The cantus project, begun more than twenty years ago, provides observations about medieval musical sources for the Office and the melodies they contain in a web-based, freely available format. The record for a single chant has always contained information about the feast to which it belongs, its placement within that feast, its text, its mode and its appearance. Owing to the recent introduction of the music font Volpiano into cantus records, information regarding pitch is now also available. Wherever feasible, records now include melodic incipits encoded as strings of letters and dashes which appear as note-heads on a five-line staff in Volpiano font. Melodic incipits increase the appeal of cantus as a research tool.

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.

One of the earliest forms of Christian psalmody, the alleluia psalmody, is difficult to explore since in most rites it is preserved only in part. Comparisons between direct and indirect traces of alleluia psalmody from Milan, Rome, Byzantium and Gaul as well as between alleluia psalmody and other genres of chant, especially the Mass alleluia, allow some conclusions about distinctive melodic characteristics. As one result, there seem to be common features in the Italian traditions that are missing in the Gallican tradition.

This article traces the history of chants associated with the Adoration of a replica of the cross. It describes the development of an antiphon series for Good Friday afternoon found in Ordines Romani XXVII–XXXIII and selected northern French, German, Aquitanian, Spanish and Italian sources dating from the eighth into the twelfth century. Using illustrative tables, rubrics and facsimiles, the study compares liturgical features of the Adoratio crucis with its related Offices of the cross, the Exaltatio and Inventio, in a survey of the principal titles' texts and melodies.

This article uses multiple witnesses of the chants from four offices of the Sanctorale, transcribed from twelve manuscripts and an early printed antiphonal, in order to assess the stability of chants in late medieval sources associated with the liturgical ‘Use of Sarum’. Whilst there is usually a ‘main’ melodic reading or version for each chant, a considerable degree of variation exists among the readings from various witnesses. The data which support this argument allow manuscripts to be linked by networks of shared melodic material, both through melodic readings identical and present in multiple sources, and through divergences from such main versions. These observations help to illuminate something of the diversity of the written melodic tradition, raising wider questions about the relationship between written witness and performed reality, and about the fixity of ‘Sarum Use’, at least as far as it was transmitted in written form.

responding to recent theories on roman chant by kenneth levy, this article argues, on the basis of liturgical and textual evidence, that non-psalmic offertories were included in the roman chant repertory before carolingian times, that the composition of the offertory cycle was finished by the beginning of the seventh century, that pieces of non-roman origin can be found among psalmic offertories, and that ‘non-roman’ can mean african as well as gallican.

Using several twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources, this study examines a selected number of Office antiphons, comparing their melodic variants for patterns of similarity and difference. The ancestry of a Sarum manuscript and - in another source - the survival of a pre-Conquest musical tradition in England are discernible in Office manuscripts examined as are affinities among French and English sources. Evidence from previous chant scholarship and certain medieval historical events shed light on the observations made in this study.

It is well known that when Father Laurence Feininger died in 1976 he left a substantial body of unpublished material. Edward Lowinsky has argued powerfully that “an enormous obligation rests on the national and international associations of musicology to undertake the publication of Feininger's scholarly estate and to bring it to the full use and enjoyment of the musical and musicological world”.

This is the first study to examine the seven invitatory antiphons of the Birgittine weekly Office, the Cantus sororum, offering complete transcriptions of the melodies and texts. An important general finding is that these invitatories share many melodic similarities with great responsories, but on a more detailed level this article investigates precisely how these chants relate to known models, both complete melodies as well as individual melodic motives. Four patterns of composition among the Cantus sororum invitatories emerge: (1) unique texts may be combined with melodies that resemble other known chants outside the Cantus sororum; (2) texts and melodies that resemble other variants outside the Cantus sororum may be combined in new ways; (3) both text and melody are unknown outside the Cantus sororum.

Overall, these invitatory antiphons, like the rest of the Cantus sororum, represent creative work with existing melodies and texts, including reworkings, borrowings and consistent use of melodic motifs, comprising a significant part of a repertoire at once distinctly Birgittine in character and yet conforming to the common stock of Gregorian Chant. Melodic correspondences within the Cantus sororum as well as in the Birgittine Mass repertoire thus afford an interesting perspective on a soundscape in which the Birgittines functioned and where, through music, their identity was created and maintained.

The cantillation of the Scriptures played an important role in the complex matrix of symbols that is the Byzantine liturgy. Beginning in the ninth century, a special type of notation called ‘ekphonetic’ was developed to indicate in the lectionaries the formulae used in the chanting of the appointed scriptural pericopes. Gradually, over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the system fell into disuse, and the meaning of the notational signs was forgotten. Unfortunately, no surviving Byzantine theoretical treatises explain the system; hence the only sources of information about it (apart from the lectionaries themselves) are lists of ekphonetic neumes found in some manuscripts. Of particular value in this regard is the manuscript Sinaiticus graecus 213. Not only is this one of the oldest datable Greek evangeliaries, but it contains the most ancient list of neumes heretofore discovered, having escaped the attention of musicologists probably because of its unusual location in the manuscript. The present study, proceeding from an analysis of the theoretical information contained in the Sinait. graec. 213 list, will seek to establish the practical application of the neumes within the body of the manuscript, thus contributing to a clarification of the structural characteristics of the earliest, so-called ‘preclassic’, phase of the notational system.

There is much interest at present in the way medieval motets generate meaning, both with their texts and their music. In two articles from a recent issue of Early Music History, for example, a remarkable density of meaning and symbolism, both textual and musical, has been proposed for Machaut's motet 15. Studies of this kind are intended to demonstrate what can be achieved by placing the poems of motets in a literary context and by considering the structure of words and music. Such research also no doubt serves to reinforce the idea that many motets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries demand a wealth of erudite knowledge to be understood and is thus congenial to the current belief that many motets were intended for an intellectual elite. Whilst there can be no doubt that medieval motets often cultivate a literary style of considerable – indeed intense – obscurity, what I wish to suggest here is that one, very ambitious, motet can be interpreted using some of the most basic tools of the medieval cleric.

During the course of a series of articles relating medieval Italian songs to oral and unwritten traditions, Nino Pirrotta comments on a peculiar anonymous two-voice setting from the fourteenth century whose verses seem to have been broken and shattered by the music. Word repetition ‘does not result in a more effective or more understandable rendition of the text; on the contrary, it so fragments and stutters it that any meaning is lost, except as a pretext for the melody which submerges it’. The song in question, Dolce lo mio drudo, is part of a group of unica with Calabrian associations found in the oldest layer of the Reina manuscript. Pirrotta transcribes the song in full and analyses the text and its cognates in detail. It is a ballata with irregularities. I quote in Example 1 just the refrain, together with an indication of the syllable count, in order to facilitate comparison with what follows.

In the mid-fourteenth century the Black Death inflicted one of the most devastating losses of life in human history. This was met by exercises of collective piety such as the singing of psalms and the celebration of special votive masses, which encouraged social cohesion in the face of the tragedy. This article presents results from an analysis of fifty-seven manuscripts containing copies of the monophonic ‘Recordare domine’ Mass, reportedly created at the behest of Clement VI at Avignon during his Black Death-spanning pontificate. Of these, seven manuscripts contain fully notated renditions of each of the chants for the Mass Propers, enabling us to decouple questions concerning the organisation and transmission of the melodies from those of the texts set to them. When the different versions of the Mass are compared, two major findings emerge. First, differential patterns of consistency within the texts and melodies suggest that the texts of the ‘Recordare domine’ Mass may have circulated separately from the melodies set to them, with the choice of music left to the discretion of the local performing clergy. Second, the patterns of variation between different versions of the Proper texts and melodies allow us to see how a variety of composition strategies (including mnemonic processes) were used to create new music for the mass. The ‘Recordare domine’ Mass thus sheds light not only on the performance of organised sacred music at a pivotal point in European history, but also more generally on the processes of chant composition as a tool for use in response to social stress.

Proper chants unique to the Roman wedding Mass - the introit Deus Israel, the gradual Vxor tua and the communion Ecce sic benedicetur - are not found in the unnotated northern Mass antiphoners of Hesbert's Sextuplex. Heavily edited and fitted with Gregorian melodies (or else unnotated), these texts appear sporadically in northern graduals beginning in the mid-tenth century. Their compilation can therefore be dated to the second half of the ninth century. Because the melodies for these Propers were assembled from formulas in common use at a time when new chants were no longer being composed at Rome and because they are certainly free of Gregorian influence, the nuptial chants disclose how certain formulas were being sung shortly before Roman culture and papal institutions began to decline.

The theory that the antiphon is a kind of refrain and that its original purpose was to be inserted between all the verses of its respective psalm was articulated by Giuseppe Maria Tommasi in the seventeenth century and has been transmitted by liturgical historians with little criticism ever since that time. The present article examines the evidence on which that theory rests, with special attention to the writings of Amalar of Metz, and finds it to be inconclusive or positively contrary to the claims that have been built upon it. The article considers the evidence of antiphonal psalmody at Mass, as transmitted in Ordo Romanus I, and finds support there for the view that antiphons were normally performed only at the beginning and end of their respective psalms. After considering briefly the Liber Pontificalis and the tradition of psalmodic differentiae, the article turns to the treatment of antiphonal psalmody by the liturgical historians Guillaume Durand and Radulph de Rivo in the late Middle Ages and finds in their writings no evidence of a belief that frequent interpolation was the authentic primitive practice. The article concludes that two iterations of the antiphon, once at the beginning and once at the end of the psalm, suited its original thematic intent and that the theory of reiteration after every verse – effectively conflating antiphonal and responsorial psalmody – may be no older than the liturgical scholarship of Tommasi in the late seventeenth century.

The alleluia was the last proper chant of the Mass to be standardized. Through the twelfth century and beyond, different churches assigned different alleluias to the same Masses, and the composition of new alleluia chants flourished throughout the latter Middle Ages. The Masses from Easter to the octave of Pentecost witness this. A collation of ca. 200 manuscripts demonstrates that identical series of chants are to be found only in sources emanating from the same church (or churches in the same city). Most of the alleluia chants from the eleventh century onward have New Testament or non-scriptural texts, as opposed to the psalmic texts of the earlier post-Pentecostal alleluias. The musical style is varied, ranging from the richly melismatic manner traditionally associated with the alleluia to much more modest melodies with few or no large melismas. A number of the latter can be associated with the reforms of Guillaume de Volpiano at Dijon and in Normandy in the years after 1000.

In the year 552, a ceremony was held to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of Martha, mother of St Simeon Stylites the Younger. The Vita of St Martha, written by an anonymous monk during the first half of the seventh century, records that the priest Antonio journeyed from Simeon's pillar at Mount Admirabilis, near Antioch, to Jerusalem to obtain a fragment of the cross. When Antonio returned to Mount Admirabilis, ‘a great crowd of men and women gathered in the grace of God, with candles and torches, to hold the service in her memory: and having kept a vigil all night, when in the early morning the living cross was displayed, all who were gathered worshipped, crying out with hymns: We adore your cross, Lord, and we glorify your holy resurrection.’

The Byzantine choirbook or Asmatikon was a musical anthology of melismatic chants for the Office and Liturgy of the fixed and movable parts of the Church year. With its counterpart for the soloist, the Psaltikon, the Asmatikon flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and was then superseded in the fourteenth and fifteenth by a new manuscript type known as the Akolouthia, which absorbed much of the material from the older sources and added collections of new chants. The older manuscript types were distinguished not only by their repertory of chants, but by separate modal and melodic traditions and stock of characteristic melodic formulae.1