Only two large collections of Hildegard of Bingen's music are extant, today housed in the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven (B-LVu, no shelf number) and in the Hochschul-und Landesbibliothek RheinMain in Wiesbaden (D-WI1 2, the so-called ‘Riesencodex’). The Riesencodex, though, was almost lost during World War II. It survived both bombing and plundering in Dresden in February 1945, only to be appropriated by the Soviet Administration in 1947. Using archival records from the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Wiesbaden from the 1940s and 1950s, I detail the efforts of a number of people to retrieve the manuscript after the war and bring it back to Wiesbaden. Franz Götting, the director of the Wiesbaden library, spent several years trying to recover the manuscript through official channels. Its eventual return to Wiesbaden in 1948, however, came about surreptitiously, largely through the efforts of Margarete Kühn at the German Academy in East Berlin and an American woman, Caroline Walsh, in Berlin as a military spouse.

Chants based on Crucem tuam in the second medial mode are examined in Greek, Slavonic and Latin sources. Central to the discussion is the role of Jerusalem in the dissemination of the modal system. On the Latin side, the emphasis is on Old Roman melodies, showing how they reproduce the prototypes more faithfully than Beneventan or Frankish melodies. The analysis does not support certain conclusions regarding the origins of the modal system and the relationship of Old Roman and Gregorian melodies advanced by Robert Snow, Helmut Hucke and Leo Treitler.

The manuscript 596 in the Library of the Abbaye-St-Pierre, Solesmes, is a copy, made in 1860, of a noted English processional, which was written between 1250 and 1320 for the Benedictine Abbey of St.Edith's at Wilton, near Salisbury. How the manuscript came to Dom Guéranger, and what subsequently became of it after 1860 is unknown. In 1961 Georges Benoit-Castelli published an examination of the provenance, date and contents of the processional, noting the presence of dramatic ceremonies, which include an Elevatio Crucis and Visitatio Sepulchri for Easter Day. This, in fact, makes the manuscript one of only five extant English sources of the Visitatio Sepulchri. Yet, despite Benoit-Castelli's report, this processional has been entirely neglected by historians of the liturgical drama. This article aims to describe the relation of the Visitatio ceremony to others in the Anglo-French repertory, and will conclude with a complete transcription based on the 19th-century copy.

A number of manuscripts from Southern Italy, almost all of them written in ‘Beneventan’ script and neumes, contain chants that are not the usual Gregorian assignments. These unusual chants have come generally to be known as Old Beneventan; in the manuscripts, however, a number of them are designated “Ambrosian”. That these chants are in any real sense Ambrosian has never been taken very seriously, even though there is very good evidence for doing so.

At the Third Colloquium of Scandinavian Liturgists assembled at Hanaholmen in May 1975, I distinguished two categories of liturgical chant book: (i) the books emanating from the first Carolingian renaissance – sacramentary, antiphoner, etc.; (ii) the books extracted from the preceding in the course of the second renaissance of letters and arts under Charles the Bald (840–877) and later – pontifical, troper-proser, processional.

Canonic techniques in the Trecento caccia reveal a wide spectrum of ostinato procedures ranging from brief cadence patterns to large-scale harmonic and/or melodic repetition schemes. The ostinato phenomenon is thus an important structural component of canonic technique in the caccia. This article examines these ostinato patterns in terms of a putative historical and structural transformation of the genre at the intersection of unwritten and written practices. Special emphasis is placed on the definition of the caccia from the anonymous Trecento treatise, Capitulum de vocibus applicatis verbis, and its correlation with the early layer of the caccia repertoire.

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.

The service books of the Ambrosian rite were produced relatively late: the oldest copy of the Manuale, the first to record the texts and some rubrics, dates from the early eleventh century; the earliest redaction of the ordinal, from shortly after 1126; the oldest copy of the antiphoner, which contains the notated melodies of both Mass and Office, from the mid-twelfth. All these books document a liturgy that had been extensively revised after the Frankish conquest of northern Italy in 774. The Frankish reforms did not result in the suppression of the Milanese rite (as they had the Gallican), but many changes were effected, changes that brought the ancient liturgy of northern Italy – without destroying all of its indigenous features – closer to the new, international, Gregorian rite. The purpose of this article is to re-examine the earliest references to the Mass of pre-Conquest Milan and its archdiocese, which reveal more than has been suspected, and to present new evidence concerning the Ambrosian sacrifice as it was in the earliest centuries, even before the time of St Ambrose.

The newly reconstructed motet Beatius/Cum humanum is remarkable in several respects. It ranks among the longest of Ars Nova motets, and divides neatly into three parts of which the middle is an eighty-breve untexted hocket section. It also contains an extended quotation – textual as well as musical – from the Fauvel motet Firmissime/Adesto. The quoted material speaks of ‘Trinity and unity’, turning a spotlight onto the tripartite form of Beatius/Cum humanum. Firmissime/Adesto has occasioned comment because it is built up of duple (‘imperfect’) notes even though it praises the perfect Trinity. Beatius/Cum humanum can be read as participating in the same conversation. By shifting the salience of the number three from local rhythmical organisation to the global level of form, it serves as an example of how music can depict perfection ex imperfectis.

This article considers Heloise's activity as abbess of the Paraclete, examining what contribution she may have made to its liturgical practice. It relates the testimony of Peter the Venerable and Hugh Metel to Heloise as inspirational leader and author to what we can learn about her from Abelard's preface to the Paraclete Hymnal. In particular, attention is directed to the understanding of Mary Magdalen at the Paraclete by both Abelard and Heloise. This suggests, I argue that ‘Epithalamica’ and the Easter plays are part of Heloise's literary output, and that she exercised a major influence on Abelard.

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.

The problem of modally ambiguous chants – which received much attention from medieval theorists – is most clearly demonstrated by juxtaposing different readings of a particular chant. This procedure often reveals transpositions (partial or complete), and other differences, many of which affect the final cadence. For example, the offertory Justitiae Domini, in the Vatican edition and various manuscript sources (e.g. F-Pn lat.776, 780, 1132) ends on E (deuterus); but the St.Yrieix gradual (F-Pn lat.903) and some other early sources (e.g. I-BV VI.34, GB-Lbl Harl.4951) emend the final cadence to end on F (tritus). This changes the maneria of the chant. A critical study of such mode-change is the primary task of this paper.

Using well-known texts by Augustine, Jacques de Liège and Guido of Arezzo, this article tries to show that, despite prior misunderstandings, medieval authors of music theory considered it a given that sensuous pleasure was the ultimate goal of music. Only by way of anachronistic readings of the sources have historians constructed an aesthetics that blended aesthetics with mathematical and theological ideas. A close reading of the sources, taking into account their cultural contexts, reveals the intentions of the authors that are at the root of the texts. Those intentions, it is argued, were not aesthetical, and any attempt to interpret them from such a perspective would be misleading. Yet careful consideration of those intentions opens the view for remarks that are truly aesthetical as well as for hints suggesting that aesthetical judgements, while self-evident, were not considered matters for written discourse but for orality.

Ever since Hugh Baillie and Philippe Oboussier's pioneering study of York, Borthwick Institute MS Mus 1, better known as the York Masses, it has been generally accepted that its compositions, if not the choirbook itself, originated elsewhere than York. Two locations claimed primacy in their bid for the manuscript's original provenance, Lincoln and London, owing to the internal evidence of two composers named in the manuscript, ‘Johannes Cuke’ and ‘Horwod’. The evidence is reassessed here with regard to an important new source relating to polyphonic music and other fragments of music preserved in post-Reformation York bindings. It is suggested that these fragments originated at one or more churches in York in the late fifteenth century, and that they were finally sold for binding material c. 1583, resulting in their appearance in the same series of court books for York Minster. The cultural background for the genesis and performance of polyphonic music is then addressed, with reference to York and other northern locations such as Durham, Beverley and Selby.

This article argues that the rhythmic meaning of the notation in the Cantigas de Santa Maria can be only understood by confronting it with different theoretical paradigms. Julián Ribera in 1922 defended an Arabic paradigm, to the exclusion of any other, but his access to Arabic historical writings was severely limited. Higinio Anglés in 1943 and most modern musicologists have since adopted French mensural theory, but recognised that it does not fit many songs. The author has demonstrated elsewhere that songs that do not fit the French paradigm often fit the Arabic one. The applicability of both paradigms, including their superimposition, is systematically compared here. After comparison of general concepts (ordo and period), of even-time composition (modes V–VI or conjunctive rhythm), of long–short opposition in ternary time (modes I–II or Ramal) and more complex patterns, the author provisionally concludes that very few patterns point unequivocally to French models, while in most cases (first and second mode and potential forms of the third mode) both French and Arabic paradigms could apply. In many other cases, encompassing both binary and ternary metre, the Arabic rhythmic paradigm is clearly either more fitting than the Parisian one, or the only one to apply.

As recently as 1975, Cyrille Vogel, in his Introduction aux sources du Moyen Age, was obliged to forego a demonstration of the transmission of the antiphoner, “given the complexity of research still in progress”.[1] Since then, with the completion in 1979 of the six-volume Corpus Antiphonalium Officii (= CAO) of René-Jean Hesbert, the foundations have been laid for all future historical research on the origins of the Roman office hours. Twelve selected sources are edited, first text-incipits of the sources in their original form, and then each complete text separately; more than this, in the two concluding volumes Hesbert undertook the task of classifying 800 sources of the office by means of statistical methods, in order thereby to facilitate the reconstruction of an archetype.[2]

The manuscript Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, 369 (henceforth Cfm 369) was made in the 13th century for the English Cluniac priory of St.Pancras at Lewes in Sussex. It is not known if the priory itself produced the manuscript or if it were copied elsewhere. Leroquais [1] described it as a breviary-missal. It is undoubtedly the most important surviving English Cluniac liturgical source, for it contains not only the liturgical texts of mass and office complete, but is also notated. Among the services for monastic office and mass there appears a full monastic rhymed office for St.Thomas of Canterbury, unspoilt, a rarity in England. Cfm 369 also has a full office for the patron saint of the priory, St.Pancras.

Over the past century, scholars have identified examples of liturgical chant belonging to more than one Western liturgical tradition, including Franco-Roman, Old Hispanic, Old Beneventan and Milanese. In a seminal study, Kenneth Levy identified a set of offertories that circulate in the Franco-Roman, Old Hispanic and Milanese traditions, arguing that all existing versions derive from an earlier, Gallican tradition. This article expands the evidence for connections between the Franco-Roman and Old Hispanic traditions, identifying nearly two dozen Franco-Roman responsories that are shared with the Old Hispanic rite and may be of Gallican or Iberian origin. The diversity of their liturgical assignments and circulation patterns suggests that the exchange of repertory took place at different times and through different routes. Many of these responsories are assigned to the later layers of the Roman liturgy. Others were added to the Old Hispanic liturgy between the eighth and tenth centuries.

Just over half of these responsories show enough melodic connections between the Franco-Roman and Old Hispanic versions, in contour and melismatic density, to imply a shared melodic ancestor. Each version, however, uses the formulas associated with its own tradition, indicating that the melodies have been assimilated to the style and formulaic content of the receiving tradition. Despite the resulting melodic differences, we identify certain commonalities between Franco-Roman and Old Hispanic chant, such as text-setting strategies and common cadential contours, that facilitated the exchange of repertory.

Old Hispanic liturgy was practised across much of medieval Iberia until c.1080. In this article we analyse the extant Old Hispanic processional antiphons, focusing on: the presence or absence of verses; amount of text and relationship with the Bible; cadence placement; number of notes per chant (melodic density) and per syllable; and melodic repetition within and between chants. We demonstrate that the processional antiphons are neither a homogenous corpus nor clearly differentiated stylistically from other Old Hispanic antiphons. In a short case study of the Good Friday Veneration of the Cross, we situate the processional antiphons within their wider ritual context, including their likely staging in the ecclesiastical architecture. As we show, the interaction between melody and ritual directed the antiphon texts towards a particular devotional end.