The fifteen studies assembled here grew out of research on south-Italian ordinary chants and tropes for the multi-volume series Beneventanum Troporum Corpus II, edited by John Boe in collaboration with Alejandro Planchart. In the present essays, clerical and ordinary chants and tropes of the Mass (especially when derived from paraliturgical hymns and poems), certain aspects of chant notation and particular facets of the old Beneventan and the old Roman chant repertories are examined in relation to the three main cultic centres of the Italian south - Benevento, Montecassino and Rome - and as they relate to their European context, namely Frankish and Norman chant and the varieties of chant sung in Italy north of Rome. The volume includes one previously unpublished study, on the Roman introit Salus Populi.

This is the first comprehensive study of Greek language ordinary chants (Gloria/Doxa, Credo/Pisteuo, Sanctus/Hagios and Agnus Dei/Amnos tu theu) in Western manuscripts from the 9th to 14th centuries. These chants – known as “Missa Graeca” – have been the subject of academic research for over a hundred years. So far, however, research has been almost exclusively from a Western point of view, without knowledge of the Byzantine sources. For the first time, this book presents an in-depth analysis of these chants and their historical, linguistic and theological-liturgical environment from a Byzantine perspective. The new approach enables the author to refute numerous (and largely contradictory) theories on the origin and development of the Missa Graeca and provides new answers to old questions.

This book presents together a number of path-breaking essays on different aspects of medieval music in France written by Manuel Pedro Ferreira, who is well known for his work on the medieval cantigas and Iberian liturgical sources. The first essay is a tour-de-force of detective work: an odd E-flat in two 16th-century antiphoners leads to the identification of a Gregorian responsory as a Gallican version of a seventh-century Hispanic melody. The second rediscovers a long-forgotten hypothesis concerning the microtonal character of some French 11th-century neumes. In the paper "Is it polyphony?" an even riskier hypothesis is arrived at: Do the origins of Aquitanian free organum lie on the instrumental accompaniment of newly composed devotional versus? The Cistercian attitude towards polyphonic singing, mirrored in musical sources kept in peripheral nunneries, is the subject of the following essay. The intellectual and sociological nature of the Parisian motet is the central concern of the following two essays, which, after a survey of concepts of temporality in the trouvère and polyphonic repertories, establish it as the conceptual foundation of subsequent European schools of composition. It is possible then to assess the real originality of Philippe de Vitry and his Ars nova, which is dealt with in the following chapter. A century later, the role of Guillaume Dufay in establishing a chord-based alternative to contrapuntal writing is laboriously put into evidence. Finally, an informative synthesis is offered concerning the mathematical underpinnings of musical composition in the Middle Ages.

The fifteen studies assembled here grew out of research on south-Italian ordinary chants and tropes for the multi-volume series Beneventanum Troporum Corpus II, edited by John Boe in collaboration with Alejandro Planchart. In the present essays, clerical and ordinary chants and tropes of the Mass (especially when derived from paraliturgical hymns and poems), certain aspects of chant notation and particular facets of the old Beneventan and the old Roman chant repertories are examined in relation to the three main cultic centres of the Italian south - Benevento, Montecassino and Rome - and as they relate to their European context, namely Frankish and Norman chant and the varieties of chant sung in Italy north of Rome. The volume includes one previously unpublished study, on the Roman introit Salus Populi.

This is a complete edition with critical commentary of the Byzantine Communions in thirteenth-century manuscripts of the Asmatikon, all known sources being used. The chants concerned are the earliest known examples of Communion Chants of the Orthodox Church, and are found in a book which may go back to the rite of St Sophia at Constantinople during the tenth century-the earliest copies of which date from the thirteenth-century and come from South Italy and North Greece. Further more, there are also a few manuscripts from Kiev with text in Church Slavonic and an untranscribable musical notation. This is the first systematic transcription of the Asmatikon ever to be published.

A comprehensive, ongoing guide to publications on music from all over the world, with abstracts written in English. All scholarly works are included: articles, books, bibliographies, catalogues, dissertations, Festschriften, films and videos, iconographies, critical commentaries to complete works, ethnographic recordings, conference proceedings, electronic resources, and reviews.