Although it has always been plain to see that the Milanese and Roman Mass shared many texts, that the melodies were also shared has gone largely unnoticed, or at any rate undemonstrated, except in the special case of the few offertory chants with wider concordances in Franco-Roman, Milanese and Visigothic books. This article takes up the particular case of the Roman and Milanese entrance antiphons: first, the circumstances of the importation of the Roman introits into the Ambrosian Mass; and, second, the precise relationship of the Ambrosian and Franco-Roman (Gregorian) melodies. It has long been understood that chants of the Old Roman repertory provide a firm basis for an understanding of the changes, inevitable over time, in an orally transmitted repertory. It emerges that the Ambrosian melodies, transcribed in neumes in about the middle of the eleventh century, offer a second opportunity for a sondage. This other, unsuspected, version of the chants, miraculously preserved and stabilised north of the Alps in the ninth and tenth centuries also allows for convincing demonstrations of the musical procedures employed in the elaboration of the melodies and in their adaptation to different texts. And not least, the isolation of what is shared between versions notated at a distance of centuries give us the basis of an objective estimation of the effectiveness of musical memory in a musical culture that did not rely on notation.

By all appearances, the advent of a full-fledged hexachordal system in the late thirteenth century marked the culmination of a radical reconceptualisation of diatonic space that had begun over two centuries earlier with Guido of Arezzo's introduction of the syllables ut re mi fa sol la as an aid to sight-singing. An early witness of the new diatonic configuration is Johannes de Garlandia's Introductio musicae planae (c.1275), which presents the three proprietates per b quadro, per natura and per b molle as a fundamental articulation of the gamut that is necessary for conveying the intervallic distances between the diatonic pitches.

A contextual evaluation of the theory of the proprietates, however, indicates that the hexachordal parsing of the gamut was not meant to establish the major sixth as the regulative paradigm of diatonic space (i.e. as a normative scale), but was rather in line with the earlier understanding of the ut-la syllables as an optional aid for singing. The development of hexachordal theory was in fact an implicit confirmation of the heptachordal structure of the gamut that had been in place since around the year 1000 (and arguably earlier), when the cycle of seven A–G letters was first used to label the constituent pitches of the octave.

When I was an undergraduate attempting to write canons, it would have been convenient to have known that composers cheated. By the time I was a don, in turn trying to teach undergraduates to write canons, I now had this knowledge, though I would doubtless have called it ‘composers' expertise’; but, unfortunately, I was still not aware of the precise way in which this expertise was employed. Later, I found out that many canons (such as those of Bach's ‘Goldberg Variations’) were written on the scaffolding of a ground bass; although Bach's use of this bass is here obvious, as it is in Pachelbel's more mundane canon on the same ground, composers would often cover their tracks by removing the scaffolding from the finished work.

The Canticle of the Three Children is the hymn sung by Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego when they were cast into the fiery furnace by order of Nebuchadnezzar. The episode is described in Daniel 3; but the canticle itself is not present in either Hebrew or Aramaic in the canonical form of the Jewish Scriptures. It was, however, present in the form of the Jewish scriptures from which the Septuagint and later the Vulgate were translated.

This joint article on aspects of the manuscript Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Helmstedt 628 (Heinemann catalogue 677), known to musicologists as “W1”, is designed to supplement the recent lengthy essay by Edward Roesner, ‘The origins of W1’, with discussions of topics where an advance on Professor Roesner's authoritative account was felt to be possible.

This article concerns a fragmentary Office for Saint Blaise found in D-PREk Reihe V G1, a late fourteenth-century antiphoner from the Benedictine convent of Kloster Preetz. Despite the late date of the source, compositional similarities between this office and the Saint Nicholas office support the possibility that the former may be a lost Office attributed to Bishop Reginold of Eichstätt (r. 966–91) by the chronicler Anonymus Haserensis. I argue that Reginold may have written both the Office for Saint Blaise and the recension of the passio on which it is based for Pia of Bergen (Biletrud, Duchess of Bavaria), whom the chronicler names as Reginold's patron. This theory is supported by a consideration of the historical position and practices of Ottonian aristocratic widows, the development of saints’ cults in tenth-century Eichstätt and the text of the passio itself. These findings give new insight into the office compositions of Reginold of Eichstätt, the Ottonian veneration of Byzantine saints and female patrons’ involvement in the liturgical arts and establishment of cults in the late tenth century. These findings also provide hints to the origin of the liturgy of Kloster Preetz, whose mother house has never been identified.