This article proposes a methodology for differentiating between scribal hands in square chant notation. Drawing on several Dominican chant books copied in thirteenth-century Paris, the methodology outlined here may also prove a useful starting point for approaching square chant notations from various other origins. Specifically, this approach highlights eight parameters that may be useful for identifying and distinguishing scribal hands in square chant notation, namely, by examining the forms of F-clefs, custodes, liquescent neume shapes, general neume shapes and/or note groupings, C-clefs, accidentals, hairline extensions and the general appearance of the notation. This methodology is used to identify the notators working within the chant books of the Dominican exemplar manuscript Rome, Santa Sabina, XIV L 1, demonstrating the presence of one main notator, an ‘overseer’ or corrector intervening across several parts of the manuscript to supply missing material, and a second corrector or user of the manuscript adding missing material on one folio only. Through such palaeographical study, it was possible to reveal the different roles of the scribes notating this manuscript, to hypothesise about the process by which the liturgical material within the manuscript was compiled and to identify a potential network of notators working in Dominican manuscripts in Paris in the third quarter of the thirteenth century.

This article examines the Tractatus de musica of Jerome of Moray (‘de Moravia’), affirming his Scottish identity, as proposed by Michel Huglo in 1994. It argues that the Tractatus de musica presents an important overview of Parisian music theory in the thirteenth century, relating to both chant and mensurable music in that century, because it combines the views of several generations: the Positio discantus vulgaris, which he says was used ‘among the nations’; the De mensurabili musica of John of Garland, who corrected its deficiencies; and the treatises of Franco of Cologne and Petrus Picardus. It considers Jerome's career in three phases: his exposure to music and music theory in Scotland; his studies in Paris, most likely under John of Garland, perhaps at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame; and his involvement in the liturgical reforms within the Dominican Order, implemented by its Master, Humbert of Romans in 1256. Rather than assigning Franco's Ars cantus mensurabilis to 1280 (as proposed by Wolf Frobenius) and Jerome's Tractatus to sometime after this, I suggest that Jerome was exposed to John of Garland's teaching in the 1240s and that the Franconian system may have started to gain ground in the 1250s. Jerome compiled his Tractatus over a period of time, adding an excerpt about cosmic music from the commentary of Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle's De caelo perhaps as early as 1271 or 1272, in response to the criticisms of John of Garland and his followers being made by Johannes de Grocheio.

This article introduces a metrical adaptation to the contrapunctus method of pitch reduction commonly used to analyse Ars Nova counterpoint. Expanding the medieval concept of colouration from the mensural to the metrical, my contrapuncti highlight the flexible toggling between perfect and imperfect groupings at various rhythmic levels in selected motets by Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300–77). The viewpoint advanced here assumes no a priori metrical grid to parse the musical surface, but rather allows the articulation of sonority, cadence and form to reveal a fluid and unique metrical grouping structure for each piece. With metrical emphases shown as inextricable from contrapuntal and harmonic ones, the metrical contrapunctus captures a more comprehensive picture of Machaut's musical language.