This discussion is ‘after Hiley’: it consists of my reflections, after reading his splendid book, Western Plainchant, concerning what I need and do not need to do, what I want and do not want to do, in pursuing studies in Gregorian chant. Even though my discussion is of some very general issues, it does not offer a programme; on the contrary, it can be taken as a critique of most programmes and systems. None the less, I hope it may suggest to others some positive and fruitful ways of proceeding.

Pistoia, Archivio capitolare, manuscripts C.119, C.120 and C.121 – two twelfth-century graduals and a troper from the cathedral of San Zeno – are relatively small, undecorated choirbooks copied during a time when the cathedral chapter gained unprecedented wealth, power and autonomy. This study closely connects the choirbooks to their cultural milieu and specifically to two high-ranking Pistoiese clerics who were likely involved in their manufacture. By examining the political and social environment in which they were created, this article places the manuscripts in a specific historical context and uses paleographical and historical evidence to date them between 1108 and as early as 1116.

Although it has always been plain to see that the Milanese and Roman Mass shared many texts, that the melodies were also shared has gone largely unnoticed, or at any rate undemonstrated, except in the special case of the few offertory chants with wider concordances in Franco-Roman, Milanese and Visigothic books. This article takes up the particular case of the Roman and Milanese entrance antiphons: first, the circumstances of the importation of the Roman introits into the Ambrosian Mass; and, second, the precise relationship of the Ambrosian and Franco-Roman (Gregorian) melodies. It has long been understood that chants of the Old Roman repertory provide a firm basis for an understanding of the changes, inevitable over time, in an orally transmitted repertory. It emerges that the Ambrosian melodies, transcribed in neumes in about the middle of the eleventh century, offer a second opportunity for a sondage. This other, unsuspected, version of the chants, miraculously preserved and stabilised north of the Alps in the ninth and tenth centuries also allows for convincing demonstrations of the musical procedures employed in the elaboration of the melodies and in their adaptation to different texts. And not least, the isolation of what is shared between versions notated at a distance of centuries give us the basis of an objective estimation of the effectiveness of musical memory in a musical culture that did not rely on notation.