This issue of Plainsong and Medieval Music honours the memory of a former vice-president of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society, Dom Jean Claire, OSB, who died on 25 April 2006. A monk of Solesmes, he was appointed choirmaster of his abbey, director of Paléographie musicale and editor of Études Grégoriennes in 1971 as the successor to Dom Joseph Gajard. These responsibilities and his own scholarly work made him one of the most important figures in the chant world.

Translator’s note Dom Jean Claire of the Abbey of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes was for many years engaged in a study of modality in Gregorian chant and in other surviving repertories of liturgical chant of the Latin West. He had perhaps an unparalleled knowledge of the chant, derived from both practice and study. Dom Claire sang the chant at Solesmes from the time he entered the monastery in 1944, and from 1971 to 1996 he was the choirmaster of the abbey and editor of Paléographie musicale, directing the abbey’s long tradition of scholarly and practical publications.

Whereas the melodies of the Ordinary chants of the Mass seem to have been rather few in earlier centuries, they subsequently developed and multiplied as a consequence of new modes of poetic invention (tropes and prosulas), their melodies taking into account the theory of the octoechos. Kyrie melodies provide us with particularly striking witnesses to this development. Despite their number, their diversity, and their classification in the octoechal system, almost all of the Kyrie melodies, at least until the end of the twelfth century, can be traced back to an earlier melodic formula, sometimes termed an ‘anaphoral chant kernel’ (CED, Gba, FGa), recognisable as a ‘signature tune’ of the Kyrie genre. This relates to Dom Jean Claire’s hypothesis about the E corde-mère as the nucleus in which the earlier Kyrie compositions originated. It also forms the focus of the protus authentic and deuterus authentic modes.

Dom Jean Claire succeeded Dom Joseph Gajard in 1971, the year before Dom Gajard’s death.He continued the programme of recordings with Société française du son, the French branch of Decca, which used the London label in America. It became part of the International Pelgrims Group about 1977 and went out of business about 1979. Dom Gajard had begun to remake his monophonic recordings in stereo (Epiphany/Dedication, Easter, Christmas), a plan that Dom Claire continued with his first two LPs. The last years of Dom Claire’s IPG recordings were the quadraphonic era, and Dom Claire once recounted to me his delight when the Decca engineers played back the ‘Times of Distress’ recording, which simulated a procession around the church. This effect was doubtless created electronically, since the recordings were made in a small room.

Liturgical chant bibliography 17 maintains the previously established subdivisions: (1) Editions and facsimile editions, (2) Books and reprints, (3) Congress reports, (4) Chant journals, (5) Collections of essays and dictionaries, (6) Articles in periodicals and Festschriften. Additions to previous bibliographies, mostly reviews, will be found immediately following this introduction.