Old Hispanic liturgy was practised across much of medieval Iberia until c.1080. In this article we analyse the extant Old Hispanic processional antiphons, focusing on: the presence or absence of verses; amount of text and relationship with the Bible; cadence placement; number of notes per chant (melodic density) and per syllable; and melodic repetition within and between chants. We demonstrate that the processional antiphons are neither a homogenous corpus nor clearly differentiated stylistically from other Old Hispanic antiphons. In a short case study of the Good Friday Veneration of the Cross, we situate the processional antiphons within their wider ritual context, including their likely staging in the ecclesiastical architecture. As we show, the interaction between melody and ritual directed the antiphon texts towards a particular devotional end.

This article argues that the rhythmic meaning of the notation in the Cantigas de Santa Maria can be only understood by confronting it with different theoretical paradigms. Julián Ribera in 1922 defended an Arabic paradigm, to the exclusion of any other, but his access to Arabic historical writings was severely limited. Higinio Anglés in 1943 and most modern musicologists have since adopted French mensural theory, but recognised that it does not fit many songs. The author has demonstrated elsewhere that songs that do not fit the French paradigm often fit the Arabic one. The applicability of both paradigms, including their superimposition, is systematically compared here. After comparison of general concepts (ordo and period), of even-time composition (modes V–VI or conjunctive rhythm), of long–short opposition in ternary time (modes I–II or Ramal) and more complex patterns, the author provisionally concludes that very few patterns point unequivocally to French models, while in most cases (first and second mode and potential forms of the third mode) both French and Arabic paradigms could apply. In many other cases, encompassing both binary and ternary metre, the Arabic rhythmic paradigm is clearly either more fitting than the Parisian one, or the only one to apply.

It is well known that when Father Laurence Feininger died in 1976 he left a substantial body of unpublished material. Edward Lowinsky has argued powerfully that “an enormous obligation rests on the national and international associations of musicology to undertake the publication of Feininger's scholarly estate and to bring it to the full use and enjoyment of the musical and musicological world”.

The cantillation of the Scriptures played an important role in the complex matrix of symbols that is the Byzantine liturgy. Beginning in the ninth century, a special type of notation called ‘ekphonetic’ was developed to indicate in the lectionaries the formulae used in the chanting of the appointed scriptural pericopes. Gradually, over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the system fell into disuse, and the meaning of the notational signs was forgotten. Unfortunately, no surviving Byzantine theoretical treatises explain the system; hence the only sources of information about it (apart from the lectionaries themselves) are lists of ekphonetic neumes found in some manuscripts. Of particular value in this regard is the manuscript Sinaiticus graecus 213. Not only is this one of the oldest datable Greek evangeliaries, but it contains the most ancient list of neumes heretofore discovered, having escaped the attention of musicologists probably because of its unusual location in the manuscript. The present study, proceeding from an analysis of the theoretical information contained in the Sinait. graec. 213 list, will seek to establish the practical application of the neumes within the body of the manuscript, thus contributing to a clarification of the structural characteristics of the earliest, so-called ‘preclassic’, phase of the notational system.

responding to recent theories on roman chant by kenneth levy, this article argues, on the basis of liturgical and textual evidence, that non-psalmic offertories were included in the roman chant repertory before carolingian times, that the composition of the offertory cycle was finished by the beginning of the seventh century, that pieces of non-roman origin can be found among psalmic offertories, and that ‘non-roman’ can mean african as well as gallican.

One of the earliest forms of Christian psalmody, the alleluia psalmody, is difficult to explore since in most rites it is preserved only in part. Comparisons between direct and indirect traces of alleluia psalmody from Milan, Rome, Byzantium and Gaul as well as between alleluia psalmody and other genres of chant, especially the Mass alleluia, allow some conclusions about distinctive melodic characteristics. As one result, there seem to be common features in the Italian traditions that are missing in the Gallican tradition.

Using several twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources, this study examines a selected number of Office antiphons, comparing their melodic variants for patterns of similarity and difference. The ancestry of a Sarum manuscript and - in another source - the survival of a pre-Conquest musical tradition in England are discernible in Office manuscripts examined as are affinities among French and English sources. Evidence from previous chant scholarship and certain medieval historical events shed light on the observations made in this study.

This article traces the history of chants associated with the Adoration of a replica of the cross. It describes the development of an antiphon series for Good Friday afternoon found in Ordines Romani XXVII–XXXIII and selected northern French, German, Aquitanian, Spanish and Italian sources dating from the eighth into the twelfth century. Using illustrative tables, rubrics and facsimiles, the study compares liturgical features of the Adoratio crucis with its related Offices of the cross, the Exaltatio and Inventio, in a survey of the principal titles' texts and melodies.

This article uses multiple witnesses of the chants from four offices of the Sanctorale, transcribed from twelve manuscripts and an early printed antiphonal, in order to assess the stability of chants in late medieval sources associated with the liturgical ‘Use of Sarum’. Whilst there is usually a ‘main’ melodic reading or version for each chant, a considerable degree of variation exists among the readings from various witnesses. The data which support this argument allow manuscripts to be linked by networks of shared melodic material, both through melodic readings identical and present in multiple sources, and through divergences from such main versions. These observations help to illuminate something of the diversity of the written melodic tradition, raising wider questions about the relationship between written witness and performed reality, and about the fixity of ‘Sarum Use’, at least as far as it was transmitted in written form.

This is the first study to examine the seven invitatory antiphons of the Birgittine weekly Office, the Cantus sororum, offering complete transcriptions of the melodies and texts. An important general finding is that these invitatories share many melodic similarities with great responsories, but on a more detailed level this article investigates precisely how these chants relate to known models, both complete melodies as well as individual melodic motives. Four patterns of composition among the Cantus sororum invitatories emerge: (1) unique texts may be combined with melodies that resemble other known chants outside the Cantus sororum; (2) texts and melodies that resemble other variants outside the Cantus sororum may be combined in new ways; (3) both text and melody are unknown outside the Cantus sororum.

Overall, these invitatory antiphons, like the rest of the Cantus sororum, represent creative work with existing melodies and texts, including reworkings, borrowings and consistent use of melodic motifs, comprising a significant part of a repertoire at once distinctly Birgittine in character and yet conforming to the common stock of Gregorian Chant. Melodic correspondences within the Cantus sororum as well as in the Birgittine Mass repertoire thus afford an interesting perspective on a soundscape in which the Birgittines functioned and where, through music, their identity was created and maintained.

Taking the Boethian understanding of the relation between the musicus and cantor as his point of departure, Jacobus – the author of the Speculum musicae – develops this relation in light of new ecclesiastical realities and the Aristotelian understanding of the relation between theory and practice. Without entirely abandoning an allegiance to the priority of theory over practice and the corresponding embodiments of these categories in the musicus and cantor, Jacobus redefines these terms to create a new threefold taxonomy: the Boethian musicus who understands but does not perform or compose, the practicus musicus who both understands and practises within an ecclesiastical context (and is the equivalent of the peritus cantor), and the cantor who sings without understanding. These developments within the Speculum musicae follow attempts by earlier authors to negotiate the relation between the heritage of antiquity and the cantus tradition of musical practice within liturgical contexts. Jacobus's solution also differs from solutions offered by contemporary and later authors.

The manuscript Vatican City, Vatican Library, Vaticanus Latinus 10781 is a 15th-century antiphonal from Veroli, an Italian town located south of Rome and north of Cassino. It is particularly interesting for the study of late medieval chant, since it contains a virtually complete setting of the office of Mary, mother of the apostles John and James; a closer examination of the chant texts identifies the saint as Mary of Salome. Mary of Salome is also known as one of the Three Marys, the other two being Mary of Cleophas and Mary the mother of the Lord. Although two exemplars of an office of the Three Marys are preserved in Carmelite manuscripts, the office presented in our codex remains distinct from the office of the Three Marys.

The alleluia was the last proper chant of the Mass to be standardized. Through the twelfth century and beyond, different churches assigned different alleluias to the same Masses, and the composition of new alleluia chants flourished throughout the latter Middle Ages. The Masses from Easter to the octave of Pentecost witness this. A collation of ca. 200 manuscripts demonstrates that identical series of chants are to be found only in sources emanating from the same church (or churches in the same city). Most of the alleluia chants from the eleventh century onward have New Testament or non-scriptural texts, as opposed to the psalmic texts of the earlier post-Pentecostal alleluias. The musical style is varied, ranging from the richly melismatic manner traditionally associated with the alleluia to much more modest melodies with few or no large melismas. A number of the latter can be associated with the reforms of Guillaume de Volpiano at Dijon and in Normandy in the years after 1000.

In the year 552, a ceremony was held to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of Martha, mother of St Simeon Stylites the Younger. The Vita of St Martha, written by an anonymous monk during the first half of the seventh century, records that the priest Antonio journeyed from Simeon's pillar at Mount Admirabilis, near Antioch, to Jerusalem to obtain a fragment of the cross. When Antonio returned to Mount Admirabilis, ‘a great crowd of men and women gathered in the grace of God, with candles and torches, to hold the service in her memory: and having kept a vigil all night, when in the early morning the living cross was displayed, all who were gathered worshipped, crying out with hymns: We adore your cross, Lord, and we glorify your holy resurrection.’

The theory that the antiphon is a kind of refrain and that its original purpose was to be inserted between all the verses of its respective psalm was articulated by Giuseppe Maria Tommasi in the seventeenth century and has been transmitted by liturgical historians with little criticism ever since that time. The present article examines the evidence on which that theory rests, with special attention to the writings of Amalar of Metz, and finds it to be inconclusive or positively contrary to the claims that have been built upon it. The article considers the evidence of antiphonal psalmody at Mass, as transmitted in Ordo Romanus I, and finds support there for the view that antiphons were normally performed only at the beginning and end of their respective psalms. After considering briefly the Liber Pontificalis and the tradition of psalmodic differentiae, the article turns to the treatment of antiphonal psalmody by the liturgical historians Guillaume Durand and Radulph de Rivo in the late Middle Ages and finds in their writings no evidence of a belief that frequent interpolation was the authentic primitive practice. The article concludes that two iterations of the antiphon, once at the beginning and once at the end of the psalm, suited its original thematic intent and that the theory of reiteration after every verse – effectively conflating antiphonal and responsorial psalmody – may be no older than the liturgical scholarship of Tommasi in the late seventeenth century.

It is a curiosity of British cultural history that the surviving Anglo-Norman (AN) songs of medieval England have attracted so little interest amongst musicologists English or French. Such knowledge as we have of them is mostly garnered from two pioneering facsimile volumes: Early English Harmony, edited in 1897 for the Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society by Harry E. Wooldridge; and Early Bodleian Music (1901), an even finer collection, edited by Sir John Stainer, his son and his daughter, with exemplary studies of many of the manuscripts by Bodley's Librarian, Edward B. Nicholson. These two volumes contain about half of the songs listed here. Their French equivalent, Pierre Aubry's Les plus anciens monuments de la musique française (1905), contains two AN songs in facsimile. Others were published at around the same time (‘buried’ might be a better word) in isolated facsimile: El tens d'iver (Baker), Quaunt le russinol (Petersen). Yet others have only recently emerged, or re-emerged, into scholarly consciousness: Volez oyer le castoy (Wilkins), Si tost c'amis (Page, 1988)

There is much interest at present in the way medieval motets generate meaning, both with their texts and their music. In two articles from a recent issue of Early Music History, for example, a remarkable density of meaning and symbolism, both textual and musical, has been proposed for Machaut's motet 15. Studies of this kind are intended to demonstrate what can be achieved by placing the poems of motets in a literary context and by considering the structure of words and music. Such research also no doubt serves to reinforce the idea that many motets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries demand a wealth of erudite knowledge to be understood and is thus congenial to the current belief that many motets were intended for an intellectual elite. Whilst there can be no doubt that medieval motets often cultivate a literary style of considerable – indeed intense – obscurity, what I wish to suggest here is that one, very ambitious, motet can be interpreted using some of the most basic tools of the medieval cleric.