It is well known that the two alleluias cited in the title are textings of the same tune – indeed they are only two of many textings of that tune. Along with the alleluia Video celos, these two were sung over a rather short space of time in the liturgical year: on the feasts of Christmas, St Stephen's and Epiphany. It happens that for another purpose, involving the transmission of chant in later manuscripts, I have collated the alleluia Dies sanctificatus and alleluia Vidimus stellam in over a hundred manuscripts, most of them late French sources. The choice of these manuscripts rather than others – French rather than German or English – was dictated in part by practical considerations, but also by the conviction that French sources are on the whole richer in variants and hence more revealing in the mechanics of their transmission. The approximately one hundred sources considered are a good majority of the surviving late sources, and the picture they give is, I believe, representative. In the course of this article, I will also have occasion to mention earlier manuscripts, both French and non-French. These are not the primary focus of my study, and therefore I have permitted myself many omissions in that respect. Important graduals, for example from St-Omer,2 Angers3 and Noyon,4 to name only three, have been untouched. My collation has shown a considerable number of variants, some of which are clearly regional in nature, while others are of a more ambiguous character. Having two textings of the same melody available supplies a useful control: readings that occur in both versions naturally have a strong claim to represent a true tradition, rather than a random alteration.

Heading the list of horizons unexplored when my study of the cult of St Cecilia appeared in 1995 was a strong suspicion that music's mysterious patroness sprang from a Jewish milieu, and that traces of Jewish influence persisted in her cult well into the Middle Ages. But the evidence was cloudy, and no discussion of my suspicion found its way into the book beyond the bare statement that Cecilia may have belonged to an early Jewish-Christian community.1 Now that the evidence is clearer, and the suspicion better founded, it is time to set forth that evidence. I do so here, and at the outset point to my brief corollary suggesting that if indeed Jewish-Christian influence persisted in Rome rather longer than is generally supposed, then we need to think in a new way about the origins of Western chant. Rather than thinking simply about transfer from Synagogue to Church, we should ponder what might have happened within communities that were in some sense churches and synagogues at the same time.

The fragments of liturgical music held in the monastic library of Ampleforth Abbey, Yorkshire, consist of thirty-three manuscript parchment leaves of varying sizes, most of which appear to have been used as strengtheners for book bindings.1 It is difficult to determine their provenance but some clues may be found in the variety of their neume styles. Six of the fragments are written with staffless neumes, the rest have staff notation, including eleven leaves from an Office antiphoner. There are also several fragments with square notation in a mensural form. The neume styles indicate a wide time-span, probably from the eleventh century to the mid-fifteenth century. The geographical region suggested by the notation is, for the most part, that of Lorraine and of southern Germany.

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

Liturgical chant bibliography 7 continues the new format initiated last year in this journal: editions and facsimile editions; books, reprints; collections of essays, congress reports, chant periodicals, dictionaries; articles in periodicals and Festschriften. This year's bibliography begins with a list of additions to the previous bibliography. In the case of a few titles, the Lexicon Musicum Latinum (7053) or MGG (7059), for example, I have referred to publications listed in LitChBibl 6. Completing and facilitating access to the bibliography are separate indices of names, subjects and manuscripts

The end of a century, like the end of any era, is a time to take stock and lay plans. This is no less true of plainsong and medieval music than of any field of human endeavour. So it comes as no surprise to encounter in our professional literature exhortations to re-envision our subject and to contemplate its direction in the twenty-first century. Richard Crocker has been particularly cogent in recommending the abandonment of lost causes and the adoption of new or neglected research methods.1 The attempt to read the oldest melodic texts of plainchant as the trace of the sumptuous oral tradition that preceded them, however tantalizing, is ultimately unsatisfying in his view, perhaps even vain. In its place he urges us to cultivate a critical, evaluative understanding of chants composed in the era of musical notation, that is, as authoritative compositions of the time when they were copied rather than as witnesses to an obsolescent oral tradition. Putting this advice into practice would require more listening, performing and remembering of chants as they are and less speculation about how they got that way.

The series of chant programmes that Fr Hubert Dopf has recorded with the Vienna Hofburgkapelle on Philips has progressed slowly until now. My discography listed 411140 and 416808, and 432089–2 followed in this review (1992, no. 20). Now all at once, five new titles have been announced, although only two have arrived (nos. 1 and 2 in the list at the end of this article). These adopt a new plan in following the course of the liturgical year. In this plan, the programme of chants of the Holy Spirit on the third disc is defined as belonging to Pentecost, while Advent and Christmas herewith will be followed by Easter, Ascension and Marian feasts. The new scheme resulted in new versions of much of the content of the second disc of the set. The interpretation is semiological, even using the revised melodies that have been edited by the Associazione Internazionale Studi di Canto Gregoriano (AISCGre).