firmavit’ (from Bodmer 74) with its verses is new to records. Benjamin Bagby accompanies himself on the lute in ‘A solis ortu’, the lament for Charlemagne, the choice of verses (neither version is complete) partly different from Alfred Deller's recording, 237 in my discography (1992, no. 19 on CD). The disc concludes with two familiar pieces, the Palm Sunday processional responsory ‘Collegerunt’ and the laudes regiae ‘Christus vincit’. The last (from Paris, BNF lat. 13159, a source not cited by Bukofzer in ‘The Music of the Laudes’) is the most imaginative performance on disc, the only one known to me that interjects the acclamations more fluidly than the familiar editions indicate.

Melodiarium Hymnologicum Bohemiae is a digital database of facsimiles of sources of Czech, German and Latin sacred monody and is essentially sui generis; there are no other such digital databases of comparable scope for this repertory. Its address is www.firmadat.cz/melodiarium/, and the English version can be reached by clicking on the Union Jack icon. The idea of Czech musicologist Stanislav Tesař, MHB is an extremely ambitious project, which has involved a team of several Czech musicologists in its realization. It is now yielding the fruits of two three-year grants from the Czech Science Foundation and further support from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, which has funded the project from its inception. The amount of work that has been accomplished here is considerable but the sheer volume of material dictates that the catalogue will be for a long time a work in progress – it will not be complete for perhaps a decade. There is still much work to do; therefore this account is really more of a progress report than a conventional review.