Although it has always been plain to see that the Milanese and Roman Mass shared many texts, that the melodies were also shared has gone largely unnoticed, or at any rate undemonstrated, except in the special case of the few offertory chants with wider concordances in Franco-Roman, Milanese and Visigothic books. This article takes up the particular case of the Roman and Milanese entrance antiphons: first, the circumstances of the importation of the Roman introits into the Ambrosian Mass; and, second, the precise relationship of the Ambrosian and Franco-Roman (Gregorian) melodies. It has long been understood that chants of the Old Roman repertory provide a firm basis for an understanding of the changes, inevitable over time, in an orally transmitted repertory. It emerges that the Ambrosian melodies, transcribed in neumes in about the middle of the eleventh century, offer a second opportunity for a sondage. This other, unsuspected, version of the chants, miraculously preserved and stabilised north of the Alps in the ninth and tenth centuries also allows for convincing demonstrations of the musical procedures employed in the elaboration of the melodies and in their adaptation to different texts. And not least, the isolation of what is shared between versions notated at a distance of centuries give us the basis of an objective estimation of the effectiveness of musical memory in a musical culture that did not rely on notation.

The changes in time perception that emerged in the late Middle Ages have not only left their mark on musical notation or the isorhythmic motet, but also on the composition of polyphonic songs. This article proposes an analytical approach to late Trecento songs that takes these changes into account. A case study of Andrea da Firenze's ballata Non più doglie ebbe Dido reveals how the temporal structures of the text and the music interact.

The Beneventan Mass Propers are preserved in sources that are notated, for the most part, in campo aperto – without staff lines or clefs to indicate the pitch or placement of the semitone. Despite the absence of pitch-specific notation, it is possible to discern a great deal about the pitch of the Beneventan chant and to propose verifiable transcriptions. This article provides a systematic overview of the pitch placement of the Beneventan repertory through a study of the formulaic structure of the chant and through a comparative examination of the small number of exemplars of Beneventan chant notated on a staff line.