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.

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.

Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.29.1 (F) is considered the earliest extant manuscript to preserve a collection of motets, with two fascicles devoted to this new genre. Scholars have long emphasised the strict liturgical sequence of the first motet fascicle, in contrast to the seeming lack of order in the second. This article engages with questions of liturgical arrangement in F, exploring the possibility of a liturgical function for motets in this source. It undertakes a re-examination of the ordering of motets in F, proposing two new organisational principles applicable across both fascicles: first, that the arrangement of motets may have been influenced by an awareness of related clausulae and discant materials extant elsewhere in F; and second, that ordering of the collection reflects the relative dissemination or ‘popularity’ of motets and their related materials.

This article reports the discovery of an early fourteenth-century manuscript fragment (two small snippets from the same folio) of Castilian origin. One side of the original folio contained a monophonic piece in Ars Nova notation whose text has been identified as Mozarabic preces, a musical repertoire that was suposed to lack written transmission from the twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries. The fragment thus throws new light on the survival of the Mozarabic rite through the late Middle Ages. The backside of the folio contains music written in an old mensural system based on undifferentiated semibreves and puncta divisionis. In this regard, the manuscript may represent the earliest known Spanish source to employ the Petronian system described in the mensural treatise in Barcelona Cathedral (misc. 23). The study includes a detailed codicological examination of the manuscript (including the digital restoration of a palimpsest), transcriptions and musical analysis.

The manuscript Chicago, Newberry Library 54.1, copied in Pavia in 1391 by an English friar, has been the object of attention of scholars for some time now. Because of the presence of Senleches's song La harpe de melodie (famously notated in the shape of a harp), and of the earliest known dated copy of the Tractatus figurarum (which reflects late fourteenth-century developments in the notation of complex rhythms), the Chicago manuscript has often been cited in support of the historiographical hypothesis which sees the Visconti court of Pavia–Milan as the main centre of production of Ars subtilior repertory in Italy. In the absence of records on the scribe ‘G de Anglia’ and the context in which he worked, it has been almost inevitable thus far to associate the compilation of the manuscript with the Visconti court and the city university (founded and supported by the Visconti). A recently identified document, however, provides some clues to the identity of the scribe of Chicago 54.1, who can now be identified as an Augustinian Hermit. This is confirmed by various elements in the manuscript that also indicate Augustinian connections, placing the compilation of the manuscript in the context of the Augustinian house of Pavia. These elements help to shift the focus of attention to other cultural contexts that may have played a role in the compilation of the manuscript, and invite a reassessment of the hitherto assumed connections with the Visconti court and secular university.

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.