The sources of medieval Offices contain a vast number of characteristics which demand comparative study; consequently, analyses of the repertory necessitate the use of a limited set of data upon which observations can be made. While apparently ‘trivial’ variants may be of limited use at the outset, they contribute to the understanding of the repertory and may provide key information to support the relationships between sources. One of these subtle variants is the filling in of a melodic third by the enclosed pitch. An examination of the instances of filled thirds in a selection of sources of the Office for St Thomas Becket offers evidence for an established source grouping. The author attempts to address the question why these filled thirds would exist in sources of relatively new chant melodies. Finally, proposals for further study of filled thirds and similar variants in the plainchant repertory are outlined.

No bibliographical information has survived regarding the anonymous treatise Capitulum de vocibus applicatis verbis, the only treatise of the Trecento that provides a description of the musical genres of Italian secular music. The problem of dating the Capitulum is the more challenging for scholars, given the absence of unequivocal points of reference of known date (the presently accepted dating, since Debenedetti’s first description of the source in 1906, is ‘between the years 1313–1332’). The Capitulum and Antonio da Tempo’s Summa artis rithmici vulgaris dictaminis (1332), are connected by the phrase ‘nova sunt pulchritudine decorata’, which appears in the final section of the Capitulum and at the very beginning of da Tempo’s Summa. The original source of this phrase, which does not appear in any other medieval source, is the Constitutio Omnem, a letter written by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (527–65) on 16 December 533. Antonio da Tempo, who was a judge in Padua, was evidently the first to extract this quotation (with a slight change in the word order) from Justinian’s Constitutio for use in his treatise on poetic forms. For his part, the author of the Capitulum, apparently a simple teacher of grammar and music, took the statement ‘nova sunt’ not directly from Justinian’s Constitutio, but verbatim from da Tempo’s Summa, a source that was closer to his field of professional activity. Therefore, it can be concluded that the Capitulum was compiled not at the beginning of the Trecento but after 1332, the year in which da Tempo completed his Summa.

The texts of thirteenth-century vernacular motets have held centre stage in many recent debates about this polytextual genre: the purported unintelligibility of the words in performance has led to questions about how motets were meant to be understood, especially by third-party listeners, both medieval and modern. The irony is that the purpose of the music has gone unheard in this debate. Using a single motet as point of focus, this article suggests various ways in which the music clarifies rather than obscures the meaning of the text in performance. These range from the use of simple musical devices, such as musical repetition or changes in texture that draw attention to significant moments in the text, to the exploitation of refrain melodies, which I argue carries out an ‘intersonic’ duty that serves as an interpretive companion to the more traditional ‘intertextual’ readings of recent scholarship.

One new recording is a landmark of sorts, for the line of choirmasters at Solesmes runs from Dom André Mocquereau (1889–1914), Dom Joseph Gajard (1914–71), Dom Jean Claire (1971–96), and an interim visitor from St Benoît-du-Lac, Dom Richard Gagné (1996–2003), to a young monk of Solesmes, frère Yves-Marie Lelièvre. His first recording (no. 1 in the list below) offers the Mass Propers for the first three Sundays of Ordinary Time, formerly the Sundays after Epiphany, a programme that matches Dom Gajard’s last recording directing the nuns of Argentan in 1971 (7536 in my discography). Two of those chants have been replaced here, as in the Graduale Triplex, and the expanded playing time of a CD has been given over to seven organ selections played on the abbey’s Schwenkedel organ by Jacques Kauffmann of Paris. Frère Lelièvre selected a schola of twenty-one monks, perhaps not much smaller than Dom Claire used, and elicited a lightness of execution that simply must be heard. There is a forward motion in the singing that is particularly effective in the melismas. Just hear the seldom-recorded gradual ‘Benedictus Dominus’. This is the portent of a fine series of recordings.

The author of the above review regrets that there is an error in the name of the author of the book reviewed. The author’s name should read:

Wolfgang Fuhrmann