The material presented here summarizes information that has come to light in the last ten years regarding the repertory and practice of the Beneventan chant of southern Italy. The information itself is provided in tabular form; the commentary that precedes it gives some brief background and points out a few interesting details.

The Beneventan chant is one of those varieties of liturgical song that made the early medieval musical landscape so much more interesting than it later became, after the Carolingian urge to unity, combined with ecclesiastical reform, created a universal music that we now call Gregorian chant. Some of these early chant repertories have survived: the Ambrosian chant of Milan; the music of the Old Spanish liturgy. Others, like the Gallican chant, have disappeared.

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.

Since the realization, at the beginning of this century, that the treatise Speculum musicae had been incorrectly attributed to Jehan des Murs by its first editor, Edmond de Coussemaker, the actual author of this voluminous work of music theory from the early fourteenth century has remained a shadowy figure. The most certain detail of the author's identity is his name, contained within an acrostic spelled out over the initials that begin each of the seven books of the treatise, rendering the given name IACOBUS. The provenances of the three surviving manuscript sources, all dating from approximately a century after the proposed date of Speculum musicae, suggest an Italian bias to the transmission of the work, but, as physical documents, the manuscripts have yet to yield any clues to the author's origins. The treatise itself is a bit more helpful. Besides offering the author's name, clues within the text have allowed for the formulation of the following hypothesis concerning the career of Jacobus: that he was probably born in the diocese of Liège, that he was a student in Paris in the late thirteenth century, and that he returned to Liège to complete the final books of his treatise, Books 6 and 7 of Speculum musicae. In what follows, I will first briefly evaluate the evidence previously marshalled to support this hypothesis, and I will then discuss new information pertinent to the biography of the author.

A model for the Roman liturgical order for processions on Sundays was Easter, the festal day described in Ordo Romanus I, rather than the preceding Sunday, perhaps a more obvious pattern for a procession within the Proprium de tempore.Michel Andrieu, ed., Les Ordines Romani du haut Moyen Age, 5 vols. (Louvain, 1931, 1948–61) II, 68–9, Ordo I, 5: ‘nam prima feria regio tertia, id est paschae, secunda feria’, etc. ; I, 7: ‘Diebus itaque sollemnibus, id est Pascha’. ‘Id est’ might be interpreted ‘for example’. Note that Easter is only one example of the papal processional procedures found only in this ordo. See John F. Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 228 (Rome, 1987), 131–2. The present study originated as a paper for the session ‘Music for Festal Days’ at the 34th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 1999. The singing by the Hebrew people of Hosanna and Benedictus qui venit to acclaim the one progressing into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday would seem to be the ideal archetype for a procession with song to replicate a biblical event, reported uniformly in all four Gospels.Matt. 21:8–9; Mark 11:8–10, Luke 19:36–8 (with different wording); John 12:12–13. The Old Testament presaging of Benedictus is Psalm 117:26. The visual replay with the symbols of olive branches and palm fronds and the commemorative Palmesel, integral to the procession, have been studied in critical detail by Karl Young and many who have followed in the wake of his pathbreaking The Drama of the Medieval Church. Much of the music has been expertly studied by Terence Bailey. On musical and prayer formularies from the typikon and early Western patristic citations (i.e. Bede, Aldhelm, Amalarius and Drogo of Metz), see Hermann J. Gräf, Palmenweihe und Palmprozession in der lateinischen Liturgie (Kaldenkirchen, 1950), 10–15, 30–2. See also Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1962), I: 90–8, 519, 527, 533, 549; Terence Bailey, The Processions of Sarum and the Western Church (Toronto, 1971), 33–40 (Examples 6–14); 166–7 (Table 2). (The acclamation Benedictus qui venit–Hosanna in excelsis that follows the Sanctus of the Mass precluded movement by its position within the liturgy.) By the time of the pilgrim Egeria, who visited Jerusalem in the early 380s, the commemoration of the Evangelists' historiae had engendered a meeting at the very spot where in biblical times infants, strewing palms sang the celebrated Benedictus verse, now converted into a refrain.‘Et jam cum coeperit esse hora undecima [die dominica] legitur ille locus de evangelio, ubi infantes cum ramis vel palmis occurrerunt Domino, dicentes: Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Et statim levat se episcopus et omnis populus; porro inde de summo monte Oliveti totum pedibus itur. Nam totus populus ante ipsum cum hymnis vel antiphonis, respondentes semper; Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’. [Peregrinatio ad loca sancta] Itinerarium 31, 1, ed. Pierre Maraval, Egérie: Journal de Voyage, Sources Chrétiennes 296 (Paris, 1982), 274; trans. John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels to the Holy Land (Jerusalem, 1981), 133. Other translations and descriptive material are found in Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. William G. Storey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen (Washington, DC, 1986), 11. On the date of Egeria's report, see Peter Jeffery, ‘The Earliest Christian Chant Repertory Recovered: The Georgian Witnesses to Jerusalem Chant’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 47/1 (1994), 2–3. Perhaps a half-century before, Chrysostom (Homilia habita in magnum hebdomadam 2) had allied the Hosanna exclamation with the exhortation ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul!’ of Psalm 145. See James McKinnon, ed., Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, 1987), 83 (no. 175); cf. Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, MN, 1991), 186. For the Palm Sunday agendas according to other Eastern practices (e.g., Armenian, Georgian and the Anastasis Typikon) see Baldovin, The Urban Character, 77, 80–1, 98.

The structure of the present Liturgical chant bibliography 9 maintains the previously established format: (1) Editions and facsimile editions, (2) Books and reprints, (3) Congress reports, (4) Chant journals, (5) Collections of essays, dictionaries and periodicals, (6) Articles in periodicals. All of the material contained in the bibliography may be accessed by means of the indices of names, subjects and manuscripts. This year, I would like to draw particular attention to several facsimile editions of chant manuscripts: Il Libro del Maestro, Piacenza 9 (9002), The York Processional (9003), the Breviarium notatum strigoniense (9005) and an Antiphonaire cistercien, XII s. (9007). The first mentioned of these facsimiles has been the centre of a number of related publications (9024, 9039, 9060, 9077f, 9138). The famous Ars nova manuscript from Cyprus (9008) has been published in facsimile. Previously, the small chant repertory it contains (fols 1-28) had been available in Richard H. Hoppin: Cypriot Plainchant of the Manuscript Torino Biblioteca Nazionale J. II. 9. A Facsimile Edition with Commentary, Musicological Studies and Documents 19 (American Institute of Musicology, 1968).

Ave virgo mater dei, an English three-voice composition from around 1300, combines two structural devices typical of English music of this time: voice-exchange and hocket. Like many of its companion pieces in the so-called Worcester Fragments, only a portion of the original script (shown in Fig. 1) has survived. Recovery of this composition is aided by a number of immediate clues as to how the music (including what has been lost) must originally have been set out in the manuscript.

Chant from the Greek tradition continues to be explored in its various manifestations by performers with very different interpretational approaches. Lycourgos Angelopoulos has continued his pioneering work both liturgically and in concert, though he has not recorded a great deal recently. His two most recent discs, which fill significant gaps in the recorded repertory, date from 1993 and 1994. The first (5) is a concert recorded in 1990, particularly interesting in that it contains two pieces from the Athonite tradition as practised today: the mode 1 kathisma from the Akathistos Hymn as notated by Fr Georgios Rigas (d. 1958) and verses from Psalm 135 in four modes as sung by the much beloved Deacon Dionysios Firfiris, proptopsaltis of the cathedral of Karies on Athos until his death in 1990. The psalm verses are sung in Angelopoulos's own transcription. The second disc (7) brings together a collection of magnificent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century compositions for Christmas. It includes a particularly impressively structured koinonikon by the Constantinopolitan Daniel Protopsaltis (d. 1789), which includes a fine kratima (a melody sung to nonsense syllables) before the final alleluia. The performance style of the Greek Byzantine Choir is, as ever, tasteful, technically brilliant (the precision of the ornamentation alone leaves one amazed) and inspired. Worthy of emphasis is the fact that this repertory is being sung by a choir. Choral (as opposed to solo) psaltic singing is undergoing something of a revival in Greece at present. A number of good choirs are working in the field, but the Greek Byzantine Choir remains the only one to have been extensively recorded and distributed outside Greece.