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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

in summarizing the findings of a forthcoming monograph and edition, this article reviews the forces leading to the major revisions of chant characteristic of the period 1590–1890. it identifies the major independent editions, outlines their chief characteristics, and documents the need for a geography of chant practice during these centuries. the fundamental changes wrought by the several editors brought about an individualization in melodic constructions and undoubtedly caused accompanying differences in learning processes. new comparative transcriptions of the alleluia veni domine provide a view of representative editorial processes.

The tract for the feast of St Gregory, Beatus uir, appears in very different versions in the Old Roman and Gregorian traditions, and in more than one version in the Gregorian tradition. Close study of the melodies of these different versions and of the second-mode tract Ecce uir, attached to the feast in Corbie, Bec and Bec-influenced institutions, permits tentative conclusions to be drawn about the adoption of Roman chant in early eighth-century England and mid-eighth-century Francia. Before the concerted Carolingian effort to learn the entire Roman Mass Proper, Beatus uir appears to have been adopted north of the Alps at least twice: in early eighth-century England, and at St Denis in the 750s.

This analytical article aims to establish the melodic grammar of the in directum Milanese cantus. Deviations from the generic norms might be experienced in performance as emphasising the words with which they appear. Certain texts (particularly ‘domin-’) are often associated with melodic shapes found elsewhere in the genre on the same words, regardless of what one might expect to encounter formally. Chants that share similar liturgical functions, or which appear in close liturgical proximity, often share melodic material and formal strategies. Building on and responding to Bailey's The Ambrosian Cantus (1987), the present article seeks to appreciate the cantus melodies as they have been preserved, rather than using them as a lens through which to seek a putative (and entirely rationally structured) lost ancestor.

Who was Jean de Savoie, the clerk with whom the composers Jean Campion and Philippe de Vitry penned the jeu-parti Ulixea fulgens in 1350? This article uses Jean's hitherto unnoticed will and foundations at the church of Saint-Benoît-le-Bestourné, Paris, with other documentation, to bring together Jean's two identities in a unified biography (including a new date for his death, in 1354); to illustrate the close parallels between his own career and that of Philippe de Vitry, and to map the scope of opportunities for contact between them in and around the French royal court from the early 1320s onwards. Jean was also an artist and illustrator, and his career as one of the more prominent cartoonists of Philippe VI, king of France, throws light on potential contact with Vitry via the adoption by Louis I de Bourbon of the hitherto largely royal practice of charter illustration. In addition the properties acquired to support two chaplaincies endowed by Jean at Saint-Benoît demonstrate the extent to which he was professionally embedded in a network of royal councillors working in and around the Parlement in the 1330–50s, in which Vitry was also active. Also identified is a house acquired at Saint-Benoît by Gervès du Bus, author of the Roman de Fauvel.

The idea that the Deuteros modes (second authentic and second plagal) of Greek liturgical chant already had a chromatic character before the end of the Byzantine era has gained wide acceptance in the last decades. Trying to go one step further and reconstruct the scales of these modes, the present article attempts a new interpretation of certain crucial passages in late Byzantine treatises, which can provide important clues, if interpreted in connection with the description of the modes in modern Greek music theory and their actual characteristics in the written and oral tradition. The resulting structures can serve as a basis for future transcriptions of chants, at least for the late and post-Byzantine repertory.