An early fourteenth-century gradual produced for use in Avignon and today preserved in Rome at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore is a new source for understanding the musical and liturgical exchange between France and Italy in the fourteenth century. The present article will consider compositions written after the main body of the gradual, and found now in the initial fascicle and on the last three folios of the manuscript. These folios contain a hitherto unknown source for the Credo of Tournai as well as other works not recorded elsewhere; for example, a polyphonic Gloria, a polyphonic Credo, a troped Sanctus and a Credo in cantus fractus.

The manuscript 3314/15 of the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek at Darmstadt (originally from Seligenstadt) contains a fragment of a mid-twelfth-century tonary that is essentially identical to interpolations in the tonary of Theoger of Metz transmitted in the manuscript Kassel, 4o Mss. Math. 1. The Seligenstadt tonary is of especial interest, inasmuch as it is one of the first sources to cite differentiae peregrinae in addition to the ordinary differentiae for the psalm tones in each of the ecclesiastical modes. These irregular differentiae were designated ‘peregrinae’ for the first time by Berno. Differentiae peregrinae are occasionally mentioned in the south German cultural sphere during the twelfth century, but by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were being discussed frequently. It is precisely at this time that the fourth differentia of the eighth ecclesiastical mode came to be known as the ‘tonus peregrinus’.

Chansonniers copied from the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries are the earliest extant sources to include an extensive corpus of lyrics in European vernacular languages. However, contemporary literary sources refer to the existence of earlier books of vernacular lyrics, and a handful of notated lyrics survive from as early as the twelfth century. This article explores a certain type of notated song that predates the relatively well-documented chansonnier tradition by some decades, specifically focusing on the case study of the crusader recruitment song Chevalier mult estes guariz (RS 1548a), composed around the mid-1140s. Probably the earliest extant copy of an Old French lyric (with or without musical notation), this unicum is distinct from songs of the kind preserved in the chansonniers in several respects, especially in its musical form, its manuscript appearance and its intended use in the Middle Ages. I examine this song from several angles, including its crusading theme, provenance, authorship, manuscript presentation, musical construction, intended audience, and the broader contexts of its composition and copying. Such close examination of a single song not only offers insights into the context of an early tradition of written-out vernacular monophony but also casts new light on the origins of the later chansonnier tradition.

Chant scholars who attempt to deal with their subject in the pre-Carolingian period will sooner or later come up against the formidable oeuvre of Antoine Chavasse, the eminent Strasbourg scholar who dominates the field of Roman liturgical history from the sixth to the eighth centuries. A knowledge of the development of the church year is crucial to speculation on the chronology of early chant, and Chavasse has written extensively on every phase of the subject – on Lent especially, but also on Paschaltide, Advent, and the Sundays after Christmas and Pentecost. While he has not neglected the sanctorale, his emphasis has always been on the more demanding area of the temporale. There are other scholars who have contributed much to the field, but none could be considered even a close second in either the scope of their contribution or its influence: frequently one finds other liturgical scholars accepting without question some of Chavasse's most far-reaching conclusions as premises to their own work.

In 1910 the Premonstratensian Order acquired its own Graduale. Soon after the publication of this Graduale doubts were expressed about its authenticity. Still, to this very day the Premonstratensians stand by their ‘own’ chant and use the 1910 Graduale. In this article, I reveal that the Graduale is not a reconstruction of Premonstratensian chant of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries and I also attempt to explain why the Premonstratensians undertook the quest for their ‘own authentic’ Premonstratensian chant.

This paper considers contratenor parts in equal-cantus Italian motets found in the manuscript Bologna Q.15 from codicological, contrapuntal and stylistic perspectives. After establishing criteria for contratenor classification, the paper collates a lexicon of rules governing contratenor behaviour in fourteen motets by Johannes Carmen, Johannes Ciconia, Christoforus de Monte, Antonius Romanus, Matheus de Brixia, and Antonius de Civitate. Four paradigmatic motets are presented as case studies. Q.15 is the earliest (or only extant) source for many of these contratenors, several of which were probably added by a later composer, and they exhibit remarkably similar behaviour that we might term a ‘Q.15 style’. Finally, the lexicon is employed to distinguish between the features of an original contratenor and a later one, and the paper posits that studying contratenors can offer a unique window into fifteenth-century compositional thinking.

The later Trecento repertoire contains many short, monostrophic ballatas with philosophical or moralising texts. Why should the poets and composers, mostly Florentine, have preferred the ballata over the madrigal when exploring serious subjects, and why did they employ the monostrophic form?

It turns out that the text structure of the monostrophic ballata is, in its essentials, comparable to the pattern of the geometric demonstration from Euclid's Elements, comprising premise, argumentation and return to the enhanced, proved premise (quod erat demonstrandum). Considered in light of Florentine Humanism's engagement with philosophy, including Ockham methods of demonstration, this article examines the possibility that Francesco Landini and other composers were sufficiently influenced by philosophy to view the structure of the monostrophic ballata as a means of logical demonstrations of refined arguments.

Chant scholarship provides a fairly standard description of the Kyrie, in terms expressing very clearly what a typical example was like in the post-Carolingian era. There is no disagreement here, as there is with the sequence and trope, over how to treat the genre. Describing it seems to be a simple task. The chants are nine phrases long, with one phrase for each petition of the Ordinary text:

The relation among the phrases varies from complete identity of all nine to nearly the opposite extreme, yet in most cases the phrases are grouped by threes, giving the melody a tripartite shape like that of the text. Certain of the melodies were sometimes underlaid with syllabic texts expanding or replacing the Ordinary petitions (e.g.: Kyriefons bonitatis, Pater ingenite, a quo bona cuncta procedunt, eleison). Medieval commentaries on the liturgy (such as Amalar's Liber officialis) and exegesis of these texts make it clear that the Kyrie was thought of as being Trinitarian, with the first three petitions directed to the Father, the next three to the Son, and the last three to the Holy Spirit.

More than thirty years ago, Jacques Handschin drew general attention to certain striking melismas in Ambrosian chant. He identified these as tropes – referring to them as ‘prototypes’ – and he noted the importance in their construction of repetitions, both exact and approximate, repetitions that involved both brief motives and lengthy passages.

Singers from the area south of Rome kept the Gregorian repertory received in the ninth century, including a few early tropes and proses, and their traditional Old Beneventan repertory alive side by side with remarkable consistency in oral tradition for nearly two hundred years. This might explain why the received Gregorian repertory retained its archaic traits in Benevento rather than in northern Europe. For the ‘new music’ of the tenth and eleventh centuries, mostly locally composed tropes, proses, and Latin Kyrieleison, south Italian singers adopted the musical surface of Gregorian chant, albeit Italianised (that is, moving largely in stepwise motion), but for the large-scale formal structures they harked back to the nearly obsessive repetition of extended passages that are the hallmark of Old Beneventan.

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.

The foundation of the solmisation system, attributed to Guido d'Arezzo, is based upon the application of the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, to the musical notes C D E F G A. Later, this system was expanded to incorporate a series of overlapping hexachords made up of these six syllables. These overlapping hexachords could allow a singer to move seamlessly across the regular musical space (the gamut) using only the six syllables (voces) via ‘mutations’. Even though the extent to which this system underpinned diatonic conceptions of musical space is being reconsidered, it seems clear that, at least for some musicians, it played an integral part in music education.

Although many theorists discussed the process of hexachordal mutation in their treatises, the approaches towards its exemplification and demonstration were far from uniform, given its conceptual rather than notated function. Johannes Tinctoris's Expositio manus (c.1472) includes a number of musical examples showing hexachordal mutation. His examples, rather unusually, include syllabic annotations to label the points of mutation within the musical notation, a practice that is almost without precedent. This article takes Tinctoris's treatise as a point of departure and compares the approaches taken towards the exemplification of hexachordal mutation in some theoretical texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, tracking the influence of their approaches forward into the sixteenth century. It considers what some different approaches can tell us about the conceptual function of the hexachord in pedagogy, and what the motives might have been for adopting specific exemplification practices.

Word setting in Machaut's refrain songs poses a problem, for whilst it is clearly indicated in the manuscripts, it often does not comply with recognised principles or values. To understand the situation, a dualistic relationship of words and music is proposed. It is founded in the coordinated but independent operation of principles of musical mimesis and musico-poetic dislocation. The music is constructed at a primary level as an imitation of the poetic form; but it is fundamentally independent of this model and may thus be detached from it and displaced against it. Devices such as ‘cross-cadencing’, ‘quasi-declamation’, ‘complementary-cadence inversion’ and ‘dissonance’ between implied and actual word setting are manifestations of this technique. The proposal accounts on the same basis for both the close relationship of words and music observable in the virelais and for the more abstract connection apparent in the rondeaux. There is a technical unity at work across the genres in Machaut's song composition.

Although the loss of manuscript liturgical sources from medieval English monastic houses has no doubt been very great, a relatively large number of processionals has survived, more than monastic antiphoners, for example. The purpose of this inventory is to help make the contents of these important sources better known. Their secular counterparts, especially the processionals of Sarum, or Salisbury use, have so far been more familiar, through the work of Terence Bailey, various text editions, and the recently published facsimile of the printed Sarum processional of 1502. By contrast, it is not very easy even to draw up a reliably complete list of monastic processionals.

Michael Morrow was an acute reader of medieval literature, and one who knew that every medieval text is a potential source of information for the modern performer and musicologist. A striking example is provided by the 453 chapters of a fifteenth-century anthology now in the library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. This imposing book appears to be one of the largest collections of Marian miracle-stories in the world. Assembled in the year 1409, perhaps in East Anglia, it contains forty-nine chapters about Marian devotions, liturgies, plainsongs and prayers, among them several texts that were set by English composers: Salve regina (there are ten chapters devoted to this chant alone), Alma redemptoris mater, Gaude flore virginali, Sancta Maria non est tibi similis, Salve sancta parens, Gaude Maria virgo, Ave maris Stella and Gaude virgo mater Christi.

It is well known how, at the time of the Conquest, Osmund, son of Henry, Count of Sées, and Isabella, sister of William the Conqueror, accompanied the new king to England; how he there became first William's chaplain, then Chancellor (1072), and finally Bishop of Salisbury (1078).

Codex MS Urbinas latinus 602 – henceforth ‘Urb 602’ – was brought to the Vatican Library in 1657 with the rest of the library of the Dukes of Urbino. How this carefully written troper-processional was acquired for the Urbino collection is not known. The manuscript is a very small handbook for a soloist, about 15.9 × 9.4 cm., with a writing area about 10 × 5.5 cm. The classical original Beneventana is almost entirely free of mis-spellings and other errors. The abbreviations ĩ (for in), ẽ (for est), nõ (for non), petores (for peccatores), and no (for noster) are found regularly and suggest a date after 1060. The original neumatic notation is precisely diastematic but without added lines or clefs. Liquescents are extensively used, but the quilisma has almost entirely disappeared. Initial letters are coloured simply but handsomely in red, blue, and yellow; and rubrics are tinged with blue. No illuminations de luxe appear: the manuscript was meant for use and shows signs of wear.