History of Medieval Music

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF
MEDIEVAL MUSIC
Spanning a millennium of musical history, these monumental volumes

bring together nearly forty leading authorities to survey the music of
Western Europe in the Middle Ages. All of the major aspects of medieval
music are considered, making use of the latest research and thinking to
discuss everything from the earliest genres of chant, through the music of
the liturgy, to the riches of the vernacular song of the trouvères and
troubadours. Alongside this account of the core repertory of monophony,
The Cambridge History of Medieval Music tells the story of the birth of
polyphonic music, and studies the genres of organum, conductus, motet
and polyphonic song. Key composers of the period are introduced, such as
Leoninus, Perotinus, Adam de la Halle, Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume
de Machaut, and other chapters examine topics ranging from musical
theory and performance to institutions, culture, and collections.
MARK EVERIST is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton.

His previous publications include Mozart’s Ghosts: Haunting the Halls of
Musical Culture (2013), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music
(Cambridge, 2011), and French Motets in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge,
1994).
THOMAS FORREST KELLY is Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at
Harvard University, and has published numerous works including Early
Music: A Very Short Introduction (2011), The Exultet in Southern Italy (1997)
and the Kinkeldey Award-winning The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge, 1989).
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF
MUSIC
The Cambridge History of Music comprises a group of reference works concerned with significant
strands of musical scholarship. The individual volumes are self-contained and include histories of
music examined by century as well as the history of opera, music theory, and American music. Each
volume is written by a team of experts under a specialist editor and represents the latest
musicological research.
The Cambridge History of American Music

Edited by David Nicholls
The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory

Edited by Thomas Christensen
The Cambridge History of Musical Performance
Edited by Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell
The Cambridge History of World Music

Edited by Philip V. Bohlman
The Cambridge History of Medieval Music

Edited by Mark Everist and Thomas Forrest Kelly
The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music
Edited by Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin
The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music

Edited by Tim Carter and John Butt
The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music

Edited by Simon P. Keefe
The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music
Edited by Jim Samson
The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music

Edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople
THE CAMBRIDGE
HISTORY OF
MEDIEVAL MUSIC
VOLUME I AND II
*
EDITED BY
MARK EVERIST
AND
THOMAS FORREST KELLY
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First published 2018
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NAMES: Everist, Mark, editor. | Kelly, Thomas Forrest, editor.
T I T L E : The Cambridge history of medieval music / edited by Mark Everist
and Thomas Forrest Kelly.
D E S C R I P T I O N : New York : Cambridge University Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I D E N T I F I E R S : L C C N 2017023174 | I S B N 9780521513487
S U B J E C T S : L C S H : Music – 500–1400 – History and criticism. | Music – 15th
century – History and criticism.
C L A S S I F I C A T I O N : L C C M L 172 .C 3305 2017 | D D C 780.9/02–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023174
ISBN – 2-Volume Set 978-0-521-51348-7 Hardback
ISBN – Volume I 978-1-107-17980-6 Hardback
I S B N – Volume II 978-1-107-17981-3 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Figures page ix

List of Music Examples xiv
List of Tables xxii
Notes on Contributors xxiii
Acknowledgements xxxii
List of Manuscript Sigla xxxiii
List of Abbreviations xlv
VOLUME I
Introduction and Context 1
1 . Musical Legacies from the Ancient World 15

PETER JEFFERY
2 . Origins and Transmission of Franco-Roman Chant 69

ANDREAS PFISTERER
3 . Sources of Romano-Frankish Liturgy and Music 92

JOSEPH DYER
4 . Regional Liturgies: Spanish, Beneventan, Gallican, Milanese 123

TERENCE BAILEY
5 . Nova Cantica 147

JEREMY LLEWELLYN
6 . Music and Prosopography 176

MARGOT FASSLER
7 . The Silence of Medieval Singers 210

KATARINA LIVLJANIC AND BENJAMIN BAGBY
[v]
vi Contents
8 . Notation I 236
THOMAS FORREST KELLY
9 . Tropes 263
ANDREAS HAUG
10 . Sequence 300
LORI KRUCKENBERG
11 . Music Theory 357

THOMAS CHRISTENSEN
12 . Vernacular Song I : Lyric 382

ELIZABETH AUBREY
13 . Vernacular Song I I : Romance 428

ANNE IBOS-AUGÉ
14 . Instruments and Their Music 451

NIGEL WILKINS
15 . Teaching and Learning Music 475

ANNA MARIA BUSSE BERGER
16 . Music in Drama 500

DAVID KLAUSNER
17 . The Sources 527

STANLEY BOORMAN
18 . The Revival of Medieval Music 561

JOHN HAINES
19 . Medieval Performance Practice 582

TIMOTHY J. MCGEE
20 . Issues in the Modern Performance of Medieval Music 609

JOHN POTTER
Contents vii
VOLUME II
21 . Institutions and Foundations 627

ALEJANDRO ENRIQUE PLANCHART
22 . Notation I I 674
LAWRENCE EARP
23 . Rhythm and Meter 718

JOHN CALDWELL
24 . Tonal Organization in Polyphony, 1150–1400 747

PETER M. LEFFERTS
25 . Liturgy and Plainchant, 1150–1570 774

ROMAN HANKELN
26 . Early Polyphony 801

JAMES GRIER
27 . Notre Dame 834

EDWARD H. ROESNER
28 . Liturgical Polyphony after 1300 881

KARL KÜGLE
29 . The Emergence of Polyphonic Song 907

MARK EVERIST
30 . Vernacular Song I I I : Polyphony 937

ELIZABETH EVA LEACH
31 . The Thirteenth-Century Motet 974

REBECCA A. BALTZER
32 . The Fourteenth-Century Motet 1000

ALICE CLARK
33 . Latin Song I : Songs and Songbooks from the Ninth

to the Thirteenth Century 1020
HELEN DEEMING
viii Contents
34 . Latin Song I I : The Music and Texts of the Conductus 1048

THOMAS PAYNE
35 . Trecento I : Secular Music 1079

MICHAEL SCOTT CUTHBERT
36 . Trecento I I : Sacred Music and Motets in Italy and the East

from 1300 until the End of the Schism 1100
MICHAEL SCOTT CUTHBERT
37 . Ars subtilior 1125

ANNE STONE
38 . Citational Practice in the Later Middle Ages 1147

YOLANDA PLUMLEY
39 . “Medieval Music” or “Early European Music”? 1177

REINHARD STROHM
Index 1201
Figures
i.1 Machaut’s virelai “Douce dame jolie,” in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale

de France (F-Pn), fonds français 9221, fol. 159r page 5
i.2 Leo Schrade’s edition of “Douce dame jolie” from PMFC 3 (Monaco:
Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1956), 168 6
i.3 Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin’s edition of “Douce dame jolie” from Echos du
temps passé, transcrits avec Accompagnem[en]t de Piano (Paris:
G. Flaxland) 8–9
1.1 Pythagorean ratios for the most important intervals, with their
Latinized Greek names, following Boethius, De institutione musica
1.16 18
1.2 A detailed Attic red-figure amphora of a young kitharode (a person
who sings to the kithara). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Image source: Art Resource, NY. Image Reference: ART 322669 29
1.3 The genera: three types of tetrachords, after Boethius, De institutione
musica 1.21 31
1.4 The tetrachord of the middle pitches (mesōn) 31
1.5 Greek red-figure terracotta of a kithara player tuning his instrument.
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
1976.89 32
1.6 The Lesser Perfect System, showing the middle tetrachord with the
“highest” tetrachord below, and the conjunct tetrachord above 33
1.7 The Greater Perfect System, showing the middle tetrachord with the
“highest” tetrachord below, and the disjunct and additional
tetrachords above 34
1.8 A bas-relief on the triumphal Arch of Titus, in the Roman Forum 38
1.9 King David strumming a harp, from an early thirteenth-century lancet
window in the north transept at Chartres Cathedral © 2004, Henri
Alain de Feraudy 43
1.10 Examples of the more common te‘amim ̣ 44
1.11 Some early Christian hymn texts 49
[ix]
x List of Figures
1.12 Cycle of eight readings from the four Gospels for the Resurrection
vigil at Jerusalem, with corresponding musical modes. After Stig
Simeon R. Frøyshov, “The Early Development of the Liturgical Eight-
Mode System in Jerusalem,” Saint Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 51
(2007), 139–78 at 159 55
3.1 Masses for Tuesday and Wednesday in the second week of Lent in
a leaf from a French noted missal (mid-12th c.), Boston University,
Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center 104
8.1 Musical notation from St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek (CH-SGs), codex
sangallensis 339, fol. 33 237
8.2 CH-SGs cod. sang. 339: three details 238
8.3 Daseian notation from Musica enchiriadis in Bamberg,
Staatsbibliothek, (D-BAs), Varia 1 fol. 45v. The psalm “Beati
immaculati” is notated by a series of signs, each of which represents
a pitch. Blank spaces indicate that a pitch is repeated for successive
syllables 240
8.4 Notation using spaces to represent pitch (the spaces are labeled by
Dasia signs at left). The Musica enchiriadis demonstrates the melody for
a psalm tone (D-BAs, var. 1, fol. 44) 241
8.5 The notational system of Hermannus of Reichenau (Hermannus
Contractus, 1013–54) from Vienna, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung 2502, fol. 27v 242
8.6 Punctum and virga as elements of multi-note neumes 244
8.7 Relative weights as indicated in St. Gall notation 246
8.8 CH-SGs cod. sang. 339, p. 76. The Easter Alleluia “Pascha nostrum
immolatus est Christus” (detail) 247
8.9 Laon, Bibliothèque municipale (F-LA) 239, fol. 52. The melisma in the
verse of the Easter Alleluia “Pascha nostrum immolatus est Christus”
(detail) 248
8.10 A tabular view of neumes in various regional writing styles.
Reproduced from Leo Treitler’s “The Early History of Music Writing
in the West,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 35/2 (1982),
237–79 at 246–47 253
8.11 Benevento, Biblioteca capitolare (I-BV) 34, detail 254
8.12 I-BV 39, fol. 11v (detail). Two versions of the three-note torculus
(low–higher–lower) 254
8.13 The introit “Dilexisti iustitiam” from I-BV 34, fol. 4 and F-Pn lat. 776,
fol. 7 255
8.14 Arezzo, Biblioteca della città di Arezzo (I-ARc) 363 (I I I , 1b) 258
8.15 Square notation derived from neumatic signs 260
List of Figures xi
10.1 The sequence melody F U L G E N S P R E C L A R A (with its partial text

“Rex in aeternum”) and the textless sequence melodies G L O R I O S A
and E I A R E C O L A M U S , in a late ninth-century gradual-antiphoner
written at Soissons for Compiègne (F-Pn lat. 17436, fol. 30r), the
oldest surviving example of notated sequences 313
10.2 The sequence text “Festa Christi” to the melody T R I N I T A S , in
synoptic notation layout: in a mid-eleventh-century troper-
gradual-sequentiary from St. Gallen (CH-SGs, cod. sang. 376,
p. 339) 319
10.3 The aparallel sequence “Laus tibi sit o fidelis” in synoptic and
interlinear notation and rubricated with two melody names, I N T E
D O M I N E S P E R A V I and S P I R I T U S D O M I N I , in a tonary-gradual-troper-
sequentiary from Reichenau, ca. 1001 (D-BAs lit. 5, fol. 93v) 320
10.4 A rare example of synoptic notation on staff (here combined with
interlinear notation), for the sequence “Festa Christi”: a twelfth-
century fragment of unknown German provenance, D-BAs Patr. 17
(B.I I .10), flyleaf i 321
10.5 The textless sequence melody known variously as G L O R I O S A [ D I E S
A D E S T ], B E A T U S V I R [ Q U I T I M E T ], and U N U S A M O R and here as
I N S C R U T I B I L I A I U D I T I A (Reims, Bibliothèque municipale [F-RS]
258, fol. 179v) 337
10.6a The partially texted sequence “Iam nunc intonant,” in an early
twelfth-century source from Cambrai Cathedral (Cambrai,
Médiathèque municipale [F-CA] 60, fol. 117r) 340
10.6b The texted sequence “O alma trinitas” with the embedded “partial
text” “Iam nunc intonant” (here underlined by the author): in an
early twelfth-century source from Cambrai Cathedral (F-CA 60,
fol. 137v) 341
11.1 A late ninth-century manuscript copy of Boethius’ De musica with
multiple glosses. F-Pn lat. 7200, fol. 1 364
15.1a, b Hierarchies of Office antiphons, Metz, Reichenau tonaries 483
15.2 Pseudo-Odo and Guido, affinities between the finals 486
15.3 Scala musicalis from Ghent, Rijksuniversiteit, Centrale Bibliotheek
70, fol. 108r 488
15.4 Diagram of the hand, from Joseph Smits van Waesberghe,
Musikerziehung, 124 489
15.5 Interval patterns in modes 490
15.6 Lion with intervals, London, British Library (GB-Lbl), Harley
2637, fol. 40v 493
xii List of Figures
18.1 “Vue de Coucy-le-Château dans le Vermandois,” from J.-B. de

Laborde, Essai sur la musique (1780), vol. I I : facing p. 235 565
18.2 Frontispiece of E. de Coussemaker’s Chants populaires des
Flamands de France (1856) 567
18.3 The knight Astolpho and a hermit, from John Hoole’s translation
of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1783) 572
18.4 “Chanson de Roland par M[onsieur] le M[arquis] de P[aulmy],”
in Laborde, Essai sur la musique (1780), vol. I I : “Choix de
chansons,” 117 574
22.1 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (I-Fl) plut. 29.1, fol.
109r: Organum duplum, Alleluia V : “Pascha nostrum”
(excerpt) 676
22.2 Sine littera ligature notation: the six rhythmic modes 678
22.3(a–h) Different valuations of a single figure in modal notation 679
22.4 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 1099
Helmst., fol. 148r–148v. Motet “Gaudeat devocio / Nostrum”
(excerpt) 682
22.5 Franconian figures 685
22.6 Franconian ligatures 686
22.7 Unsigned semibreves in tempus imperfectum maior (Vitriacan
doctrine) 691
22.8 The gradus system of Johannes de Muris 692
22.9 The four prolations, consolidated after the Libellus cantus
mensurabilis (ca. 1345) 692
22.10 Mutatio qualitatis according to the Libellus cantus
mensurabilis 693
22.11 Incompatability of imperfect tempus within the Franconian
tempus 693
22.12 Marchettan divisions of the Franconian tempus 697
22.13 Italian meter signatures 697
22.14 Mensurae according to the Rubrice breves (ca. 1350) 699
22.15 The Italian divisions and the four prolations 700
22.16(a–c) Typical patterns of thirteenth-century English breves 702
22.17 Displacement syncopation at the beginning of the integer valor
and diminution sections in the tenor of Guillaume de Machaut,
motet “Hareu! hareu! le feu! / He las! / Obediens usque ad
mortem” (ca. 1345) 707
22.18 Displacement syncopation in Anon., “Medee fu”
(beginning) 708
List of Figures xiii
22.19 (a–c) Displacement syncopation in Zachar, “Sumite karissimi”

(detail) 710
28.1 An Ite missa est motet (Tournai, Bibliothèque du Chapitre de la
Cathédrale, A 27 [olim: 476], fol. 33v). With kind permission of
Bibliothèque de la Cathédrale, Tournai 886
29.1 “Au cuer ai un mal”: melodic relationships 921
29.2 Annotated map of north-western Europe 931
37.1 Baude Cordier, “Tout par compas,” Chantilly, Bibliothèque du
Château de Chantilly (F-CH) 564, fol. 12. Published by
permission 1140
37.2 Anonymous ballade, “Si con cy gist,” cantus (F-CH 564, fol.
31v). Published by permission 1143
37.3 “Si con cy gist,” palindromic structure of mensurations in
cantus and contratenor 1144
Music Examples
1.1a The ēchēmata of the Greek authentic modes in their most basic form.
Jørgen Raasted, Intonation Formulas and Modal Signatures in Byzantine
Musical Manuscripts, Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae: Subsidia 7
(Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966), 9 page 56
1.1b The ēchēmata of the Greek plagal modes in their most basic form.
Jørgen Raasted, Intonation Formulas and Modal Signatures in Byzantine
Musical Manuscripts, Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae: Subsidia 7
(Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966), 9 56
1.2 The ēchēmata of the Latin modes in their shortest form
Terence Bailey, The Intonation Formulas of Western Chant, Studies and
Texts 28 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974),
12 58
2.1 Comparison of standard and Beneventan versions of the tract
“Sicut ceruus” (excerpt): S – standard version; B – Beneventan
version 78
2.2 Medial caesuras of second-mode tracts, with neumatic notation from
CM-SGs, codex sangallensis 359 80
2.3 Alleluias Emitte and Excita (excerpts) with neumatic notation from
CM-SGs, codex sangallensis 359 and Chartres, Bibliothèque
municipale 47 81
2.4 Comparison of initial melismas of Frankish and Roman second-mode
tracts, with one eighth-mode tract 86
2.5 Comparison of intonation figures in Frankish and Roman first-mode
introits 87
2.6 Comparison of standard, Aquitanian and Roman graduals, Tenuisti and
Qui sedes (excerpts) 87
2.7 Comparison of standard, Roman and Oxford, Bodleian Library
(GB-Ob), Rawlinson C 892 versions of cadence melismas from
second-mode Graduals 88
[xiv]
List of Music Examples xv
3.1 “Narrabo omnia” (communion for Tuesday of the third week in Lent):
A – Roman version (Cologny-Genève, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, C 74,
fol. 49); B – Romano-Frankish (Piacenza, Biblioteca capitolare, 65,
fol. 106). 116
5.1 The first strophe, without refrain, of the monophonic song “Plebs
domini” from F-Pn lat. 3719, fol. 39v 153
5.2 “Promat chorus hodie,” a short versus found only in F-Pn lat. 1139,
fol. 51v 154
5.3 A versicle of the sequence “Epiphaniam domino” from F-Pn lat. 1139,
fol. 58v 156
5.4 The transformation of the “Epiphaniam domino” melody as a strophic
unit of “Prima mundi” 157
5.5 The opening phrase of “Radix Iesse” from F-Pn lat. 1139, fol. 46r 160
5.6 The last line of the first strophe of “Gaudeamus nova cum laetitia,”
from F-Pn lat. 1139, fol. 38r 160
5.7 The end of the second strophe of “Iubilemus exultemus,” from F-Pn
lat. 1139, fol. 41r 161
5.8 Successive notation and diaphony in “Deus in adiutorium” from F-Pn
lat. 1139, fol. 32r 161
5.9 The end of the first strophe of “Annus novus” from F-Pn lat. 1139,
fol. 36v 162
5.10 The end of the refrain of “Plebs domini” from F-Pn lat. 3719,
fol. 39v 162
5.11 The final melisma of “Lilium floruit” from F-Pn lat. 3719,
fol. 43r 163
5.12 The closing melisma of the first strophe of “Vellus rore” from GB-Lbl
add. 36881, fol. 9v 163
5.13 A five-note group from the final cauda of “Lux rediit / Novus est rex,”
F-Pn lat. 1139, fol. 36v 163
5.14 The refrain of “Virgine nato,” F-Pn lat. 1139, fol. 39v 163
5.15 A comparison of the caudae of “Noster cetus / Ad superni,” from three
manuscript sources (F-Pn lat. 1139, fol. 61r; GB-Lbl add. 36881, fol. 3r;
Santiago de Compostela, Biblioteca de la Catedral, s.s. [“Codex
Calixtinus”]) 164
5.16 Sequences with the same base melody: the openings of “Rex
omnipotens” and “Sancti spiritus,” in reduction, from F-Pn lat. 3549,
fol. 159v and F-Pn lat. 3719, fol. 46v 166
5.17 Synoptic transcription of the first three strophes of “Rex omnia,”
from F-Pn lat. 3719, GB-Lbl add. 36881, and Madrid, Biblioteca
nacional de España (E-Mn) 289 172
xvi List of Music Examples
7.1 “Collegerunt pontifices,” Graduale Triplex, 135, with kind permission

of Éditions de Solesmes 221
7.2 Monophonic Sanctus tropes from D-W Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmst. (W1),
fol. 187r (St. Andrews, Scotland, mid-thirteenth century), with kind
permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel 223
7.3 Munich, Universitätsbibliothek, 8°Cod. 375 (Cim 13), fol. 8r, with
kind permission of the Universitätsbibliothek, Munich 225
7.4 Gradual “Exsultabunt sancti.” Verse “Cantate Domino.” Graduale
Triplex, 456, including neumes from St. Gall Cantatorium, CH-SGs,
cod. sang. 359 and F-LA 239, with kind permission of Éditions de
Solesmes 229
7.5 Psalm verse for the Introit “Adorate Deum.” Graduale Triplex, 264,
including neumes from Einsiedeln, Kloster Einsiedeln (CH-E)
Musikbibliothek 121, with kind permission of Éditions de
Solesmes 230
9.1 Trope complex “Postquam factus homo” for the Easter Introit
“Resurrexi” from Halberstadt, Domschatz, Inventar-Nummer 45, fol.
23–23v 282
10.1 “Festa Christi,” an example of an early sequence and one attributed to
Notker Balbulus, D-BAs Patr. 17 (B.I I .10), flyleaf i 326
10.2 “Laus tibi sit o fidelis,” an example of a so-called aparallel sequence,
and one attributed to Notker Balbulus, CH-E frag. 366, p. 24 329
10.3 The sequence melody I N S C R U T I B I L I A I U D I T I A (F-RS 258, fol.
179v) 336
10.4 “Ecce iam votiva,” an example of a sequence in the early
“Anglo-French” style (F-Pn lat. 833, fol. 13r) 338
10.5 “Gaudete vos fideles”, new style sequence (F-LA 263: fols. 124v–
125r) 344
10.6 Versicle pairs 1a/b, 7a/b, and 8a/b from Virgo mater salvatoris, an
example of rhymed, ‘regular’ sequence, attributed to Adam of St.
Victor (F-Pn lat. 14819, folios 54v–56v) 347
12.1 Bernart de Ventadorn, “Ma dosne fu al commençar,” stanza 5 of
“Estat ai com om esperdutz” 396
12.2 Comtessa de Dia, “A chantar m’er de so q’ieu no volria” 397
12.3 Guiraut Riquier, “Be.m meravilh co non es enveios” 398
12.4 Thibaut de Navarre, “Nus hom ne puet ami reconforter” 400
12.5 Gace Brulé, “Au renouviau de la doucor d’esté” 402
12.6 Jehan Bretel and Adam de la Halle, “Adan, vauries vous manoir” 403
12.7 Spervogel, “Swa eyn vriunt dem andern vriunde bi gestat” 407
12.8 Der Meissner, “Kund ich nu underscheiden wol” 408
List of Music Examples xvii
12.9 Anonymous, “Non deve null’ ome d’esto per ren dultar” 412
12.10 Anonymous, “Ave, donna santissima” 415
13.1 Opening sections of the song “Ave gemma” and of the song by
Thibault de Champagne after which it is modeled 434
13.2 Four occurrences of the refrain vdB 1781 “Toz li cuers me rit de joie,
quant la voi” 441
13.3 The refrain “Amours et ma dame aussi, jointes mains vous proi
merchi” (vdB 156) in the Roman de Renart le Nouvel and a rondeau of
Adam de la Halle 443
13.4 Refrains 6 and 7 from manuscript C (F-Pn fr. 1395) of Renart le
Nouvel 444
13.5 Refrain 40 (vdB 342) in manuscript C of Renart le Nouvel 444
13.6 Comparison of refrains 23 and 22 from Renart le Nouvel in manuscript
C and the motet “Au cuer / Ja ne m’en repentirai / Jolietement”
(Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, Section de Médecine
[Mo], fol. 283vb) 445
14.1 Machaut, Messe de Notre Dame: Gloria, mm. 19–21 470
14.2 Saltarello (GB-Lbl add. 29987, fol. 62r) 471
14.3 Bartolino da Padova, “Imperial sedendo” (Faenza, Biblioteca
communale 117, fol. 74v) 472
14.4 Vitry, “Tribum quem” (GB-Lbl, add. 28550, fol. 44r) 472
15.1 Intonation formulas for Mode 1 from Terence Bailey, ed.,
Commemoratio brevis, 48 485
15.2 Latin intonation formulas, from Terence Bailey, ed., Commemoratio
brevis, 81–90, from D-BAs msc. lit. 5 486
15.3 Rule for consonances above an ascending step, “Vatican Organum
Treatise,” ed. Godt and Rivera, 299 495
15.4 Melismas filling in ascending steps in the G hexachord, “Vatican
Organum Treatise,” 338 496
18.1 Incipit of “Veni, sancte spiritus” from G.-G. Nivers, Graduale
Romanum (1697) 571
18.2 Excerpt from the prelude of Jean Beck’s 1928 arrangement of Adam
de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion 577
19.1 “Mors vite propitia,” from I-Fl, plut 29.1, fol. 464r. Facsimile, ed.
Luther Dittmer (n.p.: Institute of Mediaeval Music, n.d.), vol. I I . Text
from Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi, ed. Guido Dreves, 55 vols. (Leipzig:
Fues’s Verlag, 1886–1922), X X I : 40–41 592
24.1 “Regnat” clausula from W1 762
24.2 The refrain “En non Dieu que que nus die” used against two different
tenors in the same motet 763
xviii List of Music Examples
24.3 The refrain “En non Dieu que que nus die” used against three different
tenors in three additional motets 764
25.1 Antiphon from St. Francis-Office, ed. Hilarin Felder, Die liturgischen
Reimofficien auf die Heiligen Franciscus und Antonius gedichtet und
componiert von Fr. Julian von Speier (d. ca. 1250) (Freiburg: Universitäts-
Buchhandlung Veith, 1901), xv 790
25.2 Antiphon “In lectulo meo” – excerpt, from Jürg Stenzl, Der Klang des
Hohen Liedes. Vertonungen des Canticum Canticorum vom 9. bis zum Ende
des 15. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
2008), I I : 24 790
25.3 “Femina vetus,” F-CA Impr. X V I C 4, fol. 164r 791
25.4 “Quam bonus,” Aachen, Domarchiv (Stiftsarchiv), G 20, fol. 26v 792
26.1 The Enchiriadis gamut 803
26.2 Hypothetical gamut consisting of perfect fourths 807
26.3 “Rex caeli,” Musica enchiriadis 808
26.4 Guido’s gamut in tetrachords 810
26.5 “Ipsi soli,” Guido, Micrologus 811
26.6 “Veri solis radius,” F-Pn lat 3549, fols. 149v–150r, stanza 7 821
26.7 “Laude iocunda,” F-Pn lat. 3549, fol. 157v, stanza 1 823
26.8 Gradual “Misit Herodes,” Santiago de Compostela, Biblioteca de la
Catedral, s.s. (“Codex Calixtinus”), fol. 189r 827
27.1 “Viderunt omnes,” respond, after W1, fol. 25r 860
27.2 Independent clausulae for “Viderunt omnes” 863
27.3 From the doxology of “Cornelius, cum orasset” 864
27.4 “[dex]-tera manus” from “Gloriosus, Dextera tua” 865
27.5 “Alleluya” from “Alleluya, Assumpta est Maria” 868
27.6 From Perotinus, “Viderunt omnes,” after I-Fl, plut 29.1, fol. 1r 872
27.7 Cadential formulas in “Descendit de celis,” after I-Fl plut, 29.1,
fol. 17r–17v 873
28.1 Gloria “Peliso” (Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, Bibliothèque du
chapitre [F-APT] 16bis), PMFC 23a, no. 31, mm. 45–96 = pp.
113–14 897
28.2 Gloria “Loys” (F-APT 16bis and Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare [I–IV] 115),
PMFC 23a, no. 29, mm. 65–96 = p. 106 898
28.3 Kyrie “Chipre” (I–IV 115 and F-APT 16bis) mm. 1–40 = PMFC 23a,
p. 64 899
28.4 Credo: Patrem ab eterno (F-CA B 1328), PMFC 23b, mm.
1–18 = p. 313 900
List of Music Examples xix
28.5 Machaut, Mass, excerpt from Credo, mm. 1–15, from Daniel Leech-
Wilkinson, Machaut’s Mass: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990), 194 901
29.1 Adam de la Halle, rondeau no. 7, “Dame, or sui traïs” 911
29.2 Monophonic rondeau, “Dame, or sui traïs” 912
29.3 Adam de la Halle, “Dame, or sui traïs,” contrapuntal summary 912
29.4a Anonymous rondeau, “Helas! tant vi de mal eure” 914
29.4b Jehan de l’Escurel, “A vous douce deboinaire” 915
29.5a, b, and c: Comparative vocal scoring of (a) “Helas! tant vi de mal
eure,” (b) “J’ai desir de veoir” and (c) L’Escurel, “A vous,
douce deboinaire” 916
29.6 Anonymous motet, “Mes cuers est emprisone / Et pro [suo]” 917
29.7 Anonymous motet, “Au cuer ai un mal / Ja ne m’en repentirai /
Jolietement” 920
29.8 Anonymous motet “Hui main au doz mois de mai / [Hec Dies]” 923
29.9 Anonymous motet “Onques n’amai tant / Sancte Germane” 925
29.10 Anonymous polyphonic ballade “Bien m’ont amours / Tenor” 927
29.11 Anonymous polyphonic ballade “Volez oyer le castoy” 928
30.1 Guillaume de Machaut, ballade “Pour ce que tous” (B12), ll. 8–9
(pre-refrain and refrain) 941
30.2 F. Andrieu (music) and Eustache Deschamps (text), double ballade
(déploration for the death of Machaut), opening of refrain 944
30.3 Anonymous ballade “Plus ne put Musique,” refrain 947
30.4 Matheus de Sancte Johanne, ballade “Science n’a nul enemi,”
opening of refrain 950
30.5 Jacob Senleches, virelai “En ce gracieux temps”: Nightingale in the
refrain 952
30.6 Jaquemart de Cuvelier, ballade “Se Galaas,” opening of refrain 955
30.7 Two virelais invoking Plaisance 957
a: “Plaisance” in Anonymous, “Va t’en mon cuer” 957
b: “Plaisance” in Pykini, “Plaisance / Or tost” 958
31.1 “Johan(ne)” no. 3 clausula (I-Fl plut 29.1 [F], no. 148, fol. 164 v) and
motet “Clamans in deserto” (F, fol. 409v) 976
31.2 Latin conductus motet “O Maria, maris stella / Veritatem”
(Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 1099
Helmst. [W2], fols. 125–26) 978
31.3 Latin double motet “O Maria, virgo davidica / O Maria, maris stella /
Veritatem” (Mo, no. 52 [Fasc. 4], fols. 88v–90r) 982
xx List of Music Examples
31.4 French motet “Ne sai que je die / Johanne” (W2, fol. 219 bis
verso) 985
31.5 Franconian French double motet “Quant vient en mai / Ne sai que
je die / Johanne” (Mo, no. 274 [Fasc. 7], fols. 304v–306v) 987
31.6 Petronian French double motet “Aucun ont trouvé / Lonc tans /
Annun[tiantes],” mm.1–7 (Mo, no. 254 [Fasc.7], fols. 273–275) 991
33.1 “Pastor cum traeret” (Horace, Odes, I .15) from F-Pn lat. 7979, fol.
2v 1028
33.2 “O admirabile Veneris idolum” (Cambridge Songs) 1031
33.3 “Uterus hodie” (Aquitanian Versus) 1033
33.4 “Diastematica vocis armonia” (Later Cambridge Songs) 1036
33.5 “Flos pudicitie” (GB-LH, Arundel 248) 1040
34.1 “Fraude ceca desolato” (G4), opening of strophe I I , F, fol.
263v 1059
34.2 “Hac in die Gedeonis” (H26), end of strophe I I , F, fol. 311v 1059
34.3 “O lilium convallium” (F18), opening, I-Fl plut. 29.1 (F), fol.
241r 1061
34.4 “Pater sancte dictus Lotarius” (K61), strophe I , F, fol. 440r 1064
34.5 “Ver pacis aperit” (J32), opening, F, fol. 355r 1065
34.6 “Veris ad imperia” (F11), opening, F, fol. 228v 1066
34.7 “Turmas arment christicolas” (K41), opening, I-Fl plut. 29.1 (F),
fols. 431v–432r 1067
34.8 “Flos de spina procreatur” (H29), final cauda, I-Fl plut. 29.1 (F),
fol. 305v 1068
34.9 “Hec est dies triumphalis” (H12), end of final cauda, I-Fl plut. 29.1 (F),
fol. 266r 1070
34.10 “Clavus pungens acumine” (J39), strophe I , final cauda, I-Fl plut.
29.1 (F), fol. 358v 1071
34.11 “De monte lapis scinditur” (D2), opening cauda, I-Fl plut. 29.1 (F),
fol. 204r 1072
34.12 “Salve mater misericordie” (O15), line 5, GB-Ob Wood 591, fol.
1r 1074
35.1 Giovanni da Cascia, “Più non mi curo,” first phrase from Florence,
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Panciatichiano 26 1088
35.2 Giovanni Mazzuoli, excerpt from “A Febo dame” for three
voices 1097
36.1 Opening of the “Credo Cardinalis” from Siena, Biblioteca comunale,
H.I .10 1101
36.2 “Benedicamus Domino,” incipit from Messina, Biblioteca Painiana
(del Seminario Arcivescovile San Pio X), O.4.16 1105
List of Music Examples xxi
36.3 Ciconia, “Doctorum principum,” mm. 59–78 1116

36.4 Barbitonsoris, Sanctus (excerpt) 1118
37.1 Philipoctus de Caserta, ballade, “En remirant,” mm. 1–11 (F-CH 564,
fol. 39r) 1136
38.1 Gautier de Coinci, “Ja pour yver, pour noif ne pour gelee,” RS 520 (F-
Pn français 24541, fol. 117v) 1153
38.2 Reconstruction of “Je la truis trop asprete,” tenor of motet no. 295
from the Mo, fol. 338r–v 1155
38.3 “La bele m’ocit / In seculum,” motet no. 178 from Mo, fol.
231v 1157
38.4 Lescurel, “A vous douce debonaire,” F-Pn fr. 146, fol. 57r 1159
38.5a “Quant je le voi / Bon vin doit / Cis chans veult boire” (Roman de
Fauvel, F-Pn fr. 146, fol. 45) 1161
38.5b “Ci mi faut un tour de vin” (Roman de Fauvel, F-Pn fr. 146,
fol. 45) 1161
38.6 “Amis loial vous ay trouvé,” Wrocław, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka,
Ak1955 / KN195 (k. 1 & 2) 1167
38.7 The opening of Machaut’s “Nes qu’on porroit” (B33) and Anon., “En
mon cuer est un blanc cine pourtrait” compared 1170
38.8 The opening of Matteo da Perugia’s “Se je me plaing” and its citation
of Machaut’s “De Fortune” (B23) 1171
Tables
1.1 Table of the modes from Boethius, De institutione musica 4.16,

translated into modern pitch letters page 36
1.2 Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and English systems for numbering the 150
psalms 42
3.1 Proper and Ordinary parts of the Mass 96
3.2 Manuscripts of the Antiphonale missarum sextuplex 98
3.3 Facsimiles of Graduals published in Paléographie musicale 100
3.4 Facsimiles of Office Antiphoners published in Paléographie
musicale 108
10.1 Written Representations of the Sequence, ca. 800–ca. 925 309
12.1 Terminology and features of vernacular song genres 386
13.1 Comparison of versions of “Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai” by
Jaufré Rudel 438
15.1 The Carolingian modes and psalm tones 480
26.1 The manuscript sources of the Aquitanian versus repertory 818
26.2 Chronological strata of the Aquitanian Versaria 819
[xxii]
Notes on Contributors
E L I Z A B E T H A U B R E Y is Professor Emerita of Music at The University of Iowa. She

is author of The Music of the Troubadours (1996), co-editor of Songs of the Women
Trouvères (2001), and editor of Poets and Singers: On Latin and Vernacular Monophonic
Song (2009). Her articles and reviews have appeared in journals and conference
proceedings on musicology, music theory, literature, and medieval studies. She is a
contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Die Musik in
Geschichte und Gegenwart, The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, and The Harvard
Dictionary of Music.
B E N J A M I N B A G B Y is a vocalist and harper, and is the director of the medieval

music ensemble Sequentia, which he co-founded in 1977. His career has been
almost entirely devoted to the research, performance and recording work of the
ensemble. He is also involved with the solo performance of Anglo-Saxon and
Germanic oral poetry: an acclaimed performance of Beowulf has been heard
worldwide. In addition to researching and creating concert programs for
Sequentia, Bagby writes about medieval performance practice, and has taught
courses and workshops all over Europe and North America. Between 2005 and
2017 he taught medieval music performance practice at the University of Paris –
Sorbonne.
T E R E N C E B A I L E Y received his undergraduate education in Canada. After graduate

studies in the United States he taught, first at the University of Saskatchewan in
Regina, then at the University of British Columbia, and finally at Western
University in London, Ontario, where he was chairman of the musicology depart-
ment for ten years. He was awarded emeritus status in 2003. Almost all of his
publications have been concerned with Latin ecclesiastical chant. Early and con-
tinuing interests have been processions and the relationship of text and musical
setting in psalmody. Since the 1970s he has published books and articles on
Ambrosian chant – the individual chant types and, in particular, the relationship
between the Franco-Roman and Milanese repertories.
R E B E C C A A . B A L T Z E R is Professor Emerita of Musicology at the University of

Texas at Austin. Her research has focused on the music, notation, theory, and
[xxiii]
xxiv Notes on Contributors
manuscripts of the Notre-Dame School and Ars Antiqua, as well as codicology,

liturgy, chant, and liturgical books of medieval Paris. In 2007 she was made an
Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society, which she served in
several national offices, including the board of directors, vice president, and
treasurer. She recently spent six years as the review editor for books on music
for Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, and six years on the
board of directors of Early Music America.
S T A N L E Y B O O R M A N is Emeritus Professor of Music at New York University. His

research has been largely focused on understanding musical sources (especially
early printed editions), why they are the way they are, and what they can tell us
about performance, about the status of different musics and musicians, and about
the technology of preparing printed sources.
A N N A M A R I A B U S S E B E R G E R is Distinguished Professor of Medieval and

Renaissance History and Theory at the University of California, Davis. She has
published on notation, mathematics and music, music and memory, historiogra-
phy, and music in African mission stations. Her books include Mensuration and
Proportion Signs (1993) and Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (2005, Italian
translation 2008), which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and the Wallace
Berry Award from the Society of Music Theory for 2005. She is co-editor of The
Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music. Busse Berger’s fellowships include
grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Villa i Tatti, the Austrian Science Fund,
and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
J O H N C A L D W E L L taught at Oxford from 1966 to 2005. His publications include

English Keyboard Music before the Nineteenth Century (1973), Medieval Music (1978),
Editing Early Music (1985), The Oxford History of English Music (2 vols., 1991; 1999),
and editions of early Tudor organ music: Music for the Office (1966) and The Mulliner
Book (2011). He is a member of the Academia Europea, and is an honorary vice-
president of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society. He was chairman of Music
& Letters, 2005–16. He is also a composer, principally of short operas (including a
trilogy on Christ’s Passion and Resurrection), and of vocal and organ music.
THOMAS CHRISTENSEN is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Music and the

Humanities at the University of Chicago. He has published a number of mono-
graphs, including a major study of the music theory of Jean-Philippe Rameau
(1993). He was the editor of The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (2002),
and, most recently, of an anthology of essays entitled The Work of Music Theory
(2014). Professor Christensen has been the recipient of numerous fellowships
and awards; he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Germany, in
2011–12, and most recently the recipient of both an ACLS and a Guggenheim
Notes on Contributors xxv
Fellowship to support his current research project on the Belgian music critic,
François-Joseph Fétis.
ALICE CLARK is Professor of Music History at Loyola University New Orleans,

where she also directs the Medieval Studies minor. Her teaching ranges widely,
with special interests in opera and in the intersections of music and social justice.
Recent scholarship appears in The Cambridge Companion to French Music and
A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut – An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Master.
Work in progress includes an essay in A Companion to Medieval Motets, a study of
Carissimi’s Jephthe in light of Jesuit spirituality, and an examination of the
“flipped” classroom as applied to the undergraduate music history survey.
M I C H A E L S C O T T C U T H B E R T is Associate Professor of Music at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology. His work focuses on music around 1400, especially
Italian and international repertoires. He is the creator of music21, a toolkit for
computational analysis of music, which he uses in the discovery and identification
of fragmentary repertories of medieval song. Cuthbert has won fellowships from
the American Academy in Rome, Villa I Tatti, and the Radcliffe Institute.
H E L E N D E E M I N G is Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of

London. Her research concerns music, especially Latin and vernacular song, in
twelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain and France, and she has recently edited the
surviving songs from Britain, ca. 1150–1300, for the series Musica Britannica (vol.
95, 2013). She is also the editor, with Elizabeth Eva Leach, of a collection of essays,
Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context (Cambridge, 2015),
which re-examines the history of medieval song through a new focus on ten
significant manuscript sources.
JOSEPH DYER taught music history at the University of Massachusetts Boston until
his retirement in 2001. He has published numerous articles, book chapters, and
encyclopedia entries on topics relating to chant and liturgy of late Antiquity and
the Middle Ages (especially at Rome), psalmody, monasticism, performance prac-
tice, medieval music theory, and music in the intellectual life of the Middle Ages.
Active as a church organist for more than four decades, he is an Associate of the
American Guild of Organists and a Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music.
L A W R E N C E E A R P is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin-

Madison. His research and publications have focused on late medieval French
music and the reception of medieval music since the eighteenth century. He is
the author of Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (1995) and the Introductory
Study (with Domenic Leo and Carla Shapreau) accompanying the facsimile of the
Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut manuscript (2014).
xxvi Notes on Contributors
M A R K E V E R I S T is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. His

research focuses on the music of Western Europe in the period 1150–1330,
opera in France in the nineteenth century, Mozart, reception theory, and
historiography. He is the author of French Motets in the Thirteenth Century
(1994), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music (2011) and many other aca-
demic works. He was elected a fellow of the Academia Europaea in 2012. Everist
was the President of the Royal Musical Association (2010–2017), and was
elected a corresponding member of the American Musicological Society in
2014.
M A R G O T F A S S L E R is Keough Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy at

the University of Notre Dame and Tangeman Professor Emeritus of Music
History at Yale University. Recent publications include the textbook Music in the
Medieval West and its Anthology (2014), the edited volume (with Katie Bugyis and
Andrew Kraebel) Medieval Cantors and Their Craft: Music, Liturgy, and the Shaping of
History, 800–1500 (2017) and the co-authored two-volume study (with Jeffrey
Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, and Susan Marti) Liturgical Life and Latin Learning
at Paradies bei Soest, 1300–1425: Inscription and Illumination in the Choir Books of a
North German Dominican Convent (2016).
J A M E S G R I E R is Professor of Music History at the University of Western Ontario.

The author of The Critical Editing of Music (1996) and The Musical World of a
Medieval Monk: Adémar de Chabannes in Eleventh-Century Aquitaine (2006), his
critical edition of the music copied by Adémar de Chabannes appears in the
series Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (2012). He has also pub-
lished numerous articles on music and liturgy in Aquitaine and textual criticism,
as well as on the music of Joseph Haydn, Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan and Roger
McGuinn.
J O H N H A I N E S is Professor of Music and Medieval Studies at the University of

Toronto. He has published on medieval and Renaissance music and its modern
reception in a variety of journals, both musicological – from Early Music History
to Popular Music – and non-musicological – from Romania to Scriptorium.
His recent books are Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy
(2014), The Notory Art of Shorthand: A Curious Chapter in the History of Writing in the
West (2014) and Chants du diable, chants du people: voyage en musique dans le Moyen
Âge (2016). He is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to French Music
(2015).
R O M A N H A N K E L N is Professor for Music History at the Norwegian University of

Science and Technology, Trondheim (NTNU). Hankeln’s research activities cen-
ter on structure, style and socio-political context of medieval liturgical vocal music
and the German Lied and its poetry around 1800. From 2010 to 2013 Hankeln
Notes on Contributors xxvii
presided over the International Musicological Society Study Group “Cantus

Planus” as chairman. Since 2004 Hankeln has acted as a member of the editorial
board of the series H I S T O R I A E of the IMS, which is devoted to the editing of saints’
Offices.
A N D R E A S H A U G is holder of the chair in Music in Pre-Modern Europe at the

University of Würzburg (Germany). After receiving his Ph.D. at the University
of Tübingen, he worked at the C O R P U S T R O P O R U M research center at the
University of Stockholm (Sweden). He was Professor at the University in
Trondheim (Norway) and holder of the chair in Musicology at the University of
Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany). His main field of research is monophonic music –
sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular – from Late Antiquity to the High Middle
Ages. He is co-editor of the series Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi and editorial
head of the Corpus Monodicum.
A N N E I B O S - A U G É is a doctor of musicology and holder of the agrégation in music.

Author of Chanter et lire dans le récit médiéval, she carries out research into medieval
refrains, trouvères’ chansonniers, and the relationships between literature, music,
and society during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. She is the editor, in
collaboration with Mark Everist, of the database REFRAIN – Musique, poésie,
citation : le refrain au moyen âge / Music, Poetry, Citation : The Medieval Refrain. She
is currently teaching musicology at the Perpignan CRR in association with the
University of Perpignan-Via Domitia.
P E T E R J E F F E R Y is the Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of

Notre Dame, and the Scheide Professor of Music History Emeritus at Princeton
University. A former MacArthur “Genius Award” Fellow, he is the author of Re-
Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant
(1992); co-author of Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant (3 vols., 1993–97); editor of
The Study of Medieval Chant, Paths and Bridges, East and West (2000); and author of
The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a
Biblical Forgery (2006). His next book is about Gregorian chant.
T H O M A S F O R R E S T K E L L Y is Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard

University. He is the author of The Benevantan Chant (winner of the 1989
Kinkeldey award) and a number of books and articles. He is a Chevalier de
l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres of the French Republic and a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy in Rome. He is an
honorary citizen of the city of Benevento.
D A V I D K L A U S N E R is Professor Emeritus of English and Medieval Studies at the

University of Toronto. His research has focused on two areas: the relationship
between Old English and early Welsh poetry, and the drama of the late Middle
xxviii Notes on Contributors
Ages. As a performing musician he spent twenty years as a member of the Toronto

Consort, and he has been extensively involved in performance-based research in
early drama. For Records of Early English Drama he has edited the records of
Herefordshire and Worcestershire (1990) and Wales (2005) and is presently com-
pleting the edition of records of the North Riding of Yorkshire.
L O R I K R U C K E N B E R G is Associate Professor at the University of Oregon. Her

research focuses on tropes and sequences in the period from the late ninth
century up to ca. 1225, as well as traditions of the medieval cantrices in the
German-speaking lands. She has twice been awarded Fulbrights and received
the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg Award in 2012. She has
published in journals including the Journal of the American Musicological Society,
Revue bénédictine, Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse
Muziekgeschiedenis, Cantus Planus, Beiträge zur rheinischen Musikgeschichte, and
Journal of the Alamire Foundation.
K A R L K Ü G L E is Professor in the History of Music before 1800 at Utrecht

University and Senior Research Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. His research
interests cover musical cultures in France, Italy, Cyprus, England, the Low
Countries and Central Europe, ca. 1250–1450. Recent publications include an
article in Journal of the American Musicological Society (2012) on the Brescian origins
of codex Turin BNU J.I I .9 and a facsimile edition of Codex Ivrea 115 (2018).
A member of the Academia Europaea (2012), he currently directs the ERC
Advanced Grant-funded MALMECC Project (2016–20, malmecc.eu) at Oxford
alongside the Utrecht-based Sound Memories Project (2016–19, soundme.eu)
funded by HERA.
E L I Z A B E T H E V A L E A C H is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. Her

second monograph, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (2011), was
awarded the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize by the Renaissance Society of
America. Leach is a Fellow of the British Academy and maintains a regular research
blog; blogposts and free online downloads of many of Leach’s paper publications
can be found online via http://eeleach.wordpress.com/. She has been awarded a
Major Leverhulme Fellowship (2015–18) to support her investigation of the con-
tents (musical and otherwise) of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308.
P E T E R M . L E F F E R T S is Associate Director and Professor of Music in the Glenn

Korff School of Music at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His areas of research
include medieval English music, the medieval motet, early music theory and
notation, and the tonal behavior of fourteenth-century songs. He is on the inter-
national advisory board of the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music and the
Advisory Board of the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature at
Notes on Contributors xxix
Indiana University, and he directs the web-based Texts on Music in English from
the Medieval and Early Modern Eras.
KATARINA LIVLJANIC, singer and musicologist, specializes in medieval chant

performance. She is currently Maître de conferences at the Paris – Sorbonne
University where she directs a medieval music performance Masters program.
She has been invited as professor or artist in residence to different universities
or festivals worldwide (Harvard, Wellesley College, the Early Music Festival in
Utrecht, Flanders Festival in Antwerp, and others). In 2014 she published a
volume in the collection Paléographie Musicale. She is the founder and director
of the ensemble Dialogos, with which she has toured in most European countries
and in the USA, Canada, North Africa and Latin America, including extensive
recordings on CD, radio and television broadcasts.
J E R E M Y L L E W E L L Y N studied music as organ scholar at the University of

Cambridge. He undertook his doctorate in medieval chant under Wulf Arlt at
the University of Basel and was an external member of the graduate school
“Cultural Exchange in Medieval Europe” at the University of Erlangen-
Nuremberg. Following two years at the interdisciplinary research center devoted
to the “Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals” at the University of Copenhagen he
returned to Basel as lecturer at the Musicological Institute of the University and
then, from 2007, as Senior Tutor and Lecturer at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis.
T I M O T H Y J . M C G E E is a music historian whose areas of research include perfor-

mance practices before 1700, and Canadian music. His most recent monograph,
The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence was published in 2009. Other
publications include The Sound of Medieval Song (1998); Medieval Instrumental Dances
(1989); Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Performer’s Guide (1985); and The Music of
Canada (1985). In 2002 he retired from the Faculty of Music at the University of
Toronto.
THOMAS PAYNE is Professor of Music at William and Mary in Williamsburg,

Virginia, in the United States. He has published articles on medieval music in
Journal of the American Musicological Society and Speculum, and in the New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, among other places. He is also the editor of a
volume of organa dupla in the series Magnus Liber Organi and a collection of motets
and prosulas with texts attributed to Philip the Chancellor.
A N D R E A S P F I S T E R E R studied Musicology and Latin Philology at Tübingen and

Erlangen, receiving his Dr. Phil. from Erlangen University (2001) with a disserta-
tion on the transmission of Gregorian chant, and his venia legendi from
Regensburg University (2009) with a Habilitationsschrift on compositional tech-
nique in the music of Lassus. From 2003 to 2015 he taught at Regensburg
xxx Notes on Contributors
University, interrupted by guest lectureships at Vienna and Hamburg. Since 2015

he has been a collaborator on the project Corpus Monodicum at Würzburg
University.
A L E J A N D R O E N R I Q U E P L A N C H A R T is Emeritus Professor of Music at the

University of California. He has published over a hundred works including sym-
phonies, songs, solo and chamber music, and articles and books on Latin plainsong
and Renaissance topics, as well as Latin-American and twentieth-century music.
He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1987–88 and was presented with the medal of the
city of Tours for his contributions to the history of French music in 2013. His
book Guillaume Du Fay will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017,
and his edition of Du Fay’s Opera Omnia is beginning to appear online.
YOLANDA PLUMLEY is Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of

Exeter. She is author of The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of
Machaut (2013) and The Grammar of Fourteenth-Century Melody (1996). She is cur-
rently collaborating with early music ensemble The Orlando Consort on a multi-
disc recording of Guillaume de Machaut’s songs. She currently holds a Major
Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust for a project on French music
and princely patronage in the late fourteenth century.
J O H N P O T T E R is Reader Emeritus in Music at the University of York. His disco-

graphy of music by Leonin, Perotin, and their contemporaries extends from The
Early Music Consort of London via Red Byrd and the Hilliard Ensemble to his
recent three CDs of Conductus. His most recent book for Cambridge University
Press, A History of Singing (written jointly with ethnomusicologist Neil Sorrel)
focuses on historical performance reality.
EDWARD H. ROESNER is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Arts and Science,

New York University. He has published widely on the music of the twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, including a book on the Roman de Fauvel
and two volumes of the seven-volume edition Le Magnus liber organi de Notre-Dame
de Paris, of which he is General Editor. In addition to New York University he has
taught at Indiana University and the University of Maryland, and as Visiting
Professor at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities. His grants and other
awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship.
A N N E S T O N E is Associate Professor of Musicology at the City University of New

York Graduate Center, specializing in late medieval music and culture. Her
research interests include medieval manuscripts and musical philology, the
cultural and intellectual history of music-writing, the relationship of song to
late-medieval poetic subjectivity and autobiography, and medievalism in twen-
tieth-century modernist musical thought. She is an editor of the songs of
Notes on Contributors xxxi
Guillaume de Machaut, forthcoming as part of a new complete works edition,

funded by the Leverhulme Trust (http://machaut.exeter.ac.uk/), and is writing a
monograph about the Ars subtilior, the working title of which is “Reading Late
Medieval Song.”
REINHARD STROHM is Professor Emeritus of Wadham College, University of

Oxford. He studied musicology, violin, medieval Latin, and Romance languages
at Munich, Pisa, Milan, and Berlin (TU). He has published on European music
ca. 1400 – ca. 1800, history of opera, historiography and postmodern criticism of
musicology, and is currently engaged on the Balzan Research Project 2013–17
Towards a Global History of Music.
NIGEL WILKINS is Emeritus Professor at the Sorbonne in Paris and a Life Fellow of
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His research has largely centered on the study
and edition of medieval repertories of poetry set to music, especially in France and
Italy. His numerous publications, in French and in English, include editions and
studies of medieval song, and other works of broader scope: Music in the Age of
Chaucer, The Lyric Art of Medieval France, La musique du Diable, Nicolas Flamel, and
The Writings of Erik Satie.
Acknowledgements
Attempting to acknowledge the debt that we owe to previous scholarship is

futile and perhaps dangerous. And while it would be an attractive self-
reflective exercise to trace the complex network of scholarly and musical
genealogies at play in this volume, we seek here to recognize the debts we
owe to those who were directly involved in the creation of the volume. The
project really began in Century City, Los Angeles, over a decade ago in
November 2006, when the editors floated the idea with Victoria Cooper of
Cambridge University Press. Vicky was a patient and helpful interlocutor
throughout almost the entire project, and we are grateful to her, and her
successor Kate Brett, who kept flagging authors – to say nothing of editors –
motivated and enthusiastic about a project that is as extensive in scope as it
was long in arrival. We also acknowledge the rest of the Cambridge editorial
team: our Content Manager, Victoria Parrin, and our copy-editor, Martin
Thacker.
Closer to home, the entire project has been expertly managed by Dr. Amy
Williamson at the University of Southampton, who has monitored everything
from chasing permissions to assembling the indices in the volume. Also in
Southampton, Jacopo Mazzeo stepped in and wrote the footnotes for an
entire chapter. But most of all we are grateful to our contributors, who have
produced path-breaking texts, taught the editors more than they probably
deserve, and responded to endless queries and challenges over a quarter of
their working lives; we cannot thank them enough.
Mark Everist
Banister Park, Southampton
Thomas Forrest Kelly

Cambridge, Massachusetts
[xxxii]
Manuscript Sigla
A-Gu 807 B-Gar Groen. 133

Graz, Universitätsbibliothek 807 Ghent, Stadtarchief, Groenenbriel 133
A-Wn 51 B-Gar Varia D 3360 A
Vienna, Österreichische Ghent, Stadtarchief, Varia D 3360 A
Nationalbibliothek, B-Gu 70
Musiksammlung 51 Ghent, Rijksuniversiteit, Centrale
A-Wn 1043 Bibliotheek 70
Vienna, Österreichische B-TOa Beg. 490
Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung Tongeren, Stadsarchief, fonds
1043 Begijnhof 490
A-Wn 1609
Vienna, Österreichische CH-BEb 455
Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung Bern, Burgerbibliothek 455
1609 CH-Bu F.X . 37
A-Wn 2502 Basel, Universitätsbibliothek F.X . 37
Vienna, Österreichische CH-CObodmer 74
Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung Cologny, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana 74
2502 CH-E 113
A-Wn Cod. Vind. 2777 Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek des Klosters
Vienna, Österreichische Einsiedeln, Musikbibliothek 113
Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung, CH-E 114
Codex Vindobonensis 2777 Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek des
A-Wn Ser. nova 2700 Klosters Einsiedeln,
Vienna, Österreichische Musikbibliothek 114
Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung, CH-E frag. 366
Series nova 2700 Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek des
A-Wn Ser. nova 3645 Klosters Einsiedeln, Musikbibliothek
Vienna, Österreichische frag. 366
Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung, CH-EN 103
Series nova 3645 Engelberg, Stiftsbibliothek 103
AUS-CAnl 4052/2/ 1 CH-EN 314 (“Engelburg Codex”)
Canberra, National Library of Australia, Engelberg, Stiftbibliothek 314
Nan Kivell Collection 4052/2/ 1 CH-SGs cod. sang. 339
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex
B-Bc 15 sangallensis 339
Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek 15 CH-SGs cod. sang. 340
B-Br 10127–10144 (“Mont-Blandin St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex
Antiphoner”) sangallensis 340
Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, 10127– CH-SGs cod. sang. 349
10144 St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex
B-Br 19606 (“Brussels Rotulus”) sangallensis 349
Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 19606 CH-SGs cod. sang. 359
B-BRb Reeks A 50 St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex
Bruges, Archief van het Bisdom, Reeks A 50 sangallensis 359
[xxxiii]
xxxiv List of Manuscript Sigla
CH-SGs cod. sang. 375 D-BAs Patr. 17 (B.I I .10)

St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Patr. 17 (B.
sangallensis 375 I I .10)
CH-SGs cod. sang. 376 D-BAs Var. 1
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Varia 1
sangallensis 376 D-DO B 6
CH-SGs cod. sang. 381 Dortmund, Stadt– und Landesbibliothek,
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex Musikabteilung, Archiv der
sangallensis 381 Propsteikirche B 6
CH-SGs cod. sang. 383 D-Ds 1946
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex Darmstadt, Hessische Universitäts- und
sangallensis 383 Landesbibliothek 1946
CH-SGs cod. sang. 390/ 391 (“Antiphoner of D-Dül D 11
Hartker”) Düsseldorf, Universitäts und
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex Landesbibliothek D 11
sangallensis 390/ 391 D-Dül D 12
CH-SGs cod. sang. 484 Düsseldorf, Universitäts und
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex Landesbibliothek D 12
sangallensis 484 D-E 121
CH-SGs cod. sang. 546 Einsiedeln, Kloster Einsiedeln,
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex Musikbibliothek 121
sangallensis 546 D-HEu Cod. Pal. germ. 848 (“Manesse
CH-SGs cod. sang. 614 manuscript”)
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek
sangallensis 614 Heidelberg, Codex Palatinus
CH-SGv cod. 317 germanicus 848
St. Gallen, Kantonsbibliothek, D-HTd Inv.-Nr 45
codex 317 Halberstadt, Domschatz, Inventar-
CH-Zz Rh. 28 (“Antiphoner of Rheinau”) Nummer 45
Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, Rheinau 28 D-Ju El.f.101
CH-Zz Rh. 30 Jena, Thüringer Universitäts- und
Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, Rheinau 30 Landesbibliothek, El.f. 101
CZ-Pn X I E 9 D-KA 504
Prague, Knihovna Narodního muzea, X I Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek
E9 504
D-KA aug. perg. C C L I X
D-AAm G 20 Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek,
Aachen, Domarchiv (Stiftsarchiv), G 20 aug. perg. C C L I X
D-B 40047 D-KA U.H. frag. 24
Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek,
Preußischer Kulturbesitz, U.H. frag. 24
Musikabteilung 40047 D-KL theol. 4° 25
D-B lat. 4° 523 Kassel, Landesbibliothek, theol. 4° 25
Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin D-LEu 371
Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek 371
Musikabteilung, lat. 4° 523 D-LEu 391
D-BAs bibl. 71 Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek 391
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, bibl. 71 D-Mbs cgm 716
D-BAs lit. 5 (“Reichenau Troper”) Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, msc. lit. 5 codices germanici monacenses
D-BAs lit. 6 716
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, msc. lit. 6 D-Mbs cgm 6943
D-BAs lit. 115 (“Bamberg Codex”) Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, lit. 115 codices germanici monacenses 6943
D-BAs Bibl. 30 D-Mbs clm 3005
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,
msc. Bibl. 30 codices latini monacenses 3005
List of Manuscript Sigla xxxv
D-Mbs clm 4660 (“Carmina Burana D-W Cod. Guelf. 1099 Helmst. [W2]
manuscript”) Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Bibliothek, Codices Guelferbytani
codices latini monacenses 4660 1099 Helmstedt
D-Mbs clm 4660a D-W Weis. 76
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-
codices latini monacenses 4660a Bibliothek, Weissenburg 76
D-Mbs clm 9543 D-WIl Hs. 2
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek,
codices latini monacenses 9543 Handschrift 2
D-Mbs clm 9921
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, E-Bbc 1139
codices latini monacenses 9921 Barcelona, Biblioteca de Cataluña
D-Mbs clm 14000 1139
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, E-Boc 1
codices latini monacenses 14000 Barcelona, Biblioteca del Orfeó
D-Mbs clm 14843 Català 1
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, E-Boc 2
codices latini monacenses 14843 Barcelona, Biblioteca del Orfeó Català 2
D-Mbs clm 14965 E-BUlh [Hu] (“Las Huelgas Manuscript”)
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas
codices latini monacenses 14965 E-E B.I .2 (“Cantigas de Santa Maria” [E])
D-Mbs lat. 14274 (“St. Emmeram Codex”) San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Real
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, monastario de San Lorenzo B.I . 2 [E]
latin 14274 E-E T.I .1 (“Cantigas de Santa Maria” [T])
D-Mbs Mus. 3223 San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Real
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, monastario de San Lorenzo,
Musikhandschriften 3223 T.I . 1 [T]
D-Mbs Mus. 3725 (“Buxheimer Orgelbuch”) E-G frag. 33/I I
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Girona, Arxiu Capitular de la Catedral de
Musikhandschriften 3725 Girona, fragmento 33/I I
D-Mbs Mus. 4775 E-Mah Cod. L. 1503
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Madrid, Archivo histórico nacional, Cod.
Musikhandschriften 4775 L. 1503
D-Mu 2°Cod. 156 (“Moosburger Graduale”) E-Mn 288
Munich, Universitätsbibliothek, 2° Madrid, Biblioteca nacional 288
Cod. 156 E-Mn 289
D-Mu 8°Cod. 375 (Cim 13) Madrid, Biblioteca nacional 289
Munich, Universitätsbibliothek, 8°Cod. E-Mn 10069 (“Cantigas de Santa Maria” –
375 (Cim 13) “Toledo Codex” – [To])
D-MÜsa V I I 51 Madrid, Biblioteca nacional 10069
Münster, Staatsarchiv, V I I 51 E-Mn 20486 [Ma] (“Madrid Codex”)
D-Nst Inc. 304 2° Madrid, Biblioteca nacional 20486
Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, Inkunabeln E-Mn Vitr/5/9
304 2° Madrid, Biblioteca nacional,
D-Sl 160 Vitruvio/5/ 9
Stuttgart, Württembergische E-Mp I I
Landesbibliothek 160 Madrid, Biblioteca Real, I I
D-TRs Hs. 120/1170 E-SC s.s. (“Codex Calixtinus”)
Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Handschrift Santiago de Compostela, Biblioteca de la
120/ 1170 Catedral, s.s.
D-W Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmst. [W1] E-Sco 5.2.25
Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Seville, Biblioteca Colombina de la
Codices Guelferbytani 628 Helmstedt Institución Colombina 5. 2.25
D-W Cod. Guelf. 1050 Helmst. E-SE s.s. (antiguo18)
Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Segovia, Catedral, Archivo Capitular, s.s.
Codices Guelferbytani 1050 Helmstedt (antiguo18)
xxxvi List of Manuscript Sigla
E-Tc 10069 F-CH 564 (“Chantilly Codex”)

Toledo, Archivo y Biblioteca capítulares Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château de
10069 Chantilly 564
E-V carpeta 29, doc. 7 F-CHRm 47 (destroyed)
Valladolid, Archivo de la Real Chartres, Bibliothèque municipale 47
Chancillería. Pergamino, carpeta 29, (destroyed in 1944)
documento 7 F-CHRm Na4
Chartres, Bibliothèque municipale Na 4
F-AI Roche. 44 F-CHUm 31
Albi, Bibliothèque municipale, Chaumont, Bibliothèque municipale 31
Rochegude 44 F-CO 443
F-AIXm 166 (Rés.14) Colmar, Bibliothèque municipale 443
Aix-en-Provence, Bibliothèque F-CO 444
Municipale Méjanes 166 (Rés.14) Colmar, Bibliothèque municipale 444
F-AN 91 (83) F-CObodmer C 74
Angers, Bibliothèque municipale 91 (83) Cologny-Genève, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana
F-AN 97 C 74
Angers, Bibliothèque municipale 97 F-Dm 114
F-AN 144 Dijon, Bibliothèque Municipal 114
Angers, Bibliothèque municipale 144 F-DOU 1171
F-APT 16bis Douai, Bibliothèque municipale 1171
Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, F-LA 118
Bibliothèque du chapitre 16bis Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 118
F- APT 17 F-LA 239
Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 239
Bibliothèque du chapitre 17 F-LA 263
F- APT 18 Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 263
Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, F-Lad 4 G 1313
Bibliothèque du chapitre 18 Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord,
F- APT 19bis 4 G 1313
Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, F-Lad 4 G 1928
Bibliothèque du chapitre 19bis Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord,
F-AS 657 4 G 1928
Arras, Médiathèque municipale 657 F-Lad 4 G 2009
F-AUT 28 S Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord,
Autun, Bibliothèque municipale, 28 S 4 G 2009
F-CA 39 F-Lad 4 G 4656
Cambrai, Mediathèque municipale 39 Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord,
F-CA 60 4 G 4656
Cambrai, Mediathèque municipale 60 F-Lad 4 G 4661 (fabric)
F-CA 75 Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord,
Cambrai, Mediathèque municipale 75 4 G 4661 (fabric)
F-CA 78 F-Lad 4 G 4669
Cambrai, Mediathèque municipale 78 Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord,
F-CA 1046 4 G 4669
Cambrai, Mediathèque municipale 1046 F-Lad 4 G 5431
F-CA B 1328 (“Cambrai Fragments”) Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord,
Cambrai, Mediathèque municipale, B 1328 4 G 5431
F-CA Impr. X V I C 4 F-Lad 4 G 6749
Cambrai, Mediathèque municipale, Impr. Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord,
XVI C 4 4 G 6749
F-CECad 3.J.250 F-Lm 397
Châlons-sur-Marne, Archives Lille, Bibliothèque municipale 397
departmentales 3.J. 250 F-ME 351
F-CECm 270 Metz, Médiathèque municipale 351
Châlons-en-Champagne, Bibliothèque F-ME 452
municipale 270 Metz, Médiathèque municipale 452
List of Manuscript Sigla xxxvii
F-MOf H 159 F-Pn fr. 1584 [MachA]

Montpellier, Bibliothèque Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Interuniversitaire, Section de Médicine fonds français 1584
H 159 F-Pn fr. 1585 [MachB]
F-MOf H 196 [Mo] (“Montpellier Codex”) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Montpellier, Bibliothèque fonds français 1585
Interuniversitaire, Section de Médecine F-Pn fr. 1586 [MachC]
H 196 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
F-O 201 fonds français 1586
Orléans, Bibliothèque municipale 201 F-Pn fr. 1593
F-Pa 1169 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 1169 fonds français 1593
F-Pa 2741 F-Pn fr. 2631
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
2741 fonds français 2631
F-Pa 5198 F-Pn fr. 8541
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
5198 fonds français 8541
F-Pm 384 F-Pn fr. 9221 [MachE]
Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine 384 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
F-Pn Collection de Picardie 67 fonds français 9221
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, F-Pn fr. 12615 (“Chansonnier du Noailles”)
Collection de Picardie 67 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
F-Pn fr. 146 (“Roman du Fauvel”) fonds français 12615
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, F-Pn fr. 12786
fonds français 146 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
F-Pn fr. 372 fonds français 12786
F-Pn fr. 844 (“Chansonnier du Roi de fonds français 22543
Navarre”) F-Pn fr. 22546 [MachG]
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
fonds français 844 fonds français 22546
F-Pn fr. 845 F-Pn fr. 24432
F-Pn fr. 846 (“Chansonnier Cangé”) F-Pn fr. 24541
F-Pn fr. 1376 (“Trémouïlle Fragment”) F-Pn fr. 25532
F-Pn fr.1455 F-Pn fr. 25566
F-Pn fr. 1553 F-Pn gr. 2631
fonds français 1553 fonds grec 2631
xxxviii List of Manuscript Sigla
F-Pn it. 568 (pit) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds latin 2374
fonds italien 568 (pit) F-Pn lat. 2778
F-Pn lat. 268 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds latin 2778
fonds latin 268 F-Pn lat. 3549 (“St Martial Manuscripts”
F-Pn lat. 776 [StM-B])
fonds latin 776 fonds latin 3549
F-Pn lat. 887 F-Pn lat. 3719 (“St Martial Manuscripts”
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, [StM-C])
fonds latin 887 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
F-Pn lat. 895 fonds latin 3719
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, F-Pn lat. 7369
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, F-Pn lat. 12050 (“Corbie Antiphoner”)
F-Pn lat. 1138–1338 fonds latin 12584
fonds latin 1138–1338 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
F-Pn lat. 1139 (“St Martial Manuscripts” fonds latin 12957
[StM-A]) F-Pn lat. 13252
F-Pn lat. 1154 F-Pn lat. 15139 (“St Victor Manuscript”)
F-Pn lat. 1240 F-Pn lat. 16663
F-Pn lat. 1455 F-Pn lat. 17177
F-Pn lat. 2374 F-Pn lat. 17296 (“Antiphoner of St-Denis”)
List of Manuscript Sigla xxxix
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, F-TO 268

fonds latin 17296 Tours, Bibliothèque municipale 268
F-Pn lat. 17436 (“Compiègne Antiphoner” F-TO 925
or “Antiphoner of Charles the Bald”) Tours, Bibliothèque municipale 925
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
fonds latin 17436 GB-BFu 1/ 21.1
F-Pn Médailles, Inv. 298 Belfast, Queen’s University Special
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collections 1/ 21.1
Département des Médailles, GB-Ccc 8
Inv. 298 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 8
F-Pn n.a.f. 1050 GB-Ccc 11
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 11
nouvelles acquisitions françaises 1050 GB-Ccc 473 (“Winchester Troper”)
F-Pn n.a.f. 6771 (“Reina Codex”) Cambridge, Corpus Christi
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, College 473
nouvelles acquisitions françaises 6771 GB-Ccc Vg (Ferrell 1) [Mach Vg]
F-Pn n.a.f. 10036 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College,
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ferrell-Vogüé Vg (Ferrell 1)
nouvelles acquisitions françaises 10036 GB-Cgc 334/ 727
F-Pn n.a.f. 13521 (“La Clayette Codex”) Cambridge, Gonville & Caius College
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 334/ 727
nouvelles acquisitions françaises 13521 GB-Cu add. 4435
F-Pn n.a.f. 22069 Cambridge, University Library,
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, additional 4435
nouvelles acquisitions françaises 22069 GB-Cu add. 5943
F-Pn n.a.f. 23190 Cambridge, University Library,
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, additional 5943
nouvelles acquisitions françaises 23190 GB-Cu add. 5963/ 8
F-Pn n.a.lat. 1411 Cambridge, University Library,
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, additional 5963/ 8
nouvelles acquisitions Latin 1411 GB-Cu Ff.ii. 17 (“Later Cambridge
F-Pn n.a.lat. 1412 Songbook”)
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cambridge, University Library, Ff.i. 17
nouvelles acquisitions Latin 1412 GB-Cu Gg. V . 35 (Cat. 1567) (“Cambridge
F-Pn n.a.lat. 1871 Songs”)
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cambridge, University Library, Gg. V . 35
nouvelles acquisitions Latin 1871 (Cat. 1567)
F-Psg lat. 111 (“Senlis Antiphoner”) GB-DRc C.I . 20
Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Durham, Cathedral Library, C.I . 20
Latin 111 GB-DRu A.I I I . 11
F-RS 227 Durham, University Library, A.I I I . 11
Reims, Bibliothèque municipal 227 GB-DRu Cos. V . V . 6
F-RS 258 Durham, University Library, Cosin V . V . 6
Reims, Bibliothèque municipale 258 GB-Lbl add. 12194
F-RS 264 London, British Library, additional 12194
Reims, Bibliothèque municipal 264 GB-Lbl add. 19768
F-RS 285 London, British Library, additional 19768
Reims, Bibliothèque municipale 285 GB-Lbl add. 23935
F-Sm 222.C.22 (destroyed) London, British Library, additional
Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Municipale, 23935
222.C. 22 (destroyed in fire) GB-Lbl add. 28550 (“Robertsbridge Codex”)
F-Sm A94 London, British Library, additional 28550
Strasbourg, Bibliothèque municipal, GB-Lbl add. 29987 (“London Codex”)
A 94 London, British Library, additional 29987
F-Tc A 27 GB-Lbl add. 29988
Tournai, Bibliothèque du Chapitre de la London, British Library, additional
Cathédrale, A 27 [olim: 476] 29988
xl List of Manuscript Sigla
GB-Lbl add. 34209 GB-Ob Don b. 31

London, British Library, additional 34209 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Don. b. 31
GB-Lbl add. 35290 GB-Ob Don b. 32
London, British Library, additional 35290 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Don. b. 32
GB-Lbl add. 36881 (“St Martial GB-Ob Douce 139
Manuscripts” [StM-D]) Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 139
London, British Library, additional 36881 GB-Ob Douce 195
GB-Lbl add. 38651 (E) Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 195
London, British Library, additional GB-Ob Douce 222
38651 (E) Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 222
GB-Lbl add. 49622 (“Gorleston Psalter”) GB-Ob Douce 308 (“Douce chansonnier”)
London, British Library, additional 49622 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308
GB-Lbl add. 57950 (“Old Hall Manuscript”) GB-Ob lat. liturg. D. 3
London, British Library, additional 57950 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Latin liturgical
GB-Lbl add. 82959 D. 3
London, British Library, additional GB-Ob mus. E. 7
82959 Oxford, Bodleian Library, museo E. 7
GB-Lbl Arundel 248 GB-Ob Rawl. C 892
London, British Library, Arundel 248 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson
GB-Lbl Egerton 274 C 892
London, British Library, Egerton 274 GB-Ob Selden sup. 27
GB-Lbl Egerton 2615 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Selden supra 27
London, British Library, Egerton 2615 GB-Ob Wood 591
GB-Lbl Harley 978 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Wood 591
London, British Library, Harley 978 GB-Omc lat. 267
GB-Lbl Harley 2637 Oxford, Magdalen College, lat. 267
London, British Library, Harley 2637 GB-Ouc 192
GB-Lbl Harley 2961 Oxford, University College 192
London, British Library, Harley 2961 GB-SHRs V I
GB-Lbl Harley 5393 Shrewsbury, Library of Shrewsbury
London, British Library, Harley 5393 School, V I
GB-Lbl Lansdowne 420 GB-Wc X 4/34/ 3
London, British Library, Lansdowne 420 Wells, Wells Cathedral, X 4/34/ 3
GB-Lbl Royal 8 C. XIII GB-WO add. 68 (along with GB-Lbl lat.
London, British Library, Royal 8 C. XIII liturg. D. 20 known as the “Worcester
GB-Lva circ. 526–1923 Fragments”)
London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Worcester, Cathedral Library, additional 68
circ. 526–1923 GB-WO F. 160 (“Worcester Antiphoner”)
GB-Lwa W.A.M. 12185 Worcester, Cathedral Library, F. 160
London, Westminster Abbey,
Westminster Abbey Muniments 12185 HR-Šibf
GB-Ob Bodley 775 Šibenik, Samostan franjevaca
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 775 konventualaca (no shelfmark)
GB-Ob Bodley mus. E. 160
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley museo I-AC 187
E. 160 Assisi, Biblioteca comunale 187
GB-Ob Canon. cl. lat. 112 I-APa 142
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici Latin Ascoli Piceno, Archivio di Stato, Notarile
classical 112 mandamentale di Montefortino 142
GB-Ob Canon. misc. 213 I-ARc 363
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici Arezzo, Biblioteca della città di
miscellany 213 Arezzo 363
GB-Ob Canon. pat. lat. 229 [PadA] I-AT Framm. 17
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici Latin Atri, Museo della Basilica Cattedrale,
patristic 229 Biblioteca capitolare, Frammento 17
GB-Ob Digby 133 [olim: Sala Innocenzo IV, Cartella A,
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 133 frammento n. 5]
List of Manuscript Sigla xli
I-Bc Q11 I-Fn I I .1.122

Bologna, Civico Museo Bibliografico Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,
Musicale, Q 11 I I .1.122 [olim: Banco Rari 18]
I-Bc Q15 I-Fn Inc. F.5.5
Bologna, Civico Museo Bibliografico Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,
Musicale, Q 15 Incunaboli F. 5.5
I-BRq Inc. C.VI.5 I-Fn Maglia. BR 18
Brescia, Biblioteca Civica Queriniana, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,
Incunaboli C.VI. 5 Magliabechiano, BR 18
I-Bu 221 I-Fn Pancia. 26
Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria 221 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,
I-Bu 596 busta HH21 Panciatichiano 26
Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, 596, I-Fsl 2211
busta HH 2 1 Florence, Archivio capitolare di San
I-Bu 2216 Lorenzo 2211
Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria I-FZc 117 (“Faenza Codex”)
2216 Faenza, Biblioteca comunale 117
I-BV 21 (“Antiphoner of S. Lupo of I-GDlcc Codex 1, volumes 2 and 3
Benevento”) (stolen) (“Choirbooks of
Benevento, Biblioteca capitolare 21 Guardiagrele”)
I-BV 33 Guardiagrele, Archivio di Santa Maria
Benevento, Biblioteca capitolare 33 Maggiore, Codex 1, volumes 2 and 3
I-BV 34 (stolen)
Benevento, Biblioteca capitolare 34 I-GR [Crypt.] Lat. 219
I-BV 39 Grottaferrata, Biblioteca Statale del
Benevento, Biblioteca capitolare 39 Monumento Nazionale, [Crypt.] Lat.
I-CFm 63 [Cividale A] 219 [olim: E.β.XVI]
Cividale del Friuli, Museo Archeologico I-GR lat. 224 (“Grottaferrata
Nazionale, biblioteca 63 fragments”)
I-CFm 98 [Cividale A] Grottaferrata, Biblioteca Statale
Cividale del Friuli, Museo Archeologico del Monumento Nazionale,
Nazionale, biblioteca 98 lat. 224 [olim: Collocazione
I-CT 91 provvisoria 197]
Cortona, Biblioteca comunale e I-IV 60
dell’Accademia Etrusca 91 Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare 60
I-CTas sen. Sig. (1) I-IV 115 (“Ivrea Codex”)
Cortona, Archivio storico del Comune, Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare 115
senza signatura (1) I-IV CV (104)
I-Fc Cassa forte 74 Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare, CV (104)
Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di I-Las 184 (“Mancini Codex”)
Musica, “Luigi Cherubini,” Cassa forte Lucca, Biblioteca-Archivio storico
74 [olim: D 1175] comunale 184
I-Fl Ash. 999 I-Las 187
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Lucca, Biblioteca-Archivio storico
Laurenziana, Ashburnham 999 comunale 187
I-Fl Pal. 87 (“Squarcialupi Codex”) I-Lc 490
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Lucca, Biblioteca capitolare Feliniana e
Laurenziana, Palatino 87 Biblioteca Arcivescovile 490
I-Fl plut. 29.1 [F] (“Florence I-Lc 601 (“Antiphoner of Lucca”)
Manuscript”) Lucca, Biblioteca capitolare Feliniana e
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Biblioteca Arcivescovile 601
Laurenziana, Pluteo 29.1 I-Ma B 48 sup.
I-Fn Banco Rari 20 (“Cantigas de Santa Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, B 48 supra
Maria” [F]) I-MACa 488
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Macerata, Archivio di Stato, Notarile di
Banco Rari 20 Recanati 488
xlii List of Manuscript Sigla
I-MC 542 I-Pu 1475 [PadA]

Montecassino, Biblioteca Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria 1475
dell’Abbazia 542 I-Pu buste 2/1 [PadD]
I-MC Q.318 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria,
Montecassino, Biblioteca dell’Abbazia, buste 2/ 1
Q. 318 I-Pu buste 2/2 [PadD]
I-MEs O.4.16 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria,
Messina, Biblioteca Painiana (del buste 2/ 2
Seminario Arcivescovile San Pio X), I-Ra 123
O. 4.16 Rome, Biblioteca Angelica 123
I-MOe 5 I-Rasv reg. sup. 93
Modena, Biblioteca Estense e Vatican, Archivio Segreto Vaticano,
Universitaria 5 registrum supplicationum 93
I-MOe α.M.5.24 [ModA] I-Rasv reg. sup. 105
Modena, Biblioteca Estense e Vatican, Archivio Segreto Vaticano,
Universitaria, α.M. 5.24 registrum supplicationum 105
I-MZ c. 13/76 I-Rasv reg. sup. 109
Monza, Biblioteca capitolare e Tesoro della Vatican, Archivio Segreto Vaticano,
Basilica di S. Giovanni Battista, c. 13/ 76 registrum supplicationum 109
I-MZ cod. C I X (“Monza Cantatorium”) I-REas App. Misc. framm. 16 (“Mischiati
Monza, Biblioteca capitolare e Tesoro Fragment”)
della Basilica di S. Giovanni Battista, Reggio Emilia, Archivio di stato, Archivio
cod. C I X Comune Re, Appendice, Miscellaneo
I-PAas busta 75 n.26 storico-letteraria, Frammenti di codici
Parma, Archivio di Stato, Raccolta musicali, no. 16
Manoscritti, busta 75 n. 26 I-REm C. 408
I-Pas busta 14 Reggio Emilia, Biblioteca municipal, C. 408
Padua, Archivio di Stato, Fondo I-Rss XIV L1
Corporazioni soppresse, S. Giustina, Rome, Curia Generalizia dei Domenicani
busta 14 (S. Sabina), XIV L 1
I-Pas busta 553 [PadC] I-Rvat B.79
Padua, Archivio di Stato, Fondo Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana,
Corporazioni soppresse, S. Giustina, Archivio di S. Pietro, B. 79
busta 553 I-Rvat Barb. lat. 171
I-PCd 65 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana,
Piacenza, Biblioteca capitolare 65 Barbarini latini 171
I-PEc 3065 (“Mancini Codex”) I-Rvat F.22
Perugia, Biblioteca comunale “Augusta” Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana,
3065 Archivio di S.Pietro, F. 22
I-PEc 3409/1 I-Rvat Ottob. 145
Perugia, Biblioteca comunale “Augusta”, Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana,
3409/1 [olim: III-12–4] Ottoboni 145
I-PEdu Incunabolo inv. 15755 N.F. (“Cialini I-Rvat Reg. lat. 71
fragments”) Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana,
Perugia, Biblioteca del Dottorato Reginensi latini 71
dell’Università degli Studi, Incunabolo I-Rvat Reg. lat. 222
inv. 15755 N.F. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana,
I-Pu 658 [PadC] Reginensi latini 222
Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria 658 I-Rvat Reg. lat. 318
I-Pu 684 [PadA] Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana,
Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria 684 Reginensi latini 318
I-Pu 1106 [PadD] I-Rvat Reg. lat. 586
Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria 1106 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana,
I-Pu 1115 [PadB] Reginensi latini 586
Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria 1115 I-Rvat Reg. lat. 1146
I-Pu 1225 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana,
Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria 1225 Reginensi latini 1146
List of Manuscript Sigla xliii
I-Rvat Reg. lat. 1462 I-TRmp 1376 [Trent 89] (“Trent Codices”)
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana, Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte,
Reginensi latini 1462 Castello del Buonconsiglio 1376
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana, Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte,
Reginensi latini 1490 Castello del Buonconsiglio 1377
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana, Trento, Museo Provinciale
Reginensi latini 1529 d’Arte, Castello del Buonconsiglio
I-Rvat Reg. lat. 1709 1378
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana, I-TRmp 1379 [Trent 92] (“Trent Codices”)
Reginensi latini 1709 Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte,
I-Rvat Reg. lat. 2854 Castello del Buonconsiglio 1379
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana, I-UDa framm. 22 [Cividale A]
Reginensi latini 2854 Udine, Archivio di Stato, frammenti 22
I-Rvat Reg. lat. 5319 I-VCd 88
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana, Vercelli, Biblioteca capitolare 88
Reginensi latini 5319 I-VCd 161
I-Rvat Reg. lat. 10673 Vercelli, Biblioteca capitolare 161
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana, I-VEcap X C (85)
Reginensi latini 10673 Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, X C (85)
I-Rvat Rossi 215 (“Rossi Codex”) I-VEcap C V I I (107)
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica-Vaticana, Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, C V I I
Rossi 215 (107)
I-Sas Framm. busta 1 insert 11 I-VO L.I I I . 39
Siena, Archivio di Stato, Frammenti Volterra, Biblioteca Guarnacci e Archivio
musicali, busta 1 insert 11 [olim.: 207] storico comunale, L.I I I . 39
I-Sas Ravi 3 (1568–9) IRL-Duc Mícheál O’Cléirigh Institute for the
Siena, Archivio di Stato, Gavorrano, Ravi Study of Irish History and Civilisation,
3 (1568–9) B 29
I-Sc C.V.8 Killiney, Dún Mhuire, Franciscan
Siena, Biblioteca comunale, C.V . 8 Library, B 29 (now in the Mícheál
I-Sc H.I .10 O’Cléirigh Institute for the Study of
Siena, Biblioteca comunale, H.I . 10 Irish History and Civilisation,
I-Sc L.V.36 University College, Dublin)
Siena, Biblioteca comunale, L.V . 36
I-ST 14 [PadC] NL-G Inc. 70
Stresa, Biblioteca Rosminiana 14 Groningen, Universiteitsbibliotheek,
I-Tn G.V.20 Incunabulum 70
Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale PL-Kj Berol. Theol. Lat. Qu. 11
Universitaria, G.V. 20 Krakow, Biblioteka Jagielloń ska, Berol.
I-Tn J.I I .9 Theol. Lat. Qu. 11
Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale PL-Kj mus. 40592
Universitaria, J.I I . 9 Krakow, Biblioteka Jagielloń ska, mus.
I-Tr vari 42 40592
Turin, Biblioteca reale, vari 42 PL-Pa 174a
I-TRc 1563 Poznań , Archiwum archidiecezjalne
Trento, Biblioteca comunale 1563 174a
(housed at the Museo provincial d’arte) PL-Wn Lat. F. I . 378 (destroyed)
I-TRcap BL [Trent 93] (“Trent Codices”) Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, Lat. F. I .
Trento, Biblioteca capitolare, BL 378 (destroyed)
I-TRmp 1374 [Trent 87] (“Trent Codices”) PL-WRu Ak1955 / KN195 (k. 1 & 2)
Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, Wrocław, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka,
Castello del Buonconsiglio 1374 Ak1955 / KN195 (k. 1 & 2)
I-TRmp 1375 [Trent 88] (“Trent Codices”) PL-WRu rkp/ I V Q 16
Trento, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, Wrocław, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka,
Castello del Buonconsiglio 1375 rękopisy/ I V Q 16
xliv List of Manuscript Sigla
SI-Lna Rkp 13 US-Cn Case 54.1

Ljubljana, Nadškofijski arhiv, Chicago (IL), Newberry Library,
Rokopisi 13 Case 54.1
US-Cn Case MLo 96.P 36 (“Lowinsky
US-BEm 744 (“Berkeley Manuscript”) fragment”)
Berkeley (CA), University of California, Chicago (IL), Newberry Library, Case
Music Library 744 MLo 96.P 36
US-CAh lat. 420 US-HA 002387 (“Dartmouth Fragments”)
Cambridge (MA), Harvard University, Hanover (N.H.), Dartmouth College,
Houghton Library, lat. 420 Baker Library 002387
US-CAh Typ 122 US-NYpm M 34
Cambridge (MA), Harvard University, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library
Houghton Library, Typ 122 M 34
US-CLwr Spec. Coll. 3 Lge/ML431.D 24 US-NYpm M 36
Cleveland (OH), Case Western Reserve New York, Pierpont Morgan Library
University, Kelvin Smith Library, Spec. M 36
Coll. 3 Lge/ML431.D 24 US-NYpm M 978
Abbreviations
CMM Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae

CS Scriptorum de Musica medii aevi Nova Series, ed. E.
de Coussemaker (Paris: A. Durand, 1864–76)
CSM Corpus Scriptorum de Musica
Grove Music Online www.oxfordmusiconline.com/
GS Scriptores Ecclesiastici de Musica Sacra Potissimum, ed.
M. Gerbert (Saint-Blaise: n.p., 1784)
MGG Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Friedrich
Blume, 17 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1949–86)
MGG2 Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed., ed.
Ludwig Finscher, 29 vols. (Kassel and Stuttgart:
Bärenreiter, 1994–2007)
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
New Grove The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed.
Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1980)
NG2 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd
ed., ed. Stanley Sadie, 29 vols. (London: Macmillan,
2001)
PC Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der
Troubadours (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1933)
PL Patrologia cursus completus, series latina, ed. J. P.
Migne, 221 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1844–1904)
PMFC Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century
RISM Répertoire internationale des sources musicales
RS Hans Spanke, G. Raynauds Bibliographie des alt-
französischen Liedes, erster Teil, ergänzt mit einer
Diskographie und einem Register der Lieder nach
Anfangsbuchstaben hergestellt, ed. A. Bahat (Leiden:
Brill, 1980)
[xlv]
xlvi List of Abbreviations
SR Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, rev.

ed. by Leo Treitler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998)
vdB Nico H. J. van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains.
Du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (Paris: Klincksieck,
1969)
Introduction and Context
The need for an account of the music of the Middle Ages is as great as for any
title so far published or planned in this distinguished Cambridge series.
A tradition of encompassing the music of the West from its origins up to ca.
1400 within the compass of a single work has a large number of distinguished
predecessors. Gustave Reese’s 1940 Music in the Middle Ages remained a classic
until the appearance of its successor in the Norton Introduction to Music
History series, Richard Hoppin’s Medieval Music of 1978 (although many still
make reference to Reese).1 Alongside these two monumental enterprises stood
a more concise work, Albert Seay’s Music in the Medieval World in the Prentice
Hall history of music series; this was published in 1965 with a second edition in
1975, and completely rewritten by Jeremy Yudkin in 1989.2 Entirely coinciden-
tally, in the same years as Hoppin’s and Yudkin’s volumes were respectively
published, two freestanding histories of medieval music also appeared: John
Caldwell’s Medieval Music and Andrew Hughes’ Style and Symbol.3
The number of multi-authored histories of medieval music is much smaller:
the second volume of the New Oxford History of Music, Early Medieval Music
up to 1300, was edited by Dom Anselm Hughes and dates from 1954;4 it was
re-edited – with perhaps less success than it deserved – in 1990 by Richard
Crocker and David Hiley (although published in 1990, most of the chapters
were written substantially earlier).5 Between the two was one installment of
1 Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages with an Introduction on the Music of Ancient Times (London:
J. M. Dent, 1941); Richard Hoppin, Medieval Music, Norton Introduction to Music History (New York:
W. W. Norton; Toronto: R. J. Mcleod, 1978). Hoppin’s history was accompanied by an anthology:
Hoppin, Anthology of Medieval Music, Norton Introduction to Music History (New York: W. W. Norton;
Toronto: R. J.Mcleod, 1978).
2 Albert Seay, Music in the Medieval World, Prentice Hall History of Music Series (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1965; rev. 1975); Jeremy Yudkin, Music in Medieval Europe, Prentice Hall History of Music
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989).
3 John Caldwell, Medieval Music (London: Hutchinson, 1978); Andrew Hughes, Style and Symbol: Medieval
Music 800–1453, Musicological Studies 51 (Ottawa: Institute of Medieval Music, 1989).
4 Humphrey Vaughan [Anselm] Hughes, ed., Early Medieval Music up to 1300, New Oxford History of
Music 2 (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1954).
5 Richard Crocker and David Hiley, eds., The Early Middle Ages to 1300, New Oxford History of Music 2
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
[1]
2 Introduction and Context
a projected larger series edited by F. W. Sternfeld, Music from the Middle Ages to
the Renaissance (1973), a volume that many feel remains without peer to
this day.6
We stress this distinguished tradition in order to place The Cambridge
History of Medieval Music in its own history. By the time of publication, there
will have been no history of medieval music, single- or multi-authored, for
over a quarter-century. The urgency for a volume of the scope of
The Cambridge History of Medieval Music therefore hardly needs restating.
Vast changes have taken place in the way in which medieval music is defined
and considered in the last quarter-century, and this fact is one very clear
motivation for this work. The scope of these volumes is wider than any so
far published. This feature is common to the entire series, but is particularly
important here where the weight of tradition is so strong.
In order to meet the challenge of tradition, The Cambridge History of
Medieval Music assembles an international team of scholars and organizes
their thoughts according to a number of paradigms. In some cases, chapters
address a single repertory and give an up-to-date account of it. Although this
is an essential component of the volume, and the chapters dedicated to this
thread in the weave are distinguished ones, The Cambridge History of Medieval
Music seeks both to follow trajectories across the entire period (music and
politics, learning and teaching, collecting music) and to focus on flashpoints
in the history of medieval music where views have recently changed or are in
a state of flux (antecedents, nova cantica, questions of rhythm). The balance
between the expository and the experimental is central to the interest of the
volume.
This structure also explains the absence of some types of chapter, especially
those based on geography: with the exception of chapters on the trecento in
France and Italy, there are no contributions that focus on, say, Scandinavia,
German-speaking states, the Iberian peninsula, and so on.7 The contributors’
brief is to ensure – especially in the expository chapters – that the reception of
the repertory with which the chapter deals forms part of the chapter itself:
chapters on the fourteenth-century motet, then, will include both repertories
that might be thought central and those ranging from Cyprus to the
6 Music from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Frederick W. Sternfeld, A History of Western Music
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).
7 Although The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is a multi-
authored introduction to the subject whose size and scope place it in a different class of study from the
current volumes, its chapters on England (Peter Lefferts), Italy (Marco Gozzi), the Iberian Peninsula
(Nicolas Bell) and regions to the East of the Rhine (Robert Curry) provide an introduction to the
topography of medieval music. Christopher Page’s “The Geography of Medieval Music” outlines
a potential methodology for working with such questions (ibid., 320–34).
Netherlands, from Bohemia to Portugal. This ensures that the volume retains
a sense of coherence by formally tying in questions of chronology and topo-
graphy within single chapters rather than risking separating out the two
concerns with the possible consequence of omission or duplication.
We hope that “peripheral” areas (one of the most important sources of early
polyphony is from St. Andrews) are given due and serious consideration, but
not in a succession of geographical chapters.
The volume covers at least five times the span of time treated by the
analogous histories of seventeenth- to eighteenth-century music, and is con-
sequently of ample proportions.
Defining the Middle Ages

There is of course no such thing as the Middle Ages, at least with respect to the
history of music. The Middle Ages – if they are plural at all – get their name as
the temporal space between the decline of classical Antiquity and its redis-
covery in the Renaissance. Such a definition might once have been useful in
literature and the fine arts, but it makes little sense in music. The history of
Western music begins not with the music of Greece and Rome (about which
we know far too little) but with the music of the Latin Christian church.
The body of music known as Gregorian chant, and other similar repertories,
are the first music that survives to us in Western culture, and are the founda-
tion on which much later music is built, and the basis for describing music in
its time and forever after.
We continue to use the term “medieval” for this music, even though it is the
beginning of it all; there is some convenience in this, because historians in
other fields continue to find the term useful; what musicians are doing in the
twelfth century, however non-medieval it appears to us, is likely to be con-
sidered medieval by colleagues in other fields.
The chronological period in question is far from being a single thing.
If we consider the Middle Ages as extending from the fall of the Roman
empire, perhaps in 476 when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus, into the
fifteenth century, we have defined a period of about a millennium, far
longer than all subsequent style-periods (“Renaissance,” “Baroque,”
“Classical,” “Romantic,” etc.) put together; and yet we tend to think of it
as one thing.
There are three challenges in the study of medieval music that should be
borne in mind. One is the fallacy of historical parallax: things that are nearer to
us appear to be larger, so that the history of the twentieth century looms
enormous while the distant medieval period appears comparatively
insignificant. Secondly, the progressive loss of historical materials over time

means that more information survives from recent periods than from more
distant ones, leading to the temptation to gauge importance by sheer volume.
Thirdly, we tend to study what survives, not what does not – or what was
never written down because it was extemporized or memorized. (The authors
and editors are aware of this last, and the practices of non-written musical
performance are considered in Chapters 14 and 21.)
There is no clear beginning and no clear end to medieval music. In this
volume we acknowledge the heritage of Antiquity, and we note the continua-
tion of musical ideas and styles beyond our period. The authors of relevant
chapters have needed no explicit encouragement from us to make the
volume’s readers fully aware that nobody at the end of the fourteenth century
felt that all musical styles now came to an end.
Defining Medieval Music: Texts

If defining the Middle Ages, their culture and their institutions, is clearly
a challenge, when we turn to “works” of music, definitions are even more of
a thorny problem. It could be said that everything we know about the Middle
Ages comes from two things: notations and words on parchment that convey
all the musical and theoretical data that musicians who occupy themselves
with the period have at their disposal. There are no senses of hearing, touch or
smell that can be evoked as the past is reimagined. The second thing is the
tradition going back at least to the seventeenth century of attempts to turn
these images into either legible texts about music or musical notation legible
to the modern eye and thence into sound. And our modern editions, whether
of theory or musical “works,” when they looked similar to modern editions of
Wittgenstein or Webern, represented treacherous ground as the twentieth
century attempted to reconcile a need for “texts” of this music with the
absence of so much that was needed to re-create them.
An example can illustrate many of the problems as we seek to understand
medieval music in a modern world where the “work,” the “composition,” the
“piece” is relatively clearly defined. Even talking about a piece as well known
as Machaut’s virelai “Douce dame jolie” raises problems. It survives in several
medieval images, which all by and large resemble each other, and of which
Figure i.1 is an example.8
Depending on age, one’s point of entry to the work might be Margaret
Philpot’s ethereal solo performance on what – for many – was an
8 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (F-Pn), fonds français 9221, fol. 159r.
Figure i.1 Machaut’s virelai “Douce dame jolie,” in Paris, Bibliothèque natio-
nale de France, fonds français (F-Pn fr.) 9221, fol. 159r
epoch-making recording by the ensemble Gothic Voices entitled The Mirror

of Narcissus and released in 1983.9 Philpot’s cool, detached, unaccompanied
and above all simple performance was surely a direct response to the pre-
vious recording of the piece on David Munrow’s The Art of Courtly Love,
which dates from 1973.10 It was almost as if the clean lines of Leo Schrade’s
edition of the piece, published in 1956 as one of the earliest volumes in the
series “Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century,” was coming directly
off the page, with the generous white space around the single melodic line
prompting the white sound of Philpot’s performance and the absence of any
other singers or instruments (Figure i.2).11
Only a decade older, Munrow’s recording seems aeons away from Gothic
Voices’. In The Art of Courtly Love, the performance is led by Martin Hill,
who sings the verses, accompanied by James Bowman, Geoffrey Shaw and
(perhaps) Charles Brett in the refrain.12 But this description barely does
justice either to the high-energy accompaniment from citole and tabor in
the verses or to the added rebecs, cornetts and sopranino recorder – heavily
ornamented – in the refrains (Munrow himself contributing to the top of
9 Gothic Voices, dir. Christopher Page, Guillaume de Machaut: The Mirror of Narcissus (Hyperion,
CDA66087, 1983).
10 The Early Music Consort of London, dir. David Munrow, The Art of Courtly Love (HMV, SLS 863,
1973).
11 Leo Schrade, ed., The Works of Guillaume de Machaut: Second Part – Motets nos. 17 to 24 – Mass – double
hoquet – ballades – rondeaux – virelais, PMFC 3 (Monaco: Oiseau-Lyre, 1956), 168.
12 It is possible that Munrow’s 1973 recording was influenced by an earlier interpretation: New York
Pro Musica, dir. John Reeves White, Ah Sweet Lady (The Romance of Medieval France) (Decca, DL 79431,
1967). See Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology,
Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 279.
Figure i.2 Leo Schrade’s edition of “Douce dame jolie” from PMFC 3
(Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1956), 168
the texture on the sopranino recorder). This was one of the key moments in
the Early Music revival – as it was then called – in the United Kingdom, and
a recording that was welcomed the world over. Here, Schrade’s edition
served only as a point of departure, barely a blueprint for the performance
engendered by the Early Music Consort of London under Munrow’s
direction.
Munrow’s aesthetic debt to Johan Huizinga’s already venerable
The Waning of the Middle Ages was clear not only from his performances
but explicitly from the extensive liner notes that accompanied the lavish
boxed set in which his recording of “Douce dame jolie” was found.13 And
when Christopher Page, the director of Gothic Voices, was asked to com-
ment on BBC Radio in 1992, he responded with some caution but with
direct reference to Huizinga: “I think that many people expect that any
sound picture of the Middle Ages is going to be rumbustious and good fun.
It’s that sort of medieval banquet, rosy-cheeked wench, sucking-pig view of
the medieval past and well, that’s something I think that people like to have
13 Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and
the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (London: Edward Arnold, 1924).
confirmed in performances.”14 Intellectual and musical debts are very much

in evidence here.
Only a decade apart, and based on the same reading of the medieval past,
these two recordings bear little resemblance one to the other, and others
have probably shared our experience of playing both recordings to novices
who have failed to recognize that they are one and the same “work.”
The example may be complicated slightly by an early example of moving
from image to sound, from Roland Hayes. You could be forgiven for
thinking that this was one of Duparc’s simpler mélodies, with its simple
piano accompaniment and g modality with very clearly articulated domi-
nants and even a tierce de picardie at the end.15 It’s an elegant performance of
a remarkable piece of music. The image that Hayes, and his pianist Reginald
Boardman, take as their point of departure manages to turn Machaut’s
virelai into something very different. And unlike Page, and perhaps
Munrow, who at least had a sense of what the original image of “Douce
dame jolie” might have been, Hayes and Boardman never looked further
than the edition from which they sang.
Remarkably, that edition, for a recording made just a few years before
Schrade’s version, was based on one a hundred years old. Published in the
mid-1850s, Echos du temps passé, transcrits avec Accompagnem[en]t de Piano
was edited by Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, who later in the century would
become the librarian of the Paris Conservatoire. When he published Échos
du temps passé, he was the choral conductor of the Société Sainte Cécile in
Paris.
As the facsimile of his edition of “Douce dame jolie” paradoxically shows,
Weckerlin was not only prepared to compose an accompaniment to the
song that is likely to provoke ridicule in certain Early Music circles today,
but he was also committed to prefacing his edition with scholarly notes
that went as far as citing primary sources and secondary bibliography
(see Figure i.3).16 But what these three examples show is two things – the
radically different ways in which the same original images can find their way
into a “modern” (mid-nineteenth- or mid-twentieth-century) edition, and
how even the same edition can generate massively different results in the
space of a decade.
14 London, British Library, British Library Sound Archive H777/01, cited in Edward Breen,
“The Performance Practice of David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London: Medieval Music
in the 1960s and 1970s” (Ph.D. dissertation, King’s College London, 2014), 130.
15 The recording comes from the very end of Hayes’ career: Roland Hayes and Reginald Boardman,
The Art of Roland Hayes: Six Centuries of Song (Vanguard, VRS 448-VRS 449, 1954).
16 É C H O S / D U / T E M P S P A S S É , / transcrits / avec Accompagnem.t de Piano / P A R / J. B. Weckerlin. / P A R I S ,
G . F L A X L A N D , Editeur, / 4 Place de la Madeleine.
Figure i.3 Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin’s edition of “Douce dame jolie” from Echos
du temps passé, transcrits avec Accompagnem[en]t de Piano (Paris: G. Flaxland).
Collection of M. Everist
Figure i.3 (cont.)

Defining Medieval Music: Intertexts

In the previous section the word “work” has been carefully enclosed in
quotation marks to draw attention to the distance between medieval and
modern understandings of the concept. This is not to argue against, for
example, the claims for a nineteenth-century system which supports both
a work-based culture – for a string quartet by Mendelssohn, for example – and
an event-based one – for French and Italian opera, say. But it is however to
recognise the all-pervasive presence of an intertextuality between works and
genres in all forms of music before 1400 and of course beyond.
The idea of the intertext immediately brings to mind claims for the
formulaic construction of large parts of Latin liturgical chant and its deri-
vatives, and the perhaps less contentious presence of contrafacta – replacing
the verbal text of a composition with another, frequently in a different
language – in large tracts of Latin and vernacular monophony and poly-
phony. The poems of the trouvères are frequently found with different
melodies to the same text, and equally frequently with readings of sufficient
variance that it is difficult even to arbitrate over where melodic difference
ends and melodic variance begins. Less challenging perhaps is the presence
in all polyphonic genres of the possibility of their existence in different
numbers of parts: whether it is a clausula, a fourteenth-century polyphonic
song, or a motet from around 1300, the idea that a “work” might exist in
a different number of parts is a commonplace, and answering the obvious
question – what is the original version? – is not only difficult but very often
not the question to ask in the first place. The ne plus ultra of the intertextual
“work” where poetic texts and musical voices interchange kaleidoscopically
is the thirteenth-century motet.
So if we expect to find evidence of intertextual activity within a single
genre, coupled to an expectation that a thorough investigation of that reper-
tory would take account of such activity, we also have to recognise that
intertexts transcend genres and reach across large swaths of the repertory of
medieval monophony and polyphony. The use of the cantus prius factus in
polyphony, or the retexting of melismas in the trope and sequence repertory,
is so well known that it is easy to overlook. But it is fundamental to organum
and clausula of the fifty years either side of 1200, and to the motet of all
periods. And the cantus prius factus is not restricted to sacred Latin mono-
phony: by the fourteenth century, vernacular songs are beginning to be found
as the tenors in motets – still not as common as chant-based motets, but
a significant repertory nevertheless.
Even plainsong is not immune to the temptation of intertextuality. The degree

to which liturgical texts are based on biblical quotation and allusion brings even
that genre into a larger network of intertextual working that encompasses – like
contrafacta – both poetry and music.17 This sort of exclusively poetic intertext
spills over into the conductus repertory where the poetry is suffused with
allusion and citation from the Bible also, but together with quotations from
patristics and the classics.18 But perhaps the most wide-ranging cross-genre
intertextuality is found in the refrain; here fragments of poetry of between one
and four lines, frequently together with their music, migrate among vernacular
chanson, prose romance, rondeau and motet, in ways that are baffling in many
respects but revelatory of both aesthetic and compositional practice in others.19
Analysis and Performance

Such considerations open up challenges and opportunities for the analysis and
performance of medieval music. While the flexible nature of “works” – de facto
the objects of analysis – renders many conventional approaches to analysis
difficult to apply, it does open up the possibility of a different model of
analysis, one that focuses more on the multiplicity of the object of inquiry
than on the stability of its text. The thirteenth-century motet is a genre that
has been the subject of much analysis that purports to uncover “listening” or
“meaning,” but it is striking that the methods used have stopped short of
controlling versions of whatever single work is the subject of the analysis.20
17 The biblical sources of chant texts can be consulted in Carmina scripturarum, ed. Carolus Marbach
(Strasbourg, 1907). The relationships among chant texts and related tropes, sequences, etc., are consid-
ered in Richard Crocker’s classic article “The Troping Hypothesis,” The Musical Quarterly 52 (1966),
183–202. See also the chapters by Andreas Haug and Lori Kruckenberg in this history. Texts of tropes are
edited in the series Corpus Troporum (Stockholm, University of Stockholm, 1975–). A fascinating study on
the selection and alteration of biblical texts to form chant texts, in this case for the Old-Spanish liturgy, is
Rebecca Maloy’s recent “Old Hispanic Chant and the Early History of Plainsong,” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 67 (2014), 1–76.
18 See, for example, the notes to the text editions in Gordon A. Anderson, ed., Notre-Dame and Related
Conductus: Opera omnia, 11 vols., [Institute of Mediaeval Music] Collected Works 10 (Henryville, Ottawa,
and Binningen: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1979–) [all but vols. 7 and 11 have appeared].
19 The standard text for the refrain, Nico H. J. van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début
du XIVe: collationnement, introduction, et notes, Bibliothèque française et romane, D:3 (Paris: Éditions
Klincksieck, 1969), has now been supplemented, updated and digitised: REFRAIN Music, Poetry Citation:
The Refrain in the Middle Ages / Musique, poésie, citation: le refrain au moyen âge, 2015, www.refrain.ac.uk/.
20 Ardis Butterfield, “The Language of Medieval Music: Two Thirteenth-Century Motets,” Plainsong and
Medieval Music 2 (1993) 1–16; Suzannah Clark, “‘S’en dirai chançonete’: Hearing Text and Music in
a Medieval Motet,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 16 (2007), 31–59; Anna Grau, “Hearing Voices:
Heteroglossia, Homoglossia, and the Old French Motet,” Proceedings of Conference: The Gothic Revolution
in Music, 1100–1300, Musica Disciplina 58 (2013) 73–100; David Rothenberg, “The Marian Symbolism of
Spring, ca. 1200–ca. 1500: Two Case Studies,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59 (2006),
319–98; Rothenberg, The Flower of Paradise: Marian Devotion and Secular Song in Medieval and Renaissance
Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 24–91; Gerald Hoekstra, “The French Motet as Trope:
Multiple Levels of Meaning in Quant florist la violete/El mois de mai/Et gaudebit,” Speculum 73 (1998) 32–57;
This focus on the complexity of a work, coupled with the lack of interest in the
historical trajectories in which the work is embedded, is redolent of the focus
on Austro-German nineteenth-century instrumental music in so much analy-
sis of the twentieth century.
A further opportunity for analysis lies in the relationship between notation
(closely tied to the image) and interpretation. Reflexive methods where nota-
tion and analysis mutually inform each other, much in the manner of the
analysis of melodic variance in the trouvère song popular in the 1960s and
1970s, still has value not only for the interpretation of individual works, but of
repertories and historical drifts.21 Despite the considerable amount of work
dedicated to the passage of the refrain from one work or genre to another, the
interpretative possibilities here go far beyond the types of study current in
print.22
Another approach to the analysis of medieval music consists of a set of
claims about meaning and sound. Claims to be able to reconstruct a medieval
sound-world out of the evidence that posterity has bequeathed us seem
strange when they are divorced from the imperatives of re-creating this
music in the twenty-first century. All the music discussed in this volume has
been the subject of some sort of performance project or another, some
successful, some less so. When Gothic Voices released The Mirror of Narcissus
in 1983, with a disc presenting fourteenth-century monophonic songs
with no instrumental participation of any sort, they issued a challenge to
those ensembles who had been performing polyphony with minimal vocal
involvement and monophonic repertories with complex instrumental accom-
paniments; in both cases, these recent performing styles – fundamental to the
Early Music revival of the 1960s and 1970s – were based on little evidence
from the Middle Ages apart from a choice of images: the pictures of instru-
ments in medieval art (manuscript decoration, sculpture and stained glass).
And needless to say, a careful reading of a range of medieval authors lay behind
the performance decisions that underpinned The Mirror of Narcissus.
Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France (1260–1330), The New Cultural History of
Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) 287–296.
21 Hendrik Van der Werf, “The Trouvère Chansons as Creations of a Notationless Musical Culture,”
Current Musicology 1 (1965), 61–68; Van der Werf, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: A Study of
the Melodies and Their Relation to the Poems (Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1972).
22 Ardis Butterfield, “Repetition and Variation in the Thirteenth-Century Refrain,” Journal of the Royal
Musical Asociation 116 (1991), 1–23; Jennifer Saltzstein, The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval
French Music and Poetry (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2013); Anne Ibos-Augé, “La fonction
des insertions lyriques dans des œuvres narratives et didactiques aux XIIIème et XIVème siècles,” 4 vols.
(Ph.D. dissertation, Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux I I I , 2000); Ibos-Augé, “Les refrains de la
Court de paradis: Variance et cohérence des insertions lyriques dans un poème narratif du XIIIe siècle,”
Revue de musicologie 93 (2007), 229–267.
Despite Page’s and Gothic Voices’ efforts, and the number of ensembles
that have emulated them, there are still plenty of recordings that furnish
paraliturgical monody with instrumental preludes, postludes and accompa-
niments, or that perform any voice-parts that fail to carry a text on instru-
ments of all types. So in the 1960s and 1970s, claims to authenticity could be
made to underwrite performances of medieval music that made full use of an
instrumentarium that included objects from the twelfth to the seventeenth
centuries – frequently because the ensembles were founded and largely
staffed by instrumentalists. These claims now have to compete with those
that take the view that vocal performance was the norm for pretty well all
genres of polyphony and monophony; the resulting range of performances
must leave any but the best informed in a position where they must wonder
what they are in fact hearing. And of course, that understates the position,
since advances – if that is what they are – in our understanding of notation
and rhythm since the 1960s have resulted in editions that are as different –
almost – as those of “Douce dame jolie” by Weckerlin and Schrade.
Organizing Medieval Music

We are pleased and honored that our contributors have agreed with us that
this history is a project well worth undertaking, and doubly pleased that the
breadth, the comprehensiveness, and the authority of our plan and of our
contributors have met with more than routine approval by reviewers and by
the Press. We have not attempted, in such a collaborative collection, to impose
a “vision” on our contributors. (We would have no contributors if we did.)
We have hoped to give some view of what history might mean by the very
organization of the volume; the choice of topics, the avoidance of others
(where genres become characters, for example, or styles triumph over adver-
sity, or the modern finally breaks through), and a choice of authors whose
broad view of history we accept, or admire, or dispute.
Many of the individual chapters are likely to present a view of history
consistent with the view that music is of its culture. We believe that our
choice of authors produces a textured understanding in which a variety of
points of view can be held at once. We do not seek to impose a kind of
uniformity by asking authors to reflect on thematic questions. We think
that the themes are present in the structure and in the material.
This is not a single-author volume, and it makes no claim to represent
a single overarching view of history, or of music. What it does propose is
a stained-glass window whose individual panes, made by superb craftsmen,
are arranged in such a way as to transmit light of many colors arranged in

patterns that are presented to, but not imposed upon, our readers.
There are, we believe, practical advantages in our organizational system. Let
one example serve for many: chapters on secular song are deliberately spaced
apart. The earlier chapters are placed where they are so as to keep the reader
aware that not all monophonic music was liturgical; and the later chapters, on
Latin song, are placed so as to situate monophonic song (here Latin song) in
a wider social context, and in the permeable context in which polyphony and
monophony coexist. To place all the chapters on monophonic song together
runs the risk, we think, of Balkanizing the subject (a solution too often used);
this spacing reminds the reader that there are multiple simultaneous strands
that can be followed through the period.
We have specifically targeted this book as being about music. Discussion of
music in the absence of music is a discussion of something else. Adequate
musical examples allow authors to make their points, and readers to under-
stand stylistic, notational, and other matters. The history of music must of
course be associated with thinking about music, but excellent books on music
theory already exist, and while we regret that the two cannot be more closely
entwined, we feel that appropriate coverage of music theory would double the
size of the project.
The essays collected here introduce readers to an enormous swath of
musical history and style, and present the highest level of recent musical
scholarship. We trust that taken together they will increase access to this
rich body of music, and provide scholars and students with an authoritative
guide to the best of current thinking about the music of the Middle Ages.
.1.
Musical Legacies from the Ancient World

PETER JEFFERY
Like all great civilizations, medieval western Europe was built upon
what came before. One can see this, for example, in many of the
medieval church buildings that still stand today, like the cathedrals of
Chartres, Cologne, Venice, or Compostela, St. Mary Major in Rome, or
Westminster Abbey. Each of these structures exhibits a diversity of
architectural styles, because it was built and rebuilt over many centuries,
with every section reflecting its own historical period. Walking around
the building as it exists today, one can see artworks, monuments, tombs,
banners, and other items that date from every time period in the build-
ing’s history. Some of the columns, stones, or other materials may be
spolia – pieces taken from older dismantled buildings and put to new
uses. The crypt, below ground, may include portions of an older build-
ing on the same site, along with the most important tombs: the bones of
the patron saint, and the graves of kings and bishops who wanted to be
buried near him or her. Safely locked in the church treasury, one will
find the most valuable items: relics of the great saints and heroes of
biblical times, textiles and vessels of gold and silver that may have come
from as far away as Constantinople or the Holy Land, precious gifts
from important people who died centuries ago. All of these things are
still being used, sometimes in ways the original makers or owners could
not have foreseen.
Of course, every culture is formed, in part, by repurposing some of the
concepts, texts, technologies, and practices inherited from earlier times.
But medieval people were particularly respectful of what survived from the
world of Antiquity, even while they sought ways to innovate and adjust to
new situations and challenges. The tension between honoring the past and
engaging the present can be seen in the writings of the twelfth-century
philosopher John of Salisbury, who praised his teacher’s deep knowledge
and love of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. “Bernard of
Chartres used to compare us to dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants.
He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not
[15]
16 P E T E R J E F F E R Y
because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted
up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”1 Yet John also wrote that, in
his own works, “I have not been ashamed to cite moderns, whose opinions,
in many instances, I unhesitatingly prefer over those of the ancients. I trust
that posterity will honor our contemporaries, for I have profound admira-
tion for the extraordinary talents, diligent studies, marvelous memories,
fertile minds, remarkable eloquence, and linguistic proficiency of many of
those of our own day.”2
In a similar way, the musicians of the Middle Ages created new music and
new kinds of music that had never existed before, yet they were very aware of
being indebted to more ancient precedents. These precedents were survivals
of three of the cultures of late Antiquity: (1) ancient Greek and Roman
philosophy, which included some highly developed music theory, (2) the
literature and poetry of ancient Israel, preserved in the Christian Bible, and
(3) the transformative synthesis of the early Church.
Ancient Greece and Rome

Greek Learning
Poetry, Song, and Dance
Greek poetry was not merely for reading – it was performed, usually with song
and often with dance. Thus Greek culture did not clearly distinguish music,
dance, and poetry as separate arts. Musicians could create vigorously affecting
songs when inspired by the gods, in a psychologically agitated state known as
enthousiasmos (“possession by a god”), the origin of our word “enthusiasm.”
Classical mythology recognized the emotional or rhetorical power of such
music in the story of Orpheus, whose songs could charm animals, trees, and
stones – even the gods of the Underworld, the abode of the dead. However,
divine frenzies could also be destructive, as dramatized in Euripides’ play The
Bacchantes (fifth century B C E ) in which Pentheus, the young king of Thebes,
infiltrates the orgiastic cult of the wine-god Bacchus by disguising himself as
a maenad (a dancing female devotee) – only to be torn apart by his own
cult-crazed mother when she mistakes him for a lion.
Yet the learning of sung poetry was central to ancient Greek education.
Poems encoded much cultural information; the epic poetry of Homer in
particular was widely regarded as a storehouse of knowledge, deserving a
1 John of Salisbury, Metalogicon 3.4, translated in Daniel D. McGarry, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury:
A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1955), 167.
2 Metalogicon, Prologue, trans. in McGarry, Metalogicon, 6.
Musical Legacies from the Ancient World 17
central role in the educational process.3 This type of education was associated
with the figures of Apollo (god of the sun, of medical knowledge, and of the
fine arts) and the nine Muses, the daughters of Memory (Mnēmosynē). Each
Muse presided over one of the arts, covering four types of poetry (epic, elegiac,
erotic, hymnic), two types of drama (comedy and tragedy), dance, history
(often transmitted through poems and songs), and astronomy, where the
constellations represented the same mythological gods and heroes that popu-
lated Greek poetry, and the movements of stars and planets were governed by
the same numeric ratios as musical harmony. Thus, learning Greek culture
through the arts of the Muses was a “Muse -ical” activity, giving rise to our
word “music.”4
Philosophy
However, Plato (ca. 428–347 B C E ) strongly objected to an educational culture
based on poetry, since he thought true knowledge could be reached only by
philosophy. Since so much of ancient Greek poetry was about gods and heroes
misbehaving, causing misfortune, acting emotionally and irrationally, most
poetry was not suitable for training the young.5 “Philosophy is the supreme
music,” Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedo (61a), shortly before drinking the
hemlock that ends his life. By that he means that philosophy is the highest
form of learning, superior to the arts of the Muses, although here Socrates is
musing on the strange fact that he had responded to his death sentence by
starting to compose poetry. Thus Plato and other philosophers were more
interested in finding scientific ways to investigate the art of sound than in
poetry, and they did this by pursuing two schools of thought: the study of
acoustics, associated with Pythagoras (ca. 570–ca. 490 B C E ), and the study
of music’s relationship to human behavior, pioneered by Damon of Athens
(fifth century B C E ).
Pythagorean Acoustics No writings survive from Pythagoras himself. But

according to his followers, the Pythagoreans, music was a branch of
3 Hence it is called “The Homeric Encyclopedia” in Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 1963, 1982), 61ff. See also Gregory Nagy, “Early Greek Views of Poets and Poetry,” in The
Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. I : Classical Criticism, ed. George A. Kennedy (Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 1–77.
4 Music and the Muses: The Culture of “Mousikē” in the Classical Athenian City, ed. Penelope Murray and Peter
Wilson (Oxford University Press, 2004). Claude Calame, The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece, trans.
Janice Orion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
5 Andrew Barker, Greek Musical Writings, vol. I : The Musician and His Art, Cambridge Readings in the
Literature of Music (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 124–27; G. R. F. Ferrari, “Plato and Poetry,” in
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, I : 92–148. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture,
vol. I I : In Search of the Divine Centre, trans. Gilbert Highet (Oxford University Press, 1943, 1971), 211–30.
string lengths
2:1 diapason (“through all [the strings]”) = octave
3:2 diapente (“through five [strings]”) = perfect fifth
4:3 diatessaron (“through four [strings]”) = perfect fourth
9:8 tonus (“tone”) = whole step
Figure 1.1 Pythagorean ratios for the most important intervals, with their
Latinized Greek names, following Boethius, De institutione musica 1.16
mathematics that dealt with the investigation of mathematical ratios.

Pythagoras was said to have discovered that consonant musical intervals
could be calculated using the type of ratio that was called “superparticular” –
that is, the numerator was higher than the denominator by one (i.e., [n+1]/n in
modern algebraic terms). In other words, if one string is twice as long as
another string, the ratio between them is 2:1 ([1+1]/1). Plucking the shorter
string will produce a pitch one octave higher than the pitch produced by
plucking the longer string. We can demonstrate this principle today by pla-
cing a finger exactly in the middle of a violin or guitar string; it sounds an
octave higher than the open string.
However, if one string is only 1½ times longer than the other string,
one could multiply by 2 to produce a ratio of 3:2 ([2+1]/2), called
sesquialtera; the two strings will produce pitches that are a perfect fifth
apart. If the ratio is 4:3 ([3+1]/3, called sesquitertia), the two strings will
sound a perfect fourth apart. The difference between a 3:2 fifth and a 4:3
fourth is, of course, one whole tone, which in Pythagorean tuning has the
ratio of 9:8 ([8+1]/8; sesquioctava), since 3:2 ÷ 4:3 = 9:8 (see Figure 1.1). By
calculating these ratios on a one-stringed instrument known as a monochord
(an instrument “having one string”), a musician could find all the pitches
and intervals needed to perform a piece of music, though they might be
defined differently from the way we think of them today. For example,
the interval corresponding to what we would call a major third was calcu-
lated as one 9:8 whole tone plus another 9:8 whole tone, resulting in a
combination that was known as a ditone (“interval of two tones”). Major and
minor thirds did not really exist conceptually in Pythagorean tuning – one
reason that early medieval polyphony was based on octaves, fifths, and
fourths rather than thirds.
This approach to calculating intervals, using only whole-number frac-
tions, led to some discrepancies that do not trouble us today, since the
tuning of modern keyboard instruments makes adjustments to prevent
them. For example, if we measure out six 9:8 whole tones on a monochord,
the last pitch will be slightly higher than a 2:1 octave from the same starting
pitch would be. The difference is called a comma (“small cut”) in Greek, and
has the unwieldy ratio of 531441:524288. Pythagorean tuning produces
other peculiar intervals smaller than a tone. If we measure a 4:3 perfect
fourth on the monochord, and then measure two 9:8 whole tones from the
same starting pitch, the remaining interval will have a ratio of 256:243 – less
than half a 9:8 tone. It is therefore called a minor (i.e. smaller) semitone, or
in Greek a diesis (“difference”) or leimma (“remnant”). When a minor
semitone is subtracted from a whole tone, what is left is called a major
semitone (9:8 ÷ 256:243 = 2187:2048), or in Greek an apotomē (“cutting off”).
In fact, it is impossible to compute a semitone that is precisely half of a 9:8
whole tone, since a superparticular ratio cannot be divided exactly in half
using whole-number ratios. The difference between a major semitone and a
minor semitone is the Pythagorean comma again (2187:2048 ÷ 256:243 =
531441:524288). Imagine calculating such fractions using only Roman
numerals!6
It was not until the Renaissance, with the availability of Arabic numerals
and the decimal point, that advances in the construction of keyboard and
fretted instruments made it possible to develop more sophisticated tuning
systems, such as just intonation, mean-tone temperament, and (more recently)
equal temperament, in which all intervals except the octave are slightly dis-
torted, to avoid Pythagorean microtones and to enable transposition and
modulation into any key. What ancient musicians were trying to compute
with their Pythagorean ratios, however, were not merely keys or scales or
modes, but a grand harmonia, literally a “framework” or attunement, in which
all the various components are interconnected like the beams of a house or a
6 For the main early Pythagorean writings, see Andrew Barker, Greek Musical Writings, vol. I I : Harmonic
and Acoustic Theory, Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Music (Cambridge University Press, 1989),
28–52.
ship. An interval, a ratio, or a scale could be considered an example of

harmonia, but harmonia itself was a concept larger than music.7 The same
mathematical ratios could be detected in other natural phenomena, such as
the movements of the stars and planets studied by astronomers. Hence the
entire cosmos could be thought of as a kind of “music of the spheres,” a
harmonious whole in perpetual but predictable motion, even though the
resulting “music” could not be heard by human ears.8
Again, in ancient medicine, the physical and mental health of each human
being was thought to be determined by the balance of fluids (which in ancient
medicine were called humors) in the body. This allowed people to be categor-
ized by temperament or disposition, good or bad humor, and vestiges of this
idea still survive in our language today. According to the ancient medical
authority Hippocrates (ca. 450–ca. 380 B C E ), people with a high ratio of
blood (sanguis in Latin) would be sanguine, with a ruddy complexion and a
confident, hopeful outlook on life. Those with too much choler or yellow bile
would be choleric or bilious: thin, ill-tempered and prone to anger, with a
sallow or jaundiced complexion. Excessive phlegm would make people phleg-
matic: calm, imperturbable, even sluggish, overweight, and apathetic.
Melancholy people were dominated by black bile (melancholia in Latinized
Greek), making them introspective, sad, pessimistic. Such imbalances could
be affected by medical treatments and by natural factors, such as the changing
seasons.9 Thus Pythagorean science covered much more than music as we
think of it.
Musical Ēthos The rhythmic and melodic features that characterize different
kinds of music can help represent emotional states. Therefore, in accordance
with the Platonic theory of mimēsis (that art imitates nature) music can have a
positive or negative effect on human feeling and behavior. Music was there-
fore a subject that interested ancient philosophers thinking about ēthos (“cus-
tom” or “habit”), from which Aristotle derived the term “ethics.” Plato traced
the study of musical ethics back to Damon of Athens. Military music, for
instance, could make people feel more brave, warlike, and patriotic, while
laments would make a person sorrowful. Music played in “slack” tunings (i.e.,
relatively loose strings) could produce slackers, by encouraging indolence and
7 Thomas J. Mathiesen, “Problems of Terminology in Ancient Greek Music: ῾A P M O N Í A ,” in Festival

Essays for Pauline Alderman, ed. Burton Karson (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1976), 3–17.
8 Kathi Meyer-Baer, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death: Studies in Musical Iconology (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1970). Flora R. Levin, Greek Reflections on the Nature of Music (Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
9 R. J. Hankinson, “Philosophy of Nature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galen, ed. R. J. Hankinson
(Cambridge University Press, 2008), 210–31, esp. 217–25.
moral laxness.10 Other musical features could be characterized as “mascu-

line,” “feminine,” or in between.11 Since every musical performance had a
certain character or ēthos that could influence – for good or ill – the behavior
of those who heard or performed it, philosophers who were concerned about
the education of youth and the future of society were often inclined to
advocate that certain kinds of music be banned.12 On the other hand, there
is still much to be learned about the practical background for such thinking –
the ways music was actually employed in military, theatrical, legal and court
ceremonial, which often involved the playing of instruments, dancing or
marching by choirs, or competitions akin to athletic contests.13 The Greek
chorus of young men or women, in fact, was not only an essential element of
classical drama, but also functioned as a kind of educational institution.14
Roman Learning
The elite, educated culture of the Roman empire was largely the transplanted
learning of classical Greece, which Roman armies had conquered in the
second century B C E . Educated Romans could read and speak Greek, and
therefore most academic disciplines studied in Latin were profoundly shaped
by Greek knowledge. Even the study of Latin grammar and poetry was heavily
indebted to Greek grammatical and poetic theory. The major exception was
probably the study of law, in which the Romans had always excelled. By the
fifth century C E , however, the Roman empire was beginning to break up
politically under pressure from the barbarian invasions. The knowledge of
Greek was becoming increasingly rare in the West, and the few scholars who
still knew both languages did what they could to preserve Greek knowledge
by preparing Latin translations, paraphrases, and commentaries. Information
about the “music of the spheres,” for example, was preserved by commen-
taries on a partial Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus and on the Somnium
Scipionis (“Scipio’s Dream”) – a section of Cicero’s rewrite of Plato’s
Republic.15 St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), one of the most important
10 Barker, Greek Musical Writings, I : 127–85.

11 Thomas J. Mathiesen, “Harmonia and Ethos in Ancient Greek Music,” Journal of Musicology 3 (1984),
264–79.
12 Francesco Pelosi, Plato on Music, Soul and Body, trans. Sophie Henderson (Cambridge University Press,
2010).
13 On musical competitions see Jennifer Neils et al., Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient
Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
14 Claude Calame, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Role, and Social
Functions, new ed., trans. Derek Collins and Janice Orion (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001).
15 Platonis Timaeus interprete Chalcidio cum eiusdem commentario, ed. Ioh. Wrobel (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner,
1876; reprint ed., Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1963). Favonii Eulogii Disputatio de somnio Scipionis,
ed. Alfred Holder (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1901). Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, Commentarium
in somnium Scipionis, ed. Franciscus Eyssenhardt, in Macrobius (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1868),
Latin Church Fathers, did not know Greek well, but in his book De Musica
(“On Music”) he described the meters of classical Latin poetry and song,
which were derived from Greek poetry.16 Martianus Capella (fifth century),
in his allegorical poem On the Nuptials of Philology and Mercury, paraphrased
Greek texts on the most essential pedagogical disciplines, which became
known as the seven liberal arts.17
Four of these arts – arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy – were
considered essentially mathematical, and were therefore grouped together
and called the quadrivium (“the crossroads of four paths”) by Anicius
Manlius Severinus Boethius (died about 525). A high-ranking official in the
court of the barbarian king Theodoric, and probably the last man in Europe
who was equally at home in both Latin and Greek, Boethius may have planned
to produce Latin paraphrases of Greek textbooks on all four subjects.
Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to complete such an ambitious
project. Imprisoned because his facility with Greek raised political suspicions,
he spent his time while awaiting execution by writing The Consolation of
Philosophy, on the interesting question of whether or not life is fair.18 But
his unfinished treatise De Institutione Musica19 paraphrases some important
Pythagorean texts, not all of which survive in Greek; it therefore became the
most important music theory text of the Latin Middle Ages. Before long, the
other three liberal arts described by Martianus – basically verbal rather
than mathematical – were grouped into the trivium (“three paths”): grammar
465–652. Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William
Harris Stahl, Records of Western Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
16 Aurelius Augustinus, De Musica, ed. in PL, vol. X X X I I : 1081–194. Aurelii Augustini, De Musica, ed.
Giovanni Marzi (Florence: Sansoni, 1969). Aurelius Augustinus, De musica liber V I : A Critical Edition with a
Translation and an Introduction, ed. Martin Jacobsson, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis: Studia Latina
Stockholmiensia 47 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2002). English translation by Robert
Catesby Taliaferro in The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, ed. Ludwig Schopp et al., Writings of
Saint Augustine 2 (New York: CIMA Publishing, 1947), 151–379. Richard R. La Croix, ed., Augustine on
Music: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, Studies in the History and Interpretation of Music 6
(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988).
17 Annotated translation by William Harris Stahl and Richard Johnson, Martianus Capella and the Seven
Liberal Arts, 2 vols., Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies 84 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1971). James Willis, ed., Martianus Capella (Leipzig: Teubner, 1983). Mariken Teeuwen, Harmony
and the Music of the Spheres: The “ars musica” in Ninth-Century Commentaries on Martianus Capella,
Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 30 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2002).
18 Sam Barrett, The Melodic Tradition of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae in the Middle Ages, 2 vols.,
Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi Subsidia 7 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013).
19 Anicii Manlii Torquati Severini Boetii De institutione arithmetica libri duo, De institutione musica libri quinque,
Accedit Geometria quae fertur Boetii, ed. Godofredus Friedlein (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867), 177–371. English
translation by Calvin Bower as Fundamentals of Music, Music Theory Translation Series (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1989). Michael Bernhard, Wortkonkordanz zu Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, De
institutione musica, Veröffentlichungen der Musikhistorischen Kommission 4 (Munich: Bayerische
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1979). Michael Bernhard and Calvin M. Bower, eds., Glossa maior in
institutionem musicam Boethii, 4 vols., Veröffentlichungen der Musikhistorischen Kommission 9–12
(Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1993–2011).
(the basic structure of language), rhetoric (the art of composing persuasive

texts), and dialectic or logic (the construction of true arguments and the
disproof of false ones). The trivium and quadrivium became the basis of the
medieval curriculum, preparatory to the study of theology, the most impor-
tant subject of all.
The man who succeeded to Boethius’ old job at court was the politically
more pliable Cassiodorus Senator (died about 585). Thus he lived long enough
to retire to his private estate in southern Italy, with a large library he had once
hoped would support the founding of a Christian university in Rome. His
book Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, which describes the texts in this
library, became the most important source of bibliographical information in
the medieval period, and gives us some information about the contents of
Latin and Greek music theory treatises that have not survived.20 Isidore of
Seville (died 636), who did not know Greek, assembled and defined in his
Etymologies21 many technical terms, including musical terms, which he found
through his wide reading of Latin texts and translations. The Etymologies thus
became the most important early medieval lexicon.
It was during the “Carolingian Renaissance” of the ninth century that the
works of Boethius, Cassiodorus, Isidore and other Latin writers began to be
studied seriously by musicians seeking to improve the pedagogy of Gregorian
chant, the liturgical music of the medieval Western Church, even though
Gregorian chant was very different from the ancient Greek music on which
the theory was based. Ancient Greek music theory continued to be studied in
medieval Byzantium – in fact most of the theory texts are preserved only in
manuscripts from the Byzantine period.22 As parts of the Greek-speaking East
succumbed to the Muslim conquest, many Greek pedagogical texts were
translated into Arabic, where they contributed much to the development of
Arab music theory.23 The Latin world had access only to the late-antique Latin
translations until about the twelfth century, when the European discovery of
20 Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937). English transla-
tions by Leslie Webber Jones, An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1946) and James W. Halporn and Mark Vessy, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning
and On the Soul, Translated Texts for Historians 42 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003).
21 Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive originum libri X X , 2 vols., ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1911). The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge
University Press, 2006).
22 Cataloged in Thomas J. Mathiesen, Ancient Greek Music Theory: A Catalogue Raisonné of Manuscripts,
Répertoire International des Sources Musicales BX I (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1988).
23 Amnon Shiloah, The Theory of Music in Arabic Writings (c. 900–1900), 2 vols., Répertoire International
des Sources Musicales BX –BX a (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1979–2003). Max Haas, “Griechische
Musiktheorie in arabischen, hebräischen und syrischen Zeugnissen, Quellen, Literatur,” Vom Mythos zur
Fachdisziplin: Antike und Byzanz, Geschichte der Musiktheorie 2, ed. Konrad Volk et al. (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 635–785. Lois Ibsen al Faruqi, An Annotated Glossary of Arabic
Musical Terms (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).
Arab learning brought Latin translations of Arab writings on music.24 Not

until the revival of classical learning during the Renaissance were large num-
bers of Westerners able to find and read the Greek originals for themselves.
The Latin Transmission of Greek Music Theory

Rhythm and Meter
Since ancient Greek poetry was usually sung, and song was often accom-
panied by dance, the study of poetic and musical rhythms constituted a
single two-tiered subject. The lower tier, the study of rhythm, was about
patterns of long and short syllables, usually in ratios of 2:1 or 3:1 (i.e., a long
syllable had twice or thrice the duration of a short syllable). The length of a
syllable is known (from Latin) as its quantity. A syllable would be long if it
contained a long vowel or a diphthong, or if two or more consonants
separated it from the following vowel. In pedagogical texts, a long vowel
could be marked by a macron or longa (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū), a short vowel by a brachys
or brevis (ă, ě, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ). The Greek names of the best-known rhythmic units are
still well known today: iambic (a short followed by a long, ˇ ˉ ), trochaic
(long, then short, ˉ ˇ ), dactylic ( ˉ ˇ ˇ ), amphibrachic ( ˇ ˇ ˉ ), spondaic ( ˉ ˉ ),
pyrrhic ( ˇ ˇ ), and so on. Each such unit was known as a foot (Greek pous),
since it corresponded to one dance step. A foot or step could be subdivided
into an arsis (“lift,” the “upbeat” when the dancer’s foot was raised) and a
thesis (“placement,” the “downbeat” when the dancer’s foot was placed on
the ground). Hence the thesis was the accented or long syllable within the
foot. When these terms passed into Latin, however, they were reapplied to
the raising and lowering of the vocal melody, rather than the dancer’s foot.
As a result their meanings were somewhat reversed: the arsis was identified
with the strong, loud part at the beginning of the foot (like the downbeat of
a modern measure); the thesis was identified with the weakening and low-
ering of the voice as the singer approached the end of the foot and the next
breath (like a modern upbeat).25
Poetic feet could be grouped into larger units such as a dipody (two feet) or
tripody (three feet), and such units would be further grouped to form the
higher level of organization in this two-tier subject: the meter. Thus, in the
meter known as iambic dimeter, a line of poetry contained two iambic
dipodies, a total of four repetitions of the short-long pattern. A dactylic
hexameter line consisted of six dactylic monopodies: six repetitions of the
24 Don Randel, “Al-Fārābī and the Role of Arabic Music Theory in the Latin Middle Ages,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 29 (1976), 173–88.
25 See the article “arsis” in Lexicon Musicum Latinum Medii Aevi, ed. Michael Bernhard (Munich: Verlag der
Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, C. H. Beck, 1992–2006), vol. I , 126–30.
long-short-short pattern. Hence this type of poetry is known as metrical

(because it is measured by the meters) or quantitative (because it is based on
syllable quantity).26
However, by the time Augustine wrote his De Musica, the long and short
vowels of Latin were no longer being distinguished in ordinary speech (De
Musica 1.1–2.2, 3.3.5). Speakers of Latin were marking the accented syllables
by stress rather than length, as in modern English today. Thus a second type of
poetry developed in the medieval period, called accentual (rather than quan-
titative). From the time of the Venerable Bede27 (died 735) it has also been
called rhythmical (rather than metrical). That is because, though a line of
poetry can still be considered iambic or trochaic if we substitute stress for
length, the complicated rules for eliding or distinguishing syllables at the
metrical level cannot be applied. Therefore this type of poetry can only be
analyzed at the lower, rhythmic level. A thorough understanding of both
quantitative and accentual poetry is therefore essential for understanding
medieval musical rhythm and rhythmic theory.28
Prosody
Ancient grammarians had another way of thinking about word accent.
Speakers of ancient Greek apparently pronounced accented syllables at a
higher pitch than unaccented syllables, so that it could be said Greek had a
pitch accent rather than a stress accent. Since a student had to learn to
distinguish high from low as well as long from short, pedagogical texts
would mark the higher-pitched syllables with an acute accent; its upward
slant visually suggests a rising pitch (á é í ó ú). Unaccented syllables could be
marked with the opposite sign, the grave accent (à è ì ò ù). For some gram-
marians, the acute accent suggested greater length as well as greater height,
which contributed to the ways these accents are used in the modern Romance
languages. Ancient Greek also made use of the circumflex (â ê î ô û), which
combined the acute and grave accents to indicate a pronunciation that began
at a high pitch, then descended. Since only long syllables had sufficient
26 Martin L. West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 129–59. Joan Silva Barris, Metre
and Rhythm in Greek Verse, Wiener Studien, Beiheft 35 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 2011). Felix Budelmann, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric (Cambridge
University Press, 2009). David J. Califf, A Guide to Latin Meter and Verse Composition (London: Anthem,
2002). D. S. Raven, Latin Metre (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998).
27 Trans. and ed. by Calvin B. Kendall in Libri II De arte metrica et De schematibus et tropis: The Art of Poetry
and Rhetoric, Bibliotheca Germanica ser. nov. 2 (Saarbrücken: AQ-Verlag, 1991).
28 Dag Norberg, An Introduction to the Study of Medieval Latin Versification, trans. Grant C. Roti and
Jacqueline de La Chapelle Skubly (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004).
Corpus Rhythmorum Musicum saec. I V – I X . 1: Songs in Non-Liturgical Sources 1, ed. M. P. Bachmann, Sam
Barrett et al. (Florence: Sismel, 2007).
quantity to permit such a pronunciation, the circumflex indicated length as

well (the modern French circumflex has a more complicated origin). Since
marking pitch differences in a text was rather like setting words to song, the
Greek term for this subject was pros ōdia (“to song”), the origin of our English
word prosody. Literal translation into Latin produced the calque ad cantus,
which became accentus, the origin of our word accent.
Hence a fifth-century commentator on the fourth-century grammarian
Donatus wrote that “prosody is a representation of music.”29 His Christian
contemporary Quodvultdeus, a follower of St. Augustine, knew that the
clergy used the accents to practice reading the Bible in church services; there-
fore he could describe the ceremonial reading of the Bible as “the delight of
musicians: you have the organ [formed] out of the diverse pipes of the holy
apostles and teachers of all the churches, furnished with certain accents –
grave, acute, and circumflex – which that musician, the Spirit of God, touches,
fills, and resounds through the Word.”30 The reference to the organ is
metaphorical, since pipe organs were not then being used for church music,
but only in outdoor theatres.31 However, readers did use accent marks to
guide the oral proclamation of texts. In fact the acute, grave, and circumflex
accents fell within a larger category of grammatical and punctuation signs that
were known in Latin as notae, some of which had performative or quasi-
musical significance. For example, the apostrophe could signal the weakening
sound of a dropped syllable; the question mark implied the trembling rising
pitch with which we ask a question. The musical potential of such markings
was already recognized in the first century.32
About the ninth century, therefore, the accents and certain other notae
provided the inspiration for several systems of neumes, which constituted the
first real music notation to be developed during the Middle Ages. The Greek
word neuma means “sign” in the sense of “gesture” or “command” (from a
verb meaning “to nod”), not “sign” in the sense of “written mark” (for which
there are other words); this suggests the dynamic, gestural, performed quality
of what the neumes signify. In the Latin West, “neuma” was often confused
29 “musica. . . cuius imago prosodia.” [Sergii,] Explanationum in Artem Donati Libri II, ed. Heinrich Keil,
Grammatici Latini 4 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1864), 486–565; see 531 lines 24–25.
30 Liber Promissionum et Praedictorum Dei: De Gloria Regnoque Sanctorum Capitula 13.15, 17–18, ed. R.
Braun in Opera Quodvultdeo Carthaginiensi Episcopo Tributa, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 60
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), 220; 221–22.
31 West, Ancient Greek Music 114–18, 380–81. Thomas J. Mathiesen, Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music and Music
Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Publications of the Center for the History of Music Theory and
Literature 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 225–30.
32 Thus the Roman orator Quintilian (C E 35 – after 96) could say “musicis notis cantica excipiat” (“Let
him draw out songs from musical notes”: Institutio Oratoria 1.12.14). Quintilian, The Orator’s Education:
Books 1–2, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library 124 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 250.
with the similar-looking Greek word pneuma, which can mean “spirit,”
“wind,” or “breath” (as in “pneumonia”); “pneuma” thus was applied to a
wordless melisma that could be sung in one breath. But this meaning of
“pneuma” had nothing to do with the original meaning of “neuma.”
Multiple systems of neumes developed in both the Greek and Latin worlds,
and in both languages the earliest surviving fully neumated manuscripts date
from the tenth century. Somewhat later we also find neumes in Slavonic,
Armenian, and Georgian manuscripts.33 Even though many of these systems
share some common signs, notably the acute accent, they cannot all be traced
back to a single original system.34 Some systems of neumatic notation use a
relatively large number of signs, while others use only a few signs but combine
them in a wide variety of ways, as the circumflex combines acute and grave.
Intermediate between neumatic music notation and the grammatical/punc-
tuating notae are the ekphonetic neumes we find in many Greek manuscripts
of the Bible.35
Harmonics
The most highly developed part of ancient Greek musical thought dealt with
the organization of musical pitch, which was based on the method of tuning
the kithara and other instruments of the lyre family. In these instruments the
33 Christian Troelsgård, Byzantine Neumes: A New Introduction to the Middle Byzantine Musical Notation,
Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae: Subsidia 9 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculum Press, 2011). Johann von
Gardner and Erwin Koschmieder, eds., Ein handschriftliches Lehrbuch der altrussischen Neumenschrift,
Abhandlungen der Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Neue
Folge 57, 62, 68 (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, in Kommission bei der C.
H. Beck’schen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1963, 1966, 1972). Miloš Velimirović, “Evolution of Byzantine
Musical Notation in Russia,” Studi di musica bizantina in onore di Giovanni Marzi, ed. Alberto Doda, Studi e
testi musicali: Nuova serie 6 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1995), 29–32. Nicolas Schidlovsky, ed.,
Sticherarium Palaeoslavicum Petropolitanum, 2 parts, Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae 12 (Copenhagen: C. A.
Reitzel, 2000). Robert At’ayan, The Armenian Neume System of Notation, trans. Vrej Nersessian (Richmond:
Curzon, 1999). Aram Kerovpyan, Manuel de notation musicale arménienne moderne, Musica Mediaevalis
Europae Occidentalis 2 (Tutzing: H. Schneider, 2001).
34 The proposals made in Constantin Floros, Universale Neumenkunde, 3 vols. (Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe:
Bärenreiter, 1970) have not attained wide acceptance. Reviews include: Wolfgang Krueger in German
Studies 6 (1971), 69–75; Miloš Velimirović in Journal of the American Musicological Society 25 (1972), 479–83;
Michel Huglo in Revue de Musicologie 58 (1972), 109–112. On the Latin traditions see Michel Huglo, “Bilan
de 50 années de recherche (1939–1989) sur les notations musicales de 850 à 1300,” Acta Musicologica 62
(1990), 224–259. Kenneth Levy, Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1998) esp. 82–140.
35 Jørgen Raasted and Christian Troelsgård, eds., Paleobyzantine Notations: A Reconsideration of the Source
Material (Hernen: A. A. Bredius Foundation, 1995). Christian Troelsgård and Gerda Wolfram, eds.,
Paleobyzantine Notations II: Acta of the Congress Held at Hernen Castle, the Netherlands, in October 1996
(Hernen: A. A. Brediusstichting, 1999). Gerda Wolfram, ed., Paleobyzantine Notations III: Acta of the
Congress Held at Hernen Castle, the Netherlands, in March 2001 (Leuven: Peeters, 2004). The major publica-
tion on ekphonetic neumes is Carsten Höeg, Günther Zuntz, and Sysse Gudrun Engberg, eds.,
Prophetologium 1–2, 8 vols., Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae: Lectionaria 1 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard,
1939–81). Christian Hannick, ed., Rhythm in Byzantine Chant: Acta of the Congress Held at Hernen Castle in
November 1986 (Hernen: A. A. Bredius Foundation, 1991).
strings are attached to a sound box at the bottom, and extend vertically up to a
horizontal bar held up by two vertical arms. The classical Greek kithara had
seven strings, and thus could only play about an octave (see Figure 1.2),
though Boethius reproduces Greek accounts of ancient innovators who
added an eighth, ninth, tenth, and even an eleventh string (De Institutione
Musica 1.20).36
The kithara strings could be tuned many different ways, however, and the
theory of harmonics determined the possibilities. A hypothetical musical
space, extending as far as two octaves, was divided into tetrachords or series
of four pitches (tetrachordon actually means “having four strings”). The two
outermost notes of every tetrachord were a perfect fourth apart, but the
placement of the two intermediate notes could vary, so that there were
basically three types of tetrachord (see Figure 1.3). Each type is known in
Latin as a genus (plural genera). In a tetrachord of the diatonic genus, there
were two descending whole tones followed by a half step, or rather a minor
semitone; this could be represented by the modern pitch classes A-G-F-E or
E-D-C-B. The tetrachord of the chromatic genus began with a trihemitone,
equal to three half steps or a minor third, followed by two minor semitones;
it could be represented by the modern pitch classes A-G[-F-E. At the top of
the enharmonic genus was a ditone or major third, with two quarter tones
beneath it. This could be represented as A-F\-F (a quarter tone flat)-E.
Medieval music, however, made exclusive use of the diatonic genus; not
until the Renaissance did composers begin to explore the other two
genera.37
There were two ways to align tetrachords so that they formed a larger
musical space: the Greater Perfect System and the Lesser Perfect System.38
In either case the kithara player apparently began tuning with the pitch in the
middle of the range, known in Greek as mesē (“middle [string]”). The tetra-
chord that descended from mesē (which could be represented a-G-F-E) was
therefore known as the “tetrachord of the middles” (mesōn), since it consisted
of the pitches in the middle of the System (see Figure 1.4). The note below
mesē (G) was called lichanos mesōn, “the forefinger of the middles,” apparently
because the kithara player would put his forefinger (index finger) on the string
36 See also Martha Maas and Jane McIntosh Snyder, Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 53–78.
37 For attempts to reconstruct the ancient Greek tuning of the genera, see John C. Franklin, “Hearing
Greek Microtones” and Stefan Hagel, “Twenty-Four in Auloi: Aristotle, Met. 1093b, the Harmony of the
Spheres, and the Formation of the Perfect System,” in Ancient Greek Music in Performance: Symposion Wien
29. Sept.–1. Okt. 2003, ed. Stefan Hagel and Christine Harrauer, Wiener Studien Beiheft 30 (Vienna:
Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005), 9–50, 51–91.
38 On the historical evolution of these Systems, see Stefan Hagel, Ancient Greek Music: A New Technical
History (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Figure 1.2 In this unusually detailed picture of a young kitharode (a person

who sings to the kithara), the musician’s head is thrown back as his mouth
opens in song. He wears a crown of laurel leaves, indicating that he has just
won a musicians’ competition. That probably means that this particular
amphora, filled with wine, olive oil, or some other valuable commodity, was
given away as the prize. In fact the old man depicted on the other side of the
amphora (not visible here) may represent the judge of the contest. The kithara
has seven strings, which pass over a bridge on the hollow sound box near the
bottom of the instrument, and are attached to a horizontal bar at the top. The
for that note. The next two pitches were called parhypatē or “next to the
highest [string]” (F) and hypatē or “highest [string]” (E), even though, in
pitch, they were really the next to the lowest and the lowest. The reason for
this is that, when the player was tuning the kithara, he held it at an angle away
from his body (see Figure 1.5). In this position the strings that were lowest in
pitch were at the top of the instrument, closest to the player’s face, while the
highest-pitched strings were at the bottom of the instrument, closest to the
ground. This is easier to imagine if we recall that a modern guitar is arranged
the same way, with the low-pitched strings at the top of the instrument, the
high-pitched strings at the bottom, closest to the ground.
To show how tetrachords were combined to form the Greater and Lesser
Perfect systems, it is convenient to represent mesē as equivalent to the modern
pitch A below middle C, but this should not be taken to imply that mesē was
set to or near 220 Hz. The ancient world had no way to calculate absolute
pitch. Thus in figures 1.6 and 1.7, the lower octave A–G is shown in upper-
case letters, the higher one in lower-case, as a way to distinguish the two, but
without implying correspondence to the Helmholtz or any other modern
Caption for Figure 1.2 (cont.)

handles to the right and left of the bar apparently permitted the player to
loosen the strings when the kithara was put away after playing. The player’s
left hand can be seen behind the strings, with his index finger (lichanos) on the
third string from the left. That might mean that the fourth string was mesē, in
which case the mode would be Dorian (see Table 1.1). If so, it could be
significant that, on the tuning bar, there seems to be a slight space between
the third and fourth strings, as if dividing the seven strings into groups of
three (the hypatōn tetrachord?) and four (the mesōn tetrachord?). Beneath the
young man’s thumb we can see part of the colored strap that is wrapped
around his left wrist and attached to the right side of the kithara, where the
upright post that holds the horizontal bar joins the sound box of the instru-
ment. This made it easier for him to hold up the kithara while playing, but it
also suggests that he could not move his left hand very much. On the contrary,
the right hand could move freely, plucking the strings with a plectrum, which
is attached to the kithara by a cord to prevent loss. Attic red-figure amphora,
attributed to the Berlin Painter, ca. 490 B C E . The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, NY, USA. Fletcher Fund, 1956 (56.171.38). Image copyright
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Image
Reference: ART322669
diatonic genus
a
tone <
G
tone <
F
semitone <
E
chromatic genus
a
trihemitone (= 3 semitones) <
G
semitone <
F
semitone <
E
enharmonic genus
a
ditone (= 2 tones) <
F
quarter tone <
F (F half flat)
quarter tone <
E
Figure 1.3 The genera: three types of tetrachords, after Boethius, De institu-
tione musica 1.21
Greek name translation modern pitch letter
mese “middle” a
lichanos “forefinger” G
meson
(“of the parhypate “next to the highest” F
middles”)
hypate “highest” E
Figure 1.4 The tetrachord of the middle pitches (mesōn)
system of pitch notation. The mesōn tetrachord is now shown as a-G-F-E. The
tetrachord below it, though lower in pitch than the mesōn, was known as “the
tetrachord of the highest [strings],” hypatōn, because it was played on the
strings at the top of the instrument (see Figures 1.6 and 1.7). Since hypatōn
was a conjunct tetrachord, its highest note was the same as the lowest note of
Figure 1.5 A kithara player tunes his instrument. He holds it in tuning

position, with the low-pitched strings close to his face (and therefore “high-
est”) and the high-pitched strings nearer to the ground. Since we are now
looking at the left side of the kithara (instead of the right side as in Figure 1.2),
the wrist strap for holding up the instrument can clearly be seen. With his
right hand, the musician turns the tuning bar at the top of the instrument, to
adjust the tension of the strings. Eye Cup, ca. 520 B C E . Attributed to Psiax
(Greek). Red-figure terracotta; diameter: 6.4 cm (2½ inches); overall: 11.2 ×
33.6 cm (4⅜ × 133/16 inches). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the
J. H. Wade Fund 1976.89
nete “bottom” d
paranete “next to bottom” c

synemmenon
(“of the trite “third” b
conjuncts”)
mese “middle” a
meson
middles”)
lichanos “forefinger” D
hypaton
(“of the parhypate “next to the highest” C
highests”)
hypate “highest” B
proslambanomenos “added on” A
Figure 1.6 The Lesser Perfect System, showing the middle tetrachord with
the “highest” tetrachord below, and the conjunct tetrachord above
the mesōn tetrachord, hypatē mesōn, “the highest of the middles” (E). Below
that was lichanos hypatōn, “the forefinger of the highest [tetrachord]” (D),
parhypatē hypatōn “next to the highest [string] of the highest [tetrachord]”
(C), and hypatē hypatōn, “the highest [string] of the highest” (B). An extra note
was added below that, called proslambanomenos or “added on” (A) to complete
the octave with mesē.
Above the mesōn tetrachord, there were two ways to proceed, depending
on whether the next tetrachord was conjunct or disjunct. In the synēmmenōn or
tetrachord “of the conjuncts” (see Figure 1.6), the lowest note was mesē (a),
and the note above that (b[) was called tritē or “third,” i.e., the third string
counting from the highest pitch in the tetrachord. Above tritē was paranētē or
“next to the bottom [string]” (c) and nētē “bottom [string]” (d), even though
these lowest strings on the physical instrument were actually the highest in
pitch. The three tetrachords hypatōn, mesōn and synēmmenōn formed the
Lesser Perfect System, illustrated in Figure 1.6. However, if the tetrachord
above mesōn was disjunct (see Figure 1.7), the diezeugmenōn or tetrachord “of
the disjuncts” began with the note above mesē, called paramesē or “next to the
middle [string]” (b\), with tritē above that (c), then paranētē (d) and nētē (e).
Beyond diezeugmenōn was another tetrachord, the hyperbolaiōn or tetrachord
nete “bottom” a1
paranete “next to bottom” g

hyperbolaion
(“of the trite “third” f
additionals”)
nete “bottom” e
paranete “next to bottom” d

diezeugmenon
(“of the trite “third” c
disjuncts”)
paramese “next to the middle” b
mese “middle” a
meson
middles” )
lichanos “forefinger” D
hypaton
(“of the parhypate “next to the highest” C
highests”)
hypate “highest” B
proslambanomenos A
Figure 1.7 The Greater Perfect System, showing the middle tetrachord with
the “highest” tetrachord below, and the disjunct and additional tetrachords
above
“of additionals.” Being conjunct, it included nētē diezeugmenōn, “the bottom

[string] of the disjuncts” (e), then ascended through tritē hyperbolaiōn, “the third
[string] of the additionals” (f), paranētē hyperbolaiōn, “next to the bottom
[string] of the additionals” (g), and nētē hyperbolaiōn, “the bottom string of
the additionals” (a1). This produced the Greater Perfect System of two octaves
or fifteen pitches (Figure 1.7).
A kithara could not cover fifteen pitches, however, because it did not have
enough strings. But the performer could choose to play any portion of the
two-octave range by setting mesē to any string, and then tuning either the
Greater or Lesser Perfect System from there. Each tuning, therefore, pro-
duced a different octave species or sequence of whole and half steps. Boethius
usually called these tunings modi (“modes”) in Latin, but sometimes toni
(“tones”) or tropi (“tropes”) in Greek; each mode had its own Greek name,
after an ancient Greek tribe that supposedly favored this tuning. A moder-
nized version of Boethius’ table of the modes can be seen in Table 1.1,
translated into the same pitch letters used in Figures 1.6 and 1.7. In
Table 1.1, which assumes the Greater Perfect System, the natural range
from A to a1 has been set to the Dorian mode, so that the mesē can be set
to the fourth string in the middle of the instrument, on the pitch letter a
(marked with an M for mesē). The other modes are produced by setting mesē
to other strings, so that sharps and flats are required to represent the whole
and half steps accurately. But Table 1.1 would have been just as accurate if
the A– a1 range had been set to another mode, such as the Hypodorian a
fourth lower, where Boethius’ table begins.39 The sole purpose of the table
is to show where the half steps are, not to suggest equivalence to modern
pitches. In Table 1.1, therefore, the space between E and e represents the
actual strings of an eight-string kithara, which could be tuned to any of the
eight modes depending on which string is identified as mesē. The notes to
the left and right of the E-e range are merely hypothetical, illustrating the
portions of the Greater Perfect System that are left off the kithara with each
particular tuning or mode.
As the mesē moves up from the fourth string, the Greek tribal names are
Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian. As the mesē moves down, we have the
Hypolydian, Hypophrygian, and Hypodorian at the interval of a fourth below
their counterparts (hypo- means “beneath”). At the other end of the kithara,
since the Mixolydian is a fourth above the Dorian, it can also be called the
Hyperdorian mode (hyper- means “above”). Boethius himself may have added
the Hypermixolydian at the high end, above the Mixolydian, to provide for an
eighth string, even though the octave species is the same as that of the
Hypodorian mode at the low end. It should be understood that, even though
Boethius called these “modes,” they should be thought of as tunings, octave
species, or transpositions rather than scales. The pitches do not have scalar
functions such as tonic or dominant. The mesē is not a final. It was early
medieval Latin theorists who misidentified Boethius’ tribally-named modes
with the very different modal system of Gregorian chant (see below), spawn-
ing a thousand years of confusion from which we still have not yet fully
emerged.40
39 For other modern realizations of Boethius’ table see Calvin M. Bower, “The Modes of Boethius,”
Journal of Musicology 3 (1984), 252–63, esp. 260–61; Harold S. Powers et al., “Mode,” NG2, vol. X V I : 778.
40 The complicated story is now best told in Charles M. Atkinson, The Critical Nexus: Tone-System, Mode,
and Notation in Early Medieval Music, AMS Studies in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Table 1.1 Table of the modes from Boethius, De Institutione Musica 4.16, translated into modern pitch letters. The letter M indicates the pitch
set to mesē. When a box contains two pitch letters, the upper one belongs to the conjunct tetrachord (synēmmenōn), the lower one to the
disjunct tetrachord (diezeugmenōn).
M f g a1
Hypermixolydian E F# G a b c d e f# g a1 b1 c1 d1 e1
Mixolydian or M e[ f g
Hyperdorian D E F G a b[ c d e f g a1 b[1 c1 d1
M d e f#
Lydian C# D# E F# G# a b c# d# e f# g# a1 b1 c#1
M c d e
Phrygian B C# D E F# G a b c# d e f# g a1 b1
M b[ c d
Dorian A B C D E F G a b c d e f g a1
M a b c#
Hypolydian G#1 A# B C# D# E F# G# a# b c# d# e f# g#
M G a b
Hypophrygian F#1 G#1 A B C# D E F# G# a b c# d e f#
M F G a
Hypodorian E1 F#1 G1 A B C D E F# G a b c d e
The Israelite Heritage

Though Christianity arose as one of many sects within late antique Judaism, it
began attracting non-Jewish converts very quickly, setting in motion the
tensions that would eventually lead to a complete separation into two discrete
religions. A recent spate of new research on this topic, under the epithet “the
parting of the ways”41 has found it to be a complex of long-term processes that
varied quite a bit from region to region.42 But among the historical events that
propelled it were the First and Second Jewish Wars (C E 66–70 and 132–35),
when groups of rebels twice failed to overthrow Roman rule and establish
an independent Jewish state centered on Jerusalem. The political turmoil
brought new urgency to the question of who was really Jewish, and
contributed to the decline of most of the Jewish sects that competed with
emergent Christianity – the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and so on.
However, the greatest casualty of the First Jewish War was the Temple of
Herod in Jerusalem, known as the “Second Temple” even though it was
actually the third construction on the site of the original Temple of
Solomon.43 Because this building was the cultic center of the Jewish religion
at the time, this period of Jewish history is often referred to as “Second
Temple Judaism.”44
The Temple
In the Temple, the central acts of worship involved the ritual slaughter and
sacrificing of animals and agricultural products by the priests, who were
descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron. The sacrifices themselves were carried
out in ritual silence, following prescriptions laid out in the Torah of Moses,
41 Probably derived from Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early
Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; 2nd ed. 2008), 61–64.
42 The vast bibliography includes: Stephen Spence, The Parting of the Ways: The Roman Church as a Case
Study, Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion 5 (Leuven: Peeters, 2004); James D. G.
Dunn, ed., Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, AD 70 to 135: The Second Durham-Tübingen Research
Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism (Durham, September 1989) (Grand Rapids, MI: William. B.
Eerdmans, 1999); Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and
Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007).
43 Steven Fine, ed., The Temple of Jerusalem from Moses to the Messiah: In Honor of Professor Louis H. Feldman,
Brill Reference Library of Judaism 29 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Lester L. Grabbe, An Introduction to Second
Temple Judaism: History and Religion of the Jews in the Time of Nehemiah, the Maccabees, Hillel and Jesus
(London: T. & T. Clark, 2010). Timothy Wardle, The Jerusalem Temple and Early Christian Identity,
Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 2. Reihe, 291 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2010). Wayne O. McCready and Adele Reinhartz, Common Judaism: Explorations in Second Temple Judaism
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008).
44 On the literary history see: George W. E. Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature between the Bible and the
Mishnah (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981). Neil S. Hecht et al., eds., An Introduction to the History and
Sources of Jewish Law (Oxford University Press, 2002). For a concise historical summary see Neil S. Fujita, A
Crack in the Jar: What Ancient Jewish Documents Tell Us about the New Testament (New York: Paulist Press,
1986).
Figure 1.8 A bas-relief on the triumphal Arch of Titus, in the Roman Forum
most familiar today as the Pentateuch or first five books of the Bible. At the
end of each sacrifice, the priests would break the silence by blasting silver
trumpets, and the people would kneel down or fall prostrate on their faces. A
psalm would be sung by the Levites, who were descendants of the tribe of
Levi, one of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel and the tribe to which Moses
and Aaron belonged. After the psalm the priests would recite blessings over
the people (Sirach 50:1–21).
The Temple burned down in C E 70 during an attack by the Roman army,
even though (according to the Jewish priest and historian Josephus) the
Roman general Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian, had ordered his troops
not to destroy it, and tried to rally them to put the fire out (Jewish War
6.4.5–7). On the Arch of Titus in the Roman forum, one can still see a relief
depicting the great menorah, the silver trumpets, and other Temple fur-
nishings being carried through the streets of Rome in a triumphant victory
parade (Figure 1.8). Today the site of the Temple is covered by the Dome of
the Rock, one of the holiest shrines in the Islamic world, marking the place
from which Muhammad ascended to Heaven. This situation renders
unthinkable any possibility of either building a new Jewish Temple or
excavating the original one, at what would doubtless be one of the most
fascinating archaeological sites in the world.
The Synagogue
After the Temple’s destruction, scholar/teachers known as rabbis (“masters”)
took over the religious leadership from the priests and Levites. They began a
process of reformulating Judaism so that it centered on the learned study of
the Bible and other texts, rather than the sacrificial cult of the lost Temple.
About C E 200, they produced the Mishnah, the oldest portion of the Talmud,
which remains the basis of most forms of Judaism even today. They forma-
lized and expanded an alternate form of worship based on the chanting of
biblical texts and prayers, which was already being practiced in a type of
building known as a synagogue (a place where people are “brought together”).
Unlike the Temple, which could only exist in one place, however, a synagogue
could be built anywhere, making it possible for Judaism to become a world-
wide religion.45
The oldest regulations for synagogue worship are included in the Talmudic
writings, but the first comprehensive synagogue prayerbook, the Seder Rav
Amram Gaon, dates from the ninth century C E .46 However, the Temple is still
remembered ritually in various ways. The daily and holiday services of the
synagogue are still scheduled at the times when the Temple sacrifices used to
take place, and on some occasions texts are read that describe the Temple
ritual corresponding to the day and time. The shofar or ram’s horn is still
blown on Jewish New Year as it was in the Temple. Except for the shofar,
however, no musical instruments were played in the synagogue before mod-
ern times; the chanting remained purely vocal, and this was interpreted as a
sign of mourning for the lost Temple.47
The Bible
Because Rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism of Mishnah and Talmud, came to
the fore after the destruction of the Temple, it is not the ancestor of
Christianity, but a sibling or cousin. Nor are the Temple and synagogue
rituals the direct ancestors of the Christian liturgy. In fact the leaders of
45 Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2005).
46 For the history of liturgical texts and their study, see: Lawrence Hoffman, “Jewish Liturgy and Jewish
Scholarship,” Judaism in Late Antiquity 1: The Literary and Archaeological Sources, ed. Jacob Neusner,
Handbuch der Orientalistik 1: Der nahe und mittlere Osten 16 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 239–66;
Stefan C. Reif, Judaism and Hebrew Prayer: New Perspectives on Jewish Liturgical History (Cambridge
University Press, 1993); Alistair Stewart-Sykes and Judith Hood Newman, Early Jewish Liturgy: A
Sourcebook for Use by Students of Early Christian Liturgy (Cambridge: Grove Books, 2001).
47 Ruth Langer, To Worship God Properly: Tensions between Liturgical Custom and Halakhah in Judaism (n.p.:
Hebrew Union College Press, 1998), 1–19. James W. McKinnon, “On the Question of Psalmody in the
Ancient Synagogue,” Early Music History 6 (1986), 159–91. James McKinnon, “The Exclusion of Musical
Instruments from the Ancient Synagogue,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 106 (1979–80)
especially 84–85.
each emerging religion deliberately shaped its liturgies so that members of

the other group would be excluded from taking part.48 By the second
century, probably, the majority of Christians no longer had Jewish ancestry,
could not read Hebrew, and lacked first-hand knowledge of Jewish prac-
tices. What Christians did know about Judaism was what they read about in
the Christian Bible, a collection of about seventy-two books (the word
“Bible” comes from biblia, which is Greek for “books”) written by many
authors over as much as 1,000 years. The largest part of the Christian Bible –
the so-called Old Testament – contained Greek or Latin translations of all
the Hebrew and Aramaic texts found in the Jewish Bible, plus about a dozen
other ancient Jewish writings that had been composed in Greek and are not
included in the Jewish Bible. (Today these Greek Jewish writings are also
omitted from most Protestant Bibles, or relegated to an appendix as the
Apocrypha, but they remain in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
Christian Bibles.) Appended to the Old Testament was the much smaller
New Testament, consisting of the earliest writings by Christian authors, all
originally written in Greek.49
In the Bible, the singing of songs is closely connected to prophecy, or the
experience of divine revelation. Listening to or performing songs was one
way a prophet could bring on an enthusiastic or inspired state, enabling him
or her to pronounce messages from God (1 Samuel 16:14–23, 2 Kings 3:1–
20). Prophetic songs that have been preserved in the Bible include the song
of Moses and Miriam at the Red Sea (Exodus 15), the song of Deborah
and Barak (Judges 5), the song of Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel
(1 Samuel 2:1–10), and the song of Jonah while he was trapped inside the
whale (Jonah 2). The Song of the Three Hebrew Children in the Fiery
Furnace (Daniel 3) is one of the Jewish Greek texts found in medieval
Christian (and modern Catholic and Orthodox) Bibles, but not in Jewish
or Protestant Bibles. In Christian tradition, such songs were known as odes
or canticles; they were often collected in a special section at the end of the
Psalter, alongside canticles from the New Testament such as the Magnificat,
Benedictus, Nunc Dimittis and Gloria in excelsis (Luke 1:46–55, 68–79,
2:29–32, 2:14 expanded).
48 Eviatar Zerubavel, “Easter and Passover: On Calendars and Group Identity,” American Sociological
Review 47 (1982), 284–89; Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late
Fourth Century, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983;
repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004); Karl Gerlach, The Antenicene Pascha: A Rhetorical History, Liturgia
Condenda 7 (Leuven: Peeters, 1998); Ruth Langer, Cursing the Christians? A History of the Birkat HaMinim
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
49 On the historical formation of the biblical canon, see Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, The
Canon Debate (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002); Lee Martin McDonald, The Biblical Canon: Its Origin,
Transmission, and Authority, 3rd ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007).
The psalter or book of psalms was by far the most important part of the
Bible for musical purposes. It contains 150 hymns known as psalms, though
the way they are numbered in Latin and Greek Bibles differs from the Hebrew
way of numbering them. Almost all modern English Bibles, whether Catholic
or Protestant, use the Hebrew numbering, but older Catholic Bibles in
English use the Greek-Latin numbering (see Table 1.2).
Many of the psalms are ascribed to King David, who lived about 1000 B C E .
He is thought to have sung them while accompanying himself on a stringed
instrument called the kinnor, a type of lyre.50 Hence the Greek word psalmos,
which originally referred to the twanging sound of a plucked string, but later
came to mean a song accompanied by a plucked-string instrument, was
applied to these texts on the assumption that David performed them that
way. In Christian art, however, David is usually shown playing a more familiar
instrument, such as a harp in western Europe51 (Figure 1.9) or a lute in
Armenia. On the other hand, it is also believed that at least some of the psalms
were sung in the Temple,52 and indeed some of them are attributed to the
Levites Asaph,53 Jeduthun,54 and the sons of Korah.55 The Levitical families
both sang and played a wide variety of instruments, and were said to have been
appointed for this role by David himself (1 Chronicles 16:16–29, 35:1–8).
The Cantillation of the Hebrew Bible

We cannot know what melodies were sung by King David, the Levites or
anyone else in ancient Israel, since we have no music notation from that
period. The melodies of synagogue hymns and prayers were not written
down in staff notation until the nineteenth century, with very few
exceptions.56 However, Hebrew Bible codices (not the scrolls actually
used in the liturgy) traditionally include a system of punctuation signs,
50 1 Samuel 16:16, 23, 18:10–11, 19:9–10; 2 Samuel 22:1–23:7; Psalm 18. Joachim Braun, Music in Ancient
Israel/Palestine: Archeological, Written, and Comparative Sources, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 16–19. Yelena Kolyada, A Compendium of Musical Instruments and Instrumental
Terminology in the Bible, trans. Y. Kolyada and David J. Clark (London: Equinox, 2009), 32–42.
51 Colum Hourihane, ed., King David in the Index of Christian Art (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art,
Princeton University Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University Press, 2002), 391–401.
52 Compare the refrain “his mercy endures forever” in Psalms 106, 107, 118, 136 (English numbers),
with the reports of Temple singing in 1 Chronicles 16:34–41; 2 Chronicles 5:13, 7:3–6; 20:21; Ezra 3:11.
53 Psalms 50 and 73–83; 1 Chronicles 15:17–19, 16:5–7 and 37, 25:1–9; 2 Chronicles 5:12; Ezra 3:10;
Nehemiah 12:46.
54 Psalms 39, 62, 77; 1 Chronicles 25:3–6; 2 Chronicles 5:12, 35:15.
55 Psalms 42, 44–49, 84–85, 87–88; 1 Chronicles 26; 2 Chronicles 20:19. See also Louis Jonker, “Another
Look at the Psalm Headings: Observations on the Musical Terminology,” Journal of Northwest Semitic
Languages 30 (2004), 65–85.
56 Cataloged in Israel Adler, Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources up to circa 1840: A Descriptive and Thematic
Catalogue with a Checklist of Printed Sources, 2 vols., Répertoire International des Sources Musicales BI X 1
(Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1989). See the chronological listing on pp. xlvi–xlix.
Table 1.2 Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and English systems for numbering the 150
psalms. Psalms 1 through 8 and 148 through 150 are the same in all versions.
Psalms 9 and 10 and Psalms 113 through 116 are divided up differently. In most
other cases, the Hebrew/English number is one number higher than the Latin/
Greek number. Thus the Hebrew psalms 11 through 113 are the Greek psalms
10 through 112. The Latin Vulgate numbers were the same as the Greek
Septuagint numbers until the twentieth century, when they were modified
slightly as shown in the “Latin” column below. English Bibles that are
translated from the Vulgate use Vulgate numbers, but the vast majority of
English translations are made from the Hebrew and use the Hebrew numbers.
However, English Protestant translations, unlike those in most other languages,
often treat the first verse or two as unnumbered titles, so that the English verse 1
will be verse 2 or 3 in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and most modern languages.
Greek Latin Hebrew English
1–8 1–8 1–8 1–8

9 9A–9B 9–10 9–10
10–112 10–112 11–113 11–113
113 113A–113B 114–15 114–15
114–15 114–15 116 116
116–45 116–45 117–46 117–46
146–47 146–47 147 147
148–50 148–50 148–50 148–50
some of which are also used to learn how to chant the text. These signs are
part of the Masorah (“transmission”), the apparatus for assuring that the
text is transmitted correctly. For many centuries all Jewish communities
have used the Tiberian Masorah, which dates from about the tenth century
C E , though older manuscripts with different punctuation systems do exist.
Since traditional Hebrew writing indicates only the consonants, the
Tiberian Masoretic signs indicate the vowels, specify aspects of pronuncia-
tion and accentuation, and serve to mark the beginnings and ends of
̣
syntactical phrases. It is the syntactical signs, the te‘amim (from a word
meaning “discern”), that are used to assist the musical rendition, even
though that is not their primary function. The disjunctive t ̣e‘amim indicate
the endings of phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses, where the reader
should pause. The conjunctive signs mark places where the chanter
should not pause but continue, until reaching the next disjunctive sign
(see Figure 1.10). Both disjunctive and conjunctive signs are placed on
accented syllables, so that they have a secondary function of indicating
Figure 1.9 King David strumming a harp, from an early thirteenth-century

lancet window in the north transept at Chartres Cathedral. Even though the
Bible says that David played a kinnor (a lyre-like instrument), the harp was more
familiar to medieval Europeans. A harp has strings that extend from the sound
board or sound box to an arm that extends out at an angle, whereas lyre strings
extend to a horizontal bar held up by two vertical arms. But the fact that this
harp has ten strings does not reflect medieval harp construction, but has a
symbolic meaning instead. The artist was seeking to illustrate the “ten-stringed
psaltery” mentioned in the Latin Vulgate, following the Greek Septuagint:
psaltērion dekachordon (Psalms 32:2, 91:4, 143:9). However, the original
Hebrew term, nevel ‘aśor (Hebrew Psalms 33:2, 92:4 [= English 92:3], 144:9),
may have referred to a zither-like instrument, i.e., one in which the strings
extend horizontally directly over the sound box (Kolyada, Compendium, 29–31;
Braun, Music, 22–24). © 2004, Henri Alain de Feraudy
Sof pasuq (“end of verse”) marks the end of every biblical verse.
Etnahta
. (“pause”) marks the main pause in the middle of each verse.
Tifha
. (“diagonal”) is often the last disjunctive before sof pasuq or etnahta.
Revia (“fourth”) is one of the less important disjunctives.
Zarqa (“scatterer”) is another less important disjunctive.
Munah. (“resting”) is the most common conjunctive sign; it can precede many
of the disjunctive signs.
Merha
. (“lengthener”) often precedes tifha.
.
Dotted circles show the position of the Hebrew letters relative to the te‘amim
. signs.
A sign can occur on any letter.
̣
Figure 1.10 Examples of the more common te‘amim
where the accents are. But at some point in history the practice of reading
the Bible out loud acquired a musical aspect, so that it was more like
singing than speaking. This in-between character is called “cantillation”
in English.
In the most important parts of the Bible, the Torah (i.e., the first five
books), and the excerpts from the prophets that are read in the synagogue
̣
(haftarot), each of the t ̣e‘amim is traditionally associated with a melodic
phrase. These melodies are taught to every Jewish boy (and in some com-
munities now to girls also) in preparation for the Bar Mitzvah ceremony
when, having reached the age of thirteen, he will read the Torah scroll
during the Sabbath service, for the first time as an adult. However, since
the scroll contains only the Hebrew consonants, he must memorize the
t ̣e‘amim and their melodies beforehand, using a manuscript codex or,
nowadays, a printed book. Since the cantillation is complex and requires
considerable ability to memorize, however, most liturgical readings are
performed by a ba‘al-k: eri’ah or master reader, who has made the commit-
ment to learn the tradition thoroughly. The man who is called up from the
congregation to read recites the requisite prayers, then stands nearby as the
master reader cantillates in his place.
̣
Since the te‘amim have a syntactical function and do not of themselves
convey musical information, the melodies associated with them differ from
one Jewish community to another, according to the local oral tradition.57 As a
result it is difficult to know how old the melodies of any particular community
may be. Only in the twentieth century did it become possible to learn
̣
the te‘amim from audio recordings and books with staff notation. And the
̣
te‘amim for the psalms and other books of the Bible, which are not routinely
read in the synagogue, do not even have the same kind of fixed relationship to
corresponding musical formulas that one finds in the Torah.58
Thus there is no way to demonstrate that the melodies sung in the Temple
or the Kingdom of David have survived in the music of any Jewish commu-
nity. Most of the parallels presented in Eric Werner’s well-known book The
Sacred Bridge involve misunderstanding or misinterpretation.59 The scores
and recordings produced by Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura under the title
“The Music of the Bible Revealed” are utterly without historical basis and
60
̣
completely misrepresent the functions of the te‘amim. No less problematic
is the oft-heard supposition that ancient Israelite melodies may have been
preserved in medieval Christian chant, since neither tradition was fixed in
writing until a millennium after the two religions separated. The rapid dis-
appearance of Hebrew knowledge among early Christians, the history of
hostility between the two religions, and the considerable differences between
their liturgies present formidable obstacles to anyone trying to prove that any
57 The Eastern European interpretation of the te‘amim ̣ has a far larger bibliogaphy than any other.
Classic works include: Solomon Rosowsky, The Cantillation of the Bible: The Five Books of Moses (New York:
Reconstructionist Press, 1957); Abraham W. Binder, Biblical Chant (New York: Philosophical Library,
1959); Avigdor Herzog, “Masoretic Accents (Musical Rendition),” in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem:
Encyclopedia Judaica; New York: Macmillan, 1971), X I : 1098–112; Joshua R. Jacobson, Chanting the
Hebrew Bible: The Art of Cantillation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002). For some other
traditions: Avigdor Herzog, The Intonation of the Pentateuch in the Heder of Tunis (Tel Aviv: Israel Music
Institute, 1963); Uri Sharvit, “The Musical Realization of Biblical Cantillation Symbols (T ̣e‘amim) in the
Jewish Yemenite Tradition,” Yuval: Studies of the Jewish Music Research Center 4 ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press of
Hebrew University, 1982), 179–210; Johanna Spector, “Chant and Cantillation,” Musica Judaica 9 (1986–
87), 1–21; Reinhard Flender, Der biblische Sprechgesang und seine mündliche Überlieferung in Synagoge und
Griechischer Kirche, Quellenkataloge zur Musikgeschichte 20 (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1988);
Reinhard Flender, “Die Entzifferung der massoretischen Akzente und der ekphonetischen Notation – ein
Forschungsbericht,” in Musikkulturgeschichte: Festschrift Constantin Floros zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. P. Petersen
(Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1990), 479–90.
58 Reinhard Flender, Hebrew Psalmody: A Structural Investigation, Yuval Monograph Series 9 (Jerusalem:
Magnes Press, 1990).
59 Eric Werner, The Sacred Bridge: The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in Synagogue and Church during
the First Millennium (London: Denis Dobson; New York: Columbia University Press, 1959; with many
reprints). Eric Werner, The Sacred Bridge: The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in Synagogue and Church
during the First Millennium, vol. 2 (London: Dobson; New York: Ktav, 1984). See Peter Jeffery, “Werner’s
The Sacred Bridge, Volume I I : A Review Essay,” Jewish Quarterly Review (1987), 283–98.
60 See my review of Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura, The Music of the Bible Revealed: The Deciphering of a Millenary
Notation, trans. Dennis Webber, ed. John Wheeler (Berkeley, CA: B I B A L Press; San Francisco, CA: King
David’s Harp, 1991) Biblical Archaeology Review 18/4 (July/August 1992), 6.
ancient Israelite melodies have survived in Christian usage. “Ultimately it

must be conceded that there is simply insufficient reliable information avail-
able at present to permit more than general and inconclusive observations
about the relationship between ancient Jewish and early Christian chant in the
first four centuries of the Common Era.”61
On the other hand, melodic similarities have been pointed out between
specific orally transmitted Jewish tunes and certain Christian chants, begin-
ning with the work of Abraham Zwi Idelsohn.62 Such resemblances might be
due to coincidence, to borrowing or imitation during the medieval period or
later, or to a common European or Middle Eastern background. The true
significance of these similarities, if there is any, may eventually emerge as
researchers on Jewish music develop more sophisticated ways of investigating
the history and development of these mostly unwritten traditions.63
The Early Church

Early Christian worship did not develop out of Temple or synagogue ritual,
but from more informal kinds of prayer and Bible study that took place during
the banquets and meetings of Jewish sectarian groups. The best example is the
group known as the Therapeutae, whose practices were described by Philo of
Alexandria (died after C E 40), a Jewish Platonist philosopher who was a
contemporary of Jesus and St. Paul. The common meals of the Therapeutae
included Bible reading and instruction, with the singing of psalms and hymns,
followed by all-night vigils of song and even dance.64 Singing after banquets
was in fact a common practice in the ancient world, among both Jews and
Greeks (cf. Mark 14:26, Matthew 26:30). St. Clement of Alexandria (died about
C E 215) wrote about early Christian dining practices and their accompanying
hymnody, and his book The Pedagogue even ends (3.101.3) with the text of a
61 John Arthur Smith, Music in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Farnham and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2011), 234.
62 Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 31–
34, 42, 47, 55–56, 58–65, 132. Idelsohn’s pioneering and extremely important research on the musical oral
traditions of various Jewish communities is summarized in Jehoash Hirshberg, Music in the Jewish
Community of Palestine 1880–1948: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 11–22; 184–86. The
Abraham Zvi Idelsohn Memorial Volume, ed. Israel Adler, Bathja Bayer, and Eliyahu Schleifer, Yuval: Studies
of the Jewish Music Research Centre 5 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press of Hebrew University, 1986), 15–180;
Hebrew 15–40.
63 Recent examples: Regina Randhofer, “By the Rivers of Babylon: Echoes of the Babylonian Past in the
Musical Heritage of the Iraqi Jewish Diaspora,” Ethnomusicology Forum 13 (2004), 21–45; Sholom Kalib,
The Musical Tradition of the Eastern European Synagogue, 2 vols. in 6 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 2001–05).
64 Peter Jeffery, “Philo’s Impact on Christian Psalmody,” in Psalms in Community: Jewish and Christian
Textual, Liturgical, and Artistic Traditions, ed. Harold W. Attridge and Margot E. Fassler, Society of Biblical
Literature Symposium Series 25 (Leiden: E. J. Brill; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 147–87.
hymn he may have composed himself.65 Like Philo, whose works he knew
well, Clement drew sharp contrasts between the devout, chaste, edifying
meals of his own religious community and the drunken revelry and sexual
antics that characterized so many pagan repasts.66
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered just after World War II, preserve evidence
of the practices of another Jewish sect, which inhabited the monastic building
complex at Qumran until it was destroyed during the First Jewish War. The
library of scrolls, hidden in caves near the Dead Sea for almost 2,000 years,
include many non-biblical psalms and hymns, as well as descriptions of ritual
bathing, communal banquets, and prayer at fixed times of the day and night,
all of which make for interesting comparisons with early Christian texts as
well as with later synagogue worship. The Qumran sect rejected the Jerusalem
Temple, whose priests they saw as corrupt. But many of the Qumran texts,
particularly the hymns, imagine an idealized Temple in Heaven, where perfect
worship was offered by angels – perfect worship that should be imitated by
humans on earth.
After the earthly Temple’s destruction, a comparable idea became popular
in the early Church, namely that human praise and singing imitates the eternal
song of the angels in Heaven (Revelation 4:1–11, 5:6–14, 7:9–12, 11:15–19,
14:2–3, 15:2–5). Thus there were some parallels among early Christian
worship, early synagogue worship, and the worship of Jewish groups like
the Qumran sect: they all remembered a lost Temple that prefigured a more
perfect angelic worship to come. It is this parallelism, not a line of direct
descent from Jewish to Christian worship, that appears to explain most of the
cases where a Christian prayer text seems to be derived or adapted from a
Jewish prayer text.67
65 Clement of Alexandria, Clemens Alexandrinus, vol. I : Protrepticus und Paedagogus, 3rd ed., ed. Otto
Stählin and Ursula Treu, Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1972), 291.
English translation: Clement of Alexandria, Christ the Educator, trans. Simon P. Wood, The Fathers of the
Church: A New Translation (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1954), 276–78. John Anthony McGuckin,
At the Lighting of the Lamps: Hymns of the Ancient Church (Oxford: SLG Press; Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse,
1995), 14–17.
66 James McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 28–36;
1–4.
67 Examples can be found in the following books, though the authors’ theories and interpretations are
debatable: David A. Fiensy, Prayers Alleged to Be Jewish: An Examination of the Constitutiones Apostolorum,
Brown Judaic Studies 65 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985); Stéphane Verhelst, Les traditions Judéo-
Chrétiennes dans la liturgie de Jérusalem: spécialement la Liturgie de saint Jacques frère de Dieu, Textes et
études liturgiques / Studies in Liturgy 17 (Leuven: Peeters, 2003); Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, The Impact of
Yom Kippur on Early Christianity: The Day of Atonement from Second Temple Judaism to the Fifth Century
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); Margaret Barker, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian
Liturgy (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003); Margaret Barker, Temple Themes in Christian Worship (London: T. &
T. Clark, 2007).
Christological Hymns
Informative comparisons can also be made between early Christianity and the
pagan polytheism that was the majority religion of the Roman empire. About the
year 110 C E , Pliny the Younger (ca. C E 61–ca. C E 112), the Roman governor of
Bythinia and Pontus in modern Turkey, wrote a letter to the emperor Trajan
(ruled 98–117), seeking advice on how to prosecute Christians. By interrogating
Christians who had been arrested, Pliny learned that, like Philo’s Therapeutae,
they engaged in two kinds of rites: (1) communal banquets and (2) nocturnal
vigils, at which “they sing with each other spells to Christ, as if to a god.”
Nevertheless Pliny wasn’t entirely sure what the Christians were actually guilty
of; even when tortured they confessed to nothing more than “depraved and
excessive superstition.”68 Still, Pliny’s mention of “spells to Christ” may refer to
what modern scholars call “Christological hymns,” which poetically outline the
main doctrinal beliefs about Christ. Biblical passages like John 1, Philippians 2,
and Colossians 1:15–22 are thought by some to be early examples of such
Christological hymns. In one particularly interesting case, Ephesians 5:14
seems to quote an early hymn, and Clement of Alexandria gives us the rest of
the stanza (see Figure 1.11). The theme of Christ as the sun or light of the world
occurs in several early hymn texts, notably the lamp-lighting hymn Phōs hilaron,
already noted as very old by St. Basil the Great (died 379), and still sung today at
Vespers in the Greek Orthodox Church.69 Another early hymn that survived into
medieval and even modern usage, in both East and West, is Sub tuum praesidium,
the earliest hymn to the Virgin Mary (see Figure 1.11).70 Regrettably none of
their early melodies survive, even though ancient Greeks had a kind of music
notation. The sole exception is a papyrus fragment found at Oxyrhynchus in
Egypt, which preserves the ending of an otherwise unknown Christian hymn
with musical signs above the text.71
68 Pliny the Younger, Epistularum Libri Decem 10.96. A different but full translation by Betty Radice is in
Pliny, Letters and Panegyricus, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library 55; 59 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1969), I I : 285–93. I do not agree with those who say that the “spells to Christ” were sung
antiphonally or in alternation; I have translated secum invicem as “with each other.” For recent biblio-
graphy see Alistair C. Stewart, “The Christological Form of the Earliest Syntaxis: The Evidence of Pliny,”
Studia Liturgica 41 (2011), 1–8.
69 Peter Plank, ΦΩΣ ΙΛΑΡΟΝ: Christushymnus und Lichtdanksagung der frühen Christenheit, Hereditas:
Studien zur Alten Kirchengeschichte 20 (Bonn: Borengässer, 2001). Frieder Schulz, “Lumen Christi: Der
altkirchliche Vespergesang Phos hilaron; Zur westkirchlichen Rezeption: Forschung, Übertragung,
Musikfassung,” Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie 43 (2004), 11–48.
70 Maxwell Johnson, “Sub Tuum Praesidium: The Theotokos in Christian Life and Worship before
Ephesus,” in The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer: Trinity, Christology, and Liturgical Theology, ed. Bryan
D. Spinks (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 243–67.
71 Egert Pöhlmann and Martin L. West, eds. Documents of Ancient Greek Music: The Extant Melodies and
Fragments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 190–94.
1. A hymn quoted in the New Testament and in Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus

9.84.2.
Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead,
and Christ shall give you light [= Eph 5:14],
the sun of the resurrection,
begotten before the morning star [Ps 110:3]
who gives life by his own very rays.
Translation: Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the
Divine Office and its Meaning for Today, 2nd rev. ed. (Collegeville, MN.: Liturgical Press,
1993), 350.
2. Sub tuum praesidium (mid 3rd cent.), the earliest known hymn to the Virgin Mary.
We take refuge in your mercy, O Mother of God.
Do not disregard our prayers in troubling times,
but deliver us from danger,
O only pure one, only blessed one.
Translation adapted from Stephen J. Shoemaker, “Marian Liturgies and Devotion in Early
Christianity,” Mary: The Complete Resource, ed. Sarah Jane Boss (London: Continuum,
2007), 130–45, at p. 130.
3. The Oxyrhynchus hymn (late 3rd cent., named for the place it was found, the only
ancient Christian text with music notation).
. . . Let it be silent
let the luminous stars not shine,
let the winds (?) and all the noisy rivers die down;
and as we hymn the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,
let all the powers add “Amen, Amen.”
Empire, praise always, and glory to God,
the sole giver of all good things. Amen, amen.
Translation: M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford University Press, 1992), 325.
4. Phōs hilaron, hymn for lighting the evening lamps.
O cheerful Light, Jesus Christ,
holy glory of the immortal Father, who is heavenly, holy, blessed!
As we come to the setting of the sun, and behold the evening light,
we hymn the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: God.
Worthy are you in every moment to be hymned by happy voices,
O Son of God, giver of life.
Therefore the cosmos glorifies you.
Figure 1.11 Some early Christian hymn texts
The Post-Nicene Period

Two Types of Worship
With the Edict of Milan in C E 313, Christianity became a legal religion
within the Roman empire. Persecution ended, and the Church held its first
ecumenical (worldwide) council in C E 325, at Nicea near Constantinople.
The council serves as a convenient marker for historians, separating early

Church history into pre-Nicene and post-Nicene periods, with liturgical
and musical practices being much better documented in the latter. By
the end of the fourth century Christianity had become the predominant
religion of the Roman empire, and by then two approaches to Christian
worship had emerged, each with its own kind of music. In twentieth-
century scholarship it became common to refer to these two types as
“cathedral” and “monastic” worship.72
Desert or Monastic Worship Monastic or desert worship, the simpler of the

two kinds, looked back to the practices of the first monks in the Egyptian
desert, where many fourth-century Christians had fled to lead lives of auster-
ity and asceticism – rejecting the lukewarm, superficial and opportunistic
kinds of Christianity that became common once large numbers of people
began converting to the newly official religion.73 In fact, however, monasti-
cism was never limited to the desert, since there were monastic communities
inside the cities as well. The key features of monastic worship were:
(1) It was relatively egalitarian, since the early monks were lay men and
women, not members of the clergy. Differences were based on seniority
rather than clerical rank.
(2) It emphasized memorization of the Bible, especially the psalms and
canticles, to enable constant meditation on these texts, and therefore
their continuous recitation over fixed periods of time. Reciting all 150
psalms in one day or one week became a typical ideal.
(3) It had little use for newly composed hymn texts that were not in the Bible.
Urban or Cathedral Worship The other kind of worship to emerge clearly in

the fourth century might be called “urban,” since it took place in the large
cities, but it is usually called “cathedral” worship, since the cathedral was the
main church in each city, where the chief clergyman, the bishop, had his
throne (Greek kathedra). Urban/cathedral worship differed from monastic
worship because it was intended to include the entire urban community:
clergy, laity, and even monks.74 Thus several features of urban or cathedral
worship distinguished it from desert or monastic worship.
72 Paul F. Bradshaw, “Cathedral and Monastic: What’s in a Name?” Worship 77 (2003), 341–53. Stig
Simeon R. Frøyshov, “The Cathedral–Monastic Distinction Revisited 1: Was Egyptian Desert Liturgy a
Pure Monastic Office?” Studia Liturgica 37 (2007), 198–216.
73 Relevant excerpts in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 51–63.
74 Excerpts from relevant texts in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 75–111.
(1) Cathedral worship was hierarchical, since the lay people were led by the
clergy, headed by the bishop of the city. Below the bishop were the
priests or elders, followed by the deacons, and lower still the minor
orders, including readers, singers, acolytes, exorcists, doorkeepers,
gravediggers, and so on.
(2) Cathedral worship was stational: every Sunday and major feast day, the
bishop and his entourage traveled to one of the churches in the city or the
surrounding area, and there celebrated the services of morning and
evening prayer, as well as the Mass of the day. Over the course of the
year, therefore, a station or round of services would be held at least once
at each of the major churches of the city.
(3) Because of the stational system, urban worship put a lot of emphasis on
marking the passage of time – both the hours of the day and night and the
annual cycle of liturgical feasts and fasts.
(4) Therefore, instead of reciting all the psalms or complete Biblical books
within a fixed space of time, as in monastic worship, the psalms and other
sections of the Bible were chosen to fit the occasion or time of day. Thus
emerged the distinction between ordinary texts (which rarely or never
changed) and proper texts (which were different every day). This in turn
created a need for liturgical books to keep track of when each text needed
to be read or sung.
(5) Urban worship made greater use of non-scriptural songs and hymns than
monastic worship did.
Their Influence on Each Other Though early Christian music cannot be under-
stood without the monastic/urban distinction, it is important to note that
these ideal types were often mixed in practice. Desert monastic communities
that lacked priests of their own would need to go into town to attend Sunday
Mass. Monastic communities located in cities found ways to be included in the
daily and annual cycles of urban stational worship. Then, as late Antiquity
gave way to the Middle Ages, it became more common for monks to be
ordained to the clergy, and for the clergy to adopt monastic practices such
as celibacy and communal life. By the Middle Ages, then, both monk-priests
and ordinary priests celebrated the Mass and the other sacraments, and both
had the obligation (officium) to observe all the daily prayer hours, which
therefore became known as the Divine Office.75
75 Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and its Meaning for
Today, 2nd rev. ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993).
The monastic emphasis on the psalms also came to transform elementary

education. Jewish and Christian authors, like some of the pagan philosophers,
had long been troubled by the fact that children were taught to read from
texts that described the excessive drinking, sexual escapades, and vengeful
violence of the pagan gods. But the need to learn to read the Bible made most
Christians unwilling to give up on literacy altogether. St. Basil of Caesarea
(died 379) tried to strike a balance in his Address to Young Men on Reading Greek
Literature,76 and St. Augustine tried to do the same for Latin readers in his On
Christian Doctrine.77 Monasticism, however, offered a new model, since illiter-
ate novices were required to learn to read and memorize the psalms as part of
their training to become monks. Thus Cassiodorus, in the sixth century, tried
to turn the psalter into an introductory guide to the liberal arts by writing his
Exposition of the Psalms,78 thereby pointing the way to the medieval curriculum
that began the teaching of literacy with the psalms.
For all these reasons, then, every medieval chant tradition, Eastern and
Western, represents some kind of hybrid or synthesis of the two kinds of
worship. In Rome, each of the great basilicas of St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary
Major, and so on was served by one or more monasteries that provided
clergy to the basilica. As a result, a monastic approach prevailed in the
shaping of the Divine Office at Rome, and the non-monastic services of
cathedral worship disappeared almost completely. Both monks and
ordinary clergy shouldered the obligation to recite all 150 psalms every
week, but each group had its own arrangement for distributing the
psalms across the days and hours. The Monastic cursus, outlined in the
sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict (chapters 8–20)79 was used by all mon-
astic orders of Benedictine origin. The Roman cursus was used by diocesan
priests and all non-Benedictine religious orders. In some of the great
Greek-speaking cities, on the other hand, the non-monastic urban rite
lasted much longer than in the West: in Constantinople until the Latin
kingdom of the Crusaders (1204–61), in Thessalonica even up to the
76 Translated by Roy Joseph Deferrari and Martin R. P. McGuire in Saint Basil, The Letters, vol. I V , Loeb
Classical Library 270 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934; with many reprints), 363–435.
77 Ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green in Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
78 Magni Aurelii Cassiodori, Expositio Psalmorum, ed. M. Adriaen, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina
97–98 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1958). Trans. P. G. Walsh in Cassiodorus Senator, Explanation of the Psalms, 3
vols., Ancient Christian Writers 51–53 (New York: Paulist Press, 1990–91).
79 The best edition, with extensive commentary, is Adalbert de Vogüé and Jean Neufville, eds., La Règle
de saint Benoît, 7 vols., Sources Chrétiennes 181–86 [no series number for vol. 7] (Paris: Cerf, 1971–72;
1977). The best English translations for historical research purposes are: Terrence G. Kardong, Benedict’s
Rule: A Translation and Commentary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996); Timothy Fry, ed., RB 1980:
The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981). The latter
includes [Nathan Mitchell,] “The Liturgical Code in the Rule of Benedict,” 379–414.
fifteenth-century Ottoman conquest.80 Inevitably it was the monks who

took on the task of rebuilding, but the Byzantine monastic office included
more “cathedral” elements than the Latin Monastic and Roman cursus did.
These “cathedral” elements came from the urban rite of Jerusalem, where
the Greek-speaking Christian community had been under Arab Muslim
rule since the year 637.
The Liturgical Tradition of Jerusalem

It is in fact in the early liturgy of Jerusalem, Christianity’s holy city, that we can
see the emergence of urban worship most clearly, while learning something
about early monastic worship as well. Information begins in the fourth century,
with the Greek sermons of the city’s bishop, St. Cyril of Jerusalem (died 387).81
A particularly important source, though it survives in only one manuscript with
several missing pages, is the travelogue or Itinerarium written by Egeria, a Latin
nun from somewhere in Spain or southern France, who wrote up her experi-
ences in order to share them with her sisters back home. One of the very few
early Christian texts known to have been composed by a woman, it originally
included a description of the entire liturgical year as she herself observed it in C E
381–83.82 Jerusalem was probably the place where stational liturgy originated:
on every holiday, whether the celebration commemorated Jesus’ birth or death,
the Raising of Lazarus, the Last Supper, the Ascension, the martyrdom of
St. Stephen or whatever else, the people and the clergy traveled to the exact
location where (according to local memory) the original event had taken place.
And, as Egeria frequently marveled, all the texts of the readings and the psalms
were chosen to match both the day and the place.83
The early liturgical books from Jerusalem are among the oldest extant
Christian liturgical sources, but for the most part they survive in translations,
not the original Greek. Because the fifth-century church of Armenia decided
to adopt the Jerusalem rite for its own use, early Armenian manuscripts
faithfully preserve the calendar of readings and responsorial psalms used in
80 Oliver Strunk, “The Byzantine Office at Hagia Sophia,” Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 112–50. St. Symeon of Thessalonike, The Liturgical Commentaries, trans. and
ed. Steven Hawkes-Teeples (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010). St. Symeon of
Thessalonike, Treatise on Prayer: An Explanation of the Services Conducted in the Orthodox Church, trans. H. L.
N. Simmons (Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1984).
81 Edward Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem (London: Routledge, 2000). Alexis James Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem,
Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses, Patristic Monograph Series 17 (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 2001). Jan Willem Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City,
Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 72 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
82 Egérie: Journal de Voyage (Itinéraire), ed. Pierre Maraval, Sources Chrétiennes 296 (Paris: Cerf, 1982).
Translated in John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, 3rd ed. corrected (Oxford: Aris & Phillips; Oxbow Books,
2006). On the date, see 35–45, 169–71.
83 Some excerpts in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 111–17.
fifth-century Jerusalem, even though no Greek MSS are known. A similar

transplantation into Georgia occurred in the eighth century, producing
Georgian translations of the entire annual cycle of Jerusalem hymns, along
with much other material.84 However, Greek liturgical texts from Jerusalem
recently turned up in manuscripts discovered at Mount Sinai in Egypt, which
have barely begun to be investigated.85 From what we already know, though,
it is possible to see that, although only Armenia and Georgia adopted the
Jerusalem rite wholesale, many other liturgical traditions throughout the
Christian world were partly shaped by influences and borrowings from
Jerusalem. The most important of these borrowings was the Oktōēchos, the
eight musical “church modes” that govern Gregorian chant and many, but not
all, of the Eastern chant traditions.
The Eight Church Modes

One of the most impressive services in the rite of Jerusalem was the
Resurrection Vigil, celebrated early on Sunday mornings before the tomb of
Jesus, now known as the Holy Sepulchre. Egeria described how the lay people
and monks gathered outside during the night, singing “hymns and antiphons”
until cockcrow, when the bishop arrived and everyone went in. Then three
psalms were “said,” incense was lit, and the bishop went to the door of the
tomb to read the entire story of Jesus’ Passion and Resurrection from one of
the Gospels.86 Over time, the bishop’s one long reading from a single Gospel
developed into a series of shorter readings from all four Gospels, covering only
the Resurrection story and spread across a four-week cycle. However, since
some Gospels include more than one account of the Resurrection, the four-
week cycle was doubled to eight weeks, so that shorter excerpts could be read
each week, as shown in Figure 1.12.87 This practice survived in different forms
in the Armenian and Byzantine rites, but not in most others.
84 Peter Jeffery, “The Sunday Office of Seventh-Century Jerusalem in the Georgian Chantbook (Iadgari):
A Preliminary Report,” Studia Liturgica 21 (1991), 52–75. P. Jeffery, “The Lost Chant Tradition of Early
Christian Jerusalem: Some Possible Melodic Survivals in the Byzantine and Latin Chant Repertories,”
Early Music History 11 (1992), 151–90. P. Jeffery, “Jerusalem and Rome (and Constantinople): The
Heritage of Two Great Cities in the Formation of the Medieval Chant Traditions,” Cantus Planus:
Papers Read at the Fourth Meeting, Pécs, Hungary 3–8 September 1990 (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of
Sciences, Institute for Musicology, 1992), 163–74. P. Jeffery, “The Earliest Christian Chant Repertory
Recovered: The Georgian Witnesses to Jerusalem Chant,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 47
(1994), 1–39.
85 Holy Monastery and Archiepiscopate of Sinai, Τα νέα ευρήματα του Σινά (Athens: Ministry of Culture,
Mount Sinai Foundation, 1998).
86 Itinerarium 24.8–11, trans. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, 144–45.
87 Sebastià Janeras, “I vangeli domenicali della resurrezione nelle tradizioni liturgiche agiopolita e
bizantina,” Paschale Mysterium: Studi in memoria dell’Abate Prof. Salvatore Marsili (1910–1983), ed.
Giustino Farnedi, Studia Anselmiana 91; Analecta Liturgica 10 (Rome: Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo,
Matthew 28:1–20 Mode 1

Matthew 28:1–20 Mode 1 plagal
Mark 16:2–8 Mode 2
Mark 16:9–20 Mode 2 plagal
Luke 24:1–12 Mode 3
Luke 24:36–53 Mode 3 plagal
John 20:1–10 Mode 4
John 20:11–18 Mode 4 plagal
Figure 1.12 Cycle of eight readings from the four Gospels for the
Resurrection vigil at Jerusalem, with corresponding musical modes. After
Stig Simeon R. Frøyshov, “The Early Development of the Liturgical Eight-
Mode System in Jerusalem,” Saint Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 51 (2007),
139–78 at 159.
By the sixth century, apparently, the 4 × 2 arrangement of Resurrection

Gospel readings was being paralleled in hymnody by a system of four
“principal” (authentikos) modes, numbered 1–4, and four “side” (plagios)
modes, also numbered 1–4. The earliest theoretical discussions of their
musical characteristics are found in a half dozen Armenian liturgiological
and musicological treatises, which have yet to be fully edited and evalu-
ated.88 But we may be able to get some sense of the musical content at an
early stage of development from the ēchēmata (“sounds”) of Byzantine
chant. Also known as apēchēmata and enēchēmata, they are brief tune-up
melodies set mostly to nasal syllables, one for each mode. They may
originally have been sung by the choir leader, or by individual singers, as
a way to recall the modal characteristics of the chant they were about to
perform. But they became the basis of the modal signatures that are found
in notated Byzantine chant manuscripts from the tenth century. In their
most basic form, shown in Example 1.1a, the ēchēmata of the authentic
modes each begin and end on the same pitch, a, b, c, or d, moving through
a tetrachordal or pentachordal space in between, though there are other
forms in which they end on other pitches. The four plagal or “side”
modes, similarly, begin and end on D, E, F, or G in their most basic
form, as shown in Example 1.1b. As a result the two tetrachords cover
1986), 55–69. Stig Simeon R. Frøyshov, “The Early Development of the Liturgical Eight-Mode System in
Jerusalem,” Saint Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 51 (2007), 139–78 at 158–61.
88 Frøyshov, “The Early Development,” 169–71.
Example 1.1a The ēchēmata of the Greek authentic modes in their most
basic form. Source for concept: Jørgen Raasted, Intonation Formulas and
Modal Signatures in Byzantine Musical Manuscripts, Monumenta Musicae
Byzantinae: Subsidia 7 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966), 9. Actual image
is the author’s own.
Example 1.1b The ēchēmata of the Greek plagal modes in their most basic
form. Source for concept: Jørgen Raasted, Intonation Formulas and Modal
Signatures in Byzantine Musical Manuscripts, Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae:
Subsidia 7 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966), 9. Actual image is the
author’s own.
an octave from D to d.89 To some extent the syllabic psalm tones of

Byzantine chant follow a similar pattern, particularly in the four authentic
modes, in which the reciting pitches are a, b, c, and d.90 Thus one can
hypothesize, for the time being, that each mode originally centered on a
specific recitation pitch in a two-tetrachord space.
Of course things quickly got more complicated. In Jerusalem, the eight
modes gradually spread from the hymnody close to the four Gospels to
include all the hymn texts sung on Sundays. The result was an eight-week
89 Jørgen Raasted, Intonation Formulas and Modal Signatures in Byzantine Musical Manuscripts, Monumenta
Musicae Byzantinae: Subsidia 7 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966), 9. See also Oliver Strunk, “Intonations
and Signatures of the Byzantine Modes,” in O. Strunk, Essays on Music in the Byzantine World, ed. Kenneth
Levy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 19–36, esp. 32–33.
90 Christian Troelsgård, “Simple Psalmody in Byzantine Chant,” Papers R.ead at the 12th Meeting of the
I[nternational] M[usicological] S[ociety] Study Group Cantus Planus: Lillafüred/Hungary, 2004. Aug. 23–28, ed.
László Dobszay (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2006), 83–92.
cycle of Resurrection-themed chant texts, one mode per week. These were
collected in a book called Oktōēchos (after the eight ēchoi or modes), which
later evolved into the Anastasimatarion or Resurrection-book of the modern
Byzantine rite. Another book organized by musical mode was the
Heirmologion, containing the model melodies or heirmoi used to sing the
canons, or series of stanzas composed to accompany the nine biblical odes
used in the Byzantine morning service. Both books appear to have formed in
the Palestinian monasteries near Jerusalem, hence their traditional association
with St. John of Damascus (ca. 676–749), a monk of Mar Saba and one of the
greatest theologians of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
From Jerusalem, the eight modes gradually spread to other chant repertories
in the Greek, Slavonic, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian linguistic realms. In the
eighth century, the eight modes were imported into the Latin West, to serve a
central role in the Frankish reformulation of Roman chant that became known
as Gregorian chant. They were never adopted by the older local Latin traditions
that Gregorian chant largely replaced – Milanese, Visigothic or Mozarabic,
Beneventan, Old Roman. In each of the Eastern and Western musical cultures
that did adopt the eight modes, however, changes were made, as if to adjust the
theory to local usage. In the Latin world, where the modes had arrived by the
late eighth century, for some reason they were adjusted so that the authentic
modes ended on the same four finals as the plagal modes: D, E, F, or G. Thus
each final would henceforth host two modes: one authentic, one plagal, as
shown in Example 1.2.91 In the later history of the Eastern churches it became
common to number the plagal modes 5–8, retaining the authentic modes as
1–4. But in the West, modes with the same final were grouped together, with
authentic and plagal alternating, so that the Latin authentic modes came to be
numbered 1, 3, 5, 7, and the plagal modes 2, 4, 6, 8.
Before long, efforts were being made to conflate the Latinized Oktōēchos
with the modes of Boethius, though the two originally had nothing to do with
each other. The octave of the church modes ascends from D to d, while the
System descends two octaves from a′ to A, and the tetrachords of the Greater
and Lesser Perfect Systems were not the same as the tetrachords of the
Jerusalem modes. These efforts resulted in the D mode being linked to the
name Dorian and so on, as students are still being taught today. But the notion
that the modes of Gregorian chant go back to ancient Greece has no more
historical reality than the idea that Gregorian psalmody goes back to the
Jerusalem Temple.
91 Terence Bailey, The Intonation Formulas of Western Chant, Studies and Texts 28 (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), 12.
Example 1.2 The ēchēmata of the Latin modes in their shortest form. Source
for concept: Terence Bailey, The Intonation Formulas of Western Chant, Studies
and Texts 28 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), 12.
Actual image is the author’s own
Summary
The music of medieval Western Europe was created with the help of three
legacies from older civilizations: the philosophy and learning of ancient
Greece, the poetry and narratives of ancient Israel, and the cultural synthesis
of the early Church. From ancient Platonic philosophy, medieval Europe
inherited the Pythagorean theory of acoustics based on numerical ratios, as
well as concepts about the ability of music to mimic and influence different
types of behavior. As Greek music theory was transmitted through Latin
writers, it was identified as one of the seven liberal arts, indeed part of the
mathematical quadrivium. This included concepts of rhythm and meter that
originated in the theory of Greek poetry, but were modified somewhat as they
came to be reapplied to Latin poetry. It also involved a theory of word accent,
marked by various notae or signs, which underlay the medieval development
of more advanced systems of musical neumes. Finally it included the theory of
harmonics, based on the tuning of the ancient Greek kithara, particularly as
described by Boethius in his Latin paraphrases of Greek theoretical texts.

From this medieval Europe inherited a fundamentally tetrachordal arrange-
ment of musical space and a system of tuning transpositions that contributed
to the formation of medieval modal theory.
From ancient Israel, medieval Europe inherited the religious writings that
were incorporated into the Christian Bible, notably the psalms. From the
historical narratives in the Bible, medieval Christians learned about the
Temple as representing an ideal form of worship, an earthly copy of the eternal
praises sung by the angels in Heaven. The destruction of the Temple during the
first century C E , however, forced a reformulation of Judaism around Talmudic
study and synagogue worship, where the cantillation of the Torah of Moses was
an act of central importance. Since musical notation was rare in Jewish cultures,
reconstructing the history of oral traditions that survive today requires rather
different methodologies from the heavily paleographical approach used for
medieval Christian music, where notated sources are abundant.
In the early Church, the use of hymns – largely Christological in content –
gave way to the two kinds of worship that emerged in the fourth century.
Monastic or desert worship, more ascetic and egalitarian, focused on the
recitation of the psalms. This contributed to a reformulation of the educa-
tional curriculum, so that basic literacy was acquired by reading the psalms
instead of texts full of pagan deities. In cathedral or urban worship, the entire
urban community, led by the clergy, celebrated the liturgical year by traveling
to various sites of religious significance around the city. The model for urban
worship was Jerusalem, where the first Christian community had lived under
the leadership of the apostles. There the most important religious site was the
tomb of Jesus, and it was in the Resurrection Vigil of Sunday morning, where
the bishop read from the four Gospels, that a form of musical organization
emerged based on recitation tones organized in two tetrachords. These
became the medieval modes of Gregorian chant, Byzantine chant, and some
other Eastern chant traditions.
It was in the Carolingian period, during the reign of Charlemagne and his
successors, that the elements inherited from these three cultures were
brought together for the first time, and molded into the Frankish recension
of Gregorian chant – the first truly medieval music.
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.2.
Origins and Transmission of Franco-Roman Chant

ANDREAS PFISTERER
This chapter deals with events for which there is no direct documentation and
about which there is no consensus among scholars. To hope that a consensus
might be established by virtue of better arguments is utopian. Therefore,
there are two possible ways of writing an article on this topic. One can be
silent about history and speak about documents, or one can put forward one’s
own view in a hopefully consistent manner and present arguments that might
prove relevant even within the framework of a different view. I will follow
the second path.
The first half of the chapter deals with the origins of the Roman chant
repertory – this topic is part of the history of liturgy and can be treated mostly
without looking at the music. The second half deals with the phase of trans-
mission that connects the origins with the musical manuscripts – this topic is
treated here from the point of view of the melodies. I am convinced that the
music provides more and better evidence than all the arguments by analogy
from cultural history.
Professionalization of Liturgy
In contrast to the chant of Eastern liturgies, in late Antiquity in the West
creativity is centered on chants with biblical texts; Mass chants are mainly from
the psalms, office chants include texts from the whole Bible. There is a special
feature, most clearly visible in the Roman Mass, that James McKinnon has
termed “properization.”1 Not only feasts but also each Sunday and each day of
Lent has its own chant formulary. Thus the repertory of the Mass chants in
existence ca. C E 750 includes 148 Introits, 117 Graduals, about 40–50 Alleluias,
15 Tracts, 93 offertories, and 146 communions.2 The Office repertory is less
1 James McKinnon, “Properization: The Roman Mass,” in International Musicological Society Study Group
Cantus Planus: Papers Read at the 6th Meeting, Eger, Hungary, 1993 (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of
Sciences, Institute for Musicology, 1995), 15–22.
2 The numbers are based on the manuscripts from the ninth and tenth centuries, excluding pieces that are
probably Frankish additions, while including a few cases of pieces (almost) lost in transmission.
[69]
70 A N D R E A S P F I S T E R E R
easily defined; it numbers a few hundred antiphons and responsories. Building

up a repertory of that sort, and even more so preserving it in the memory and
transmitting it to the following generations, requires the concentrated effort
of an institution. For these reasons McKinnon attributed it to the Roman
Schola cantorum and proposed a date in the second half of the seventh
century, i.e., during a time of recovery from the catastrophes of the sixth
century (Gothic wars, invasion of the Langobards). This late date has been
contested in the course of my defense of a more traditional early date. In fact,
McKinnon’s argument is fragile in some points and there are clear indications
of the existence of substantial parts of the repertory before Gregory I
(590–604).3
The analysis of the liturgical order of the Mass antiphonary in the light of
the history of the Roman calendar within the seventh century leads to
a terminus ante quem in the middle of that century. The formularies of the
feasts Hypapanti (2.2.) and Cena Domini, introduced around that time, bor-
row pieces from the Temporale. So the last comprehensive reworking of the
Mass antiphonary seems to have taken place in the first half of the seventh
century. But parts of the repertory are older.
The Introit “Ecce aduenit” is cited in the Vita of Pope Vigilius (537–555) in
the roughly contemporary Liber pontificalis. A decisive piece of evidence is
provided by the study of the chant texts from Isaiah: the pieces for the Advent
season (introduced in the late sixth century) use the Latin text version called
Vulgata; the pieces for the rest of the year use instead (with a few exceptions)
older text versions that are today called collectively Vetus Latina. For some of
these Vetus Latina texts it is clear that they have been chosen for the special
Sunday or feast to which they are assigned, so they cannot constitute a pre-
properization repertory. It is thus impossible to interpret the Advent chants
as the initial layer of the repertory as McKinnon did; on the contrary, they
must be seen as a late layer.
So the date of the properization project should be moved back to the period
before the Gothic wars (535–555) devastated Italy. And this brings it closer to
another development in liturgical history which might appropriately be called
“professionalization.”
3 McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later-Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000). Andreas Pfisterer, “James McKinnon und die Datierung des
gregorianischen Chorals,” Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch 85 (2001), 31–53. Pfisterer, Cantilena Romana:
Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung des gregorianischen Chorals, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kirchenmusik 11
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 217–32. Cf. the similar results of the independent study of non-psalmic
Introit texts in Christoph Tietze, “The Use of Old Latin in the Non-Psalmic Introit Texts” in Papers Read
at the 12th Meeting of the IMS Study Group Cantus Planus, Lillafüred/Hungary, 2004, Aug. 23–28 (Budapest:
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Musicology, 2006), 259–83.
Origins and Transmission of Franco-Roman Chant 71
Simplifying somewhat, in patristic times one may distinguish two liturgical

spheres: cathedral and monastery.4 The liturgy of the cathedral is characterized by
the opposing roles of clergy and people; in the monastery, there are neither clergy
nor people, but a group of professional worshipers. In the Middle Ages, however,
the difference between cathedrals, collegiate churches and monasteries is not very
great, for in all of them the liturgy is performed by a community of professional
worshipers. The presence of the people is not required for any part of the liturgy,
the presence of the bishop only rarely. The development that led from one stage
to the other remains obscure due to the lack of sources. What seems to be clear is
the mutual influence of cathedral and monastery beginning in the fourth century:
one could speak of the clericalization of monks and the monasticization of clerics.
The musical implications of this development have been described by
McKinnon as a change “from lector chant to schola chant.”5 The “responsorial”
way of psalmody, as we know it from patristic texts, corresponds to the situa-
tion of the cathedral liturgy: a cleric, who knows the psalms by heart or is able to
read them from a book, sings the successive verses, the people respond to each
verse with a refrain that can be sung by heart by everybody. In the monasteries
the same way of soloistic performance was used in the Office, sometimes even
without a refrain. The preference for listening seems to correspond to the
original monastic interpretation of psalmody as a type of meditation on scrip-
tural texts.6 But then the possibility of singing the verses together, since all
members knew them by heart, was put into practice. As with all long texts
(hymns, ordinary chants), the division into two choirs that sing alternately is
a means of avoiding exhaustion. The refrain, originally a means of allowing the
participation of the people, becomes superfluous in that respect; it is retained as
the common beginning and ending of the psalm and as a means of adding
thematic emphasis to the psalm text. The question of when and where this
change in the office psalmody took place remains open; from the ninth century
onwards the “antiphonal” type of psalmody is attested as the normal way.7
According to the traditional view, going back to Isidore of Seville (d. 636),
Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) introduced double-choir psalmody in Western
4 This distinction, indispensable for the history of the Office, was developed by the school of Anton
Baumstark; see Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its
Meaning for Today, 2nd ed. (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993).
5 McKinnon, The Advent Project, 62–65. 6 Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours, 364.
7 Helmut Leeb, Die Psalmodie bei Ambrosius (Vienna: Herder, 1967). Joseph Dyer, “Monastic Psalmody of
the Middle Ages,” Revue Bénédictine 99 (1989), 41–74. Edward Nowacki, “Antiphonal Psalmody in Christian
Antiquity and Early Middle Ages” in Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David G. Hughes, ed. G.M. Boone
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 287–315. Philippe Bernard, “A-t-on connu la psalmodie
alternée à deux choeurs, en Gaule, avant l’époque carolingienne?” Revue Bénédictine 114 (2004), 291–325; 115
(2005), 33–60. Michel Huglo, “Recherches sur la psalmodie alternée à deux choeurs,” Revue Bénédictine 116
(2006), 352–66.
Europe (this view has recently been defended by Huglo). Helmut Leeb
rejected this view by demonstrating that there is no trace of that way of
singing in the writings of Ambrose. Joseph Dyer then proposed the hypoth-
esis that the Carolingian reform of the eighth century was responsible for the
general introduction of double-choir psalmody, previously used only in spe-
cial circumstances. One testimony has not yet been taken into consideration:
Bede mentions double-choir psalmody in the narration of the death of his
teacher Benedict Biscop (d. 689/90)8; this testimony would lead back to the
seventh-century Roman monasteries that Biscop tried to imitate.
In Office psalmody, the choir took over the role of the soloist; the people as it
were disappeared. In those genres, however, that retained the responsorial way of
performance (especially the Gradual of the Mass) as well as in chants without
psalmody (especially the Mass Ordinary) the choir took over the role of the
people. These are two different paths of the development toward “schola chant.”
The appropriation of chants by the choir may have occurred at different
times for different genres. The proper chants of the Roman Mass were
probably taken over by the choir by the end of the fifth century.
The participation of the people in singing the chants for the Ordinary of
Mass, however, seems to persist at least at some places into the Carolingian
age.9 This is probably the reason why ordinary melodies did not become part
of the canonical repertory of the Mass antiphonary, the book of the choir.
At least for the Gradual, one can assume that it developed out of its predeces-
sor, the patristic responsorial psalm placed within the series of scriptural readings.
Its introduction to the Roman liturgy seems to have occurred rather late, under
Pope Celestine I (422–32).10 If one accepts a direct continuity, the text must have
been abbreviated to one verse (additionally to the refrain) while the melody was
extended. A parallel development seems to apply to all Christian rites.
Institutions
The Roman Schola cantorum is mentioned in various texts from the seventh
to the fourteenth century.11 It is not easy, however, to get a comprehensive
picture of this institution. On the one hand it appears as an ensemble
8 Venerabilis Baeda, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, Historia abbatum, Epistola ad Ecgberctum, una cum
Historia abbatum auctore anonymo, ed. Carolus Plummer, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 376.
9 Joseph A. Jungmann, Missarum Sollemnia: Eine genetische Erklärung der römischen Messe, 2 vols., 3rd ed.
(Freiburg: Herder, 1952), vol. I : 460 and 603–05; vol. I I : 161–64.
10 Peter Jeffery, “The Introduction of Psalmody into the Roman Mass by Pope Celestine I (422–432):
Reinterpreting a Passage in the Liber pontificalis,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 26 (1984), 147–65.
11 Dyer, “Schola cantorum,” in MGG2, Sachteil, vol. V I I I : cols. 1119–123. Cf. Pfisterer, Cantilena Romana,
232–34.
consisting of men and boys and performing in the papal stational service; on
the other hand it appears as a school that offers to gifted poor children a school
education and the possibility of a clerical career. This second aspect is wit-
nessed by Ordo Romanus XXXVI:12
Primum in qualicumque scola reperti First, in whichever school there are

fuerint pueri bene psallentes, tolluntur found boys that sing well, they are
unde et nutriuntur in scola cantorum et taken away from there and brought up
postea fiunt cubicularii. Si autem in the Schola cantorum, and later they
nobilium filii fuerint, statim in cubiculo become privy servants (of the pope). If,
nutriuntur. (Ordo Romanus XXXVI 1) however, they are sons of nobles, they
are brought up from the beginning in
the (papal) chamber.
Dyer is probably right in assuming that the alumni of the Schola cantorum
later became clerics serving at the Roman titular churches and provided the
chant in these churches.13 In some documents the Schola cantorum or its
building are called “orphanotrophium” (orphanage); this might have been its
original function, but that had become secondary by the late seventh century
at the latest. The question of the origin of the Schola cantorum was for a long
time overshadowed by the person of Pope Gregory I who is named founder of
the Schola cantorum from the ninth century on. Dyer has managed to make
this claim implausible; he moves the origin of the Schola to the time of our
first documents, i.e., the late seventh century.14 There is one problem with
this latest possible date: it cannot be reconciled with an early dating of the
Roman Mass Proper. In order to produce and reproduce such a large repertory
there must have been some established institution. Since the argument for an
early date of the Mass Proper is much stronger than the absence of documents
for the early existence of the Schola, there is no reasonable alternative to
assuming that the Schola originated in the fifth or early sixth century.
One of the few documents of Gregory’s intervention in liturgical chant is
the decree of the Roman synod of 595:
12 Michel Andrieu, ed., Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen age IV, Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniense 28
(Louvain: Université Catholique, 1956), 195. This Ordo was probably composed by a non-Roman author
in the later ninth century. In many details it is contradicted by Roman documents (see ibid., 185–91);
there is, however, no Roman document that might confirm or correct the cited statement about the
Schola cantorum.
13 Dyer, “The Schola Cantorum and Its Roman Milieu in the Early Middle Ages,” in De musica et cantu:
Studien zur Geschichte der Kirchenmusik und der Oper: Helmut Hucke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. P. Cahn and A.-
K. Heimer (Hildesheim: Olms, 1993), 19–40 at 37–38.
14 Ibid.
In sancta hac Romana ecclesia, cui divina In this holy Roman church, over which
dispensatio praeesse me voluit, dudum the divine dispensation wanted me to
consuetudo est valde reprehensibilis preside, the very reprehensible habit
exorta, ut quidam ad sacri altaris arose long ago that some singers are
ministerium cantores eligantur et in elected to the ministry of the holy
diaconatus ordine constituti altar, and that those in the order of
modulationi vocis serviant, quos ad deacon perform the task of singing,
praedicationis officium who should devote themselves to the
elemosinarumque studium vacare office of preaching and the care for
congruebat. alms.
Unde fit plerumque, ut ad sacrum This is why most often, while a charming
ministerium, dum blanda vox voice is required for the holy ministry,
quaeritur, quaeri congrua vita the requirement of an appropriate way
neglegatur et cantor minister Deum of life is neglected, and the singer-
moribus stimulet, cum populum minister provokes God by his
vocibus delectat. manners, while he delights the people
by his sounds.
Qua de re praesenti decreto constituo, ut Therefore I order by this decree that at
in sede hac sacri altaris ministri cantare this [bishop’s] seat the ministers of the
non debeant solumque evangelicae holy altar must not sing and should
lectionis officium inter missarum perform only the task of the Gospel
sollemnia exsolvant. Psalmos vero ac reading in the Mass service. For the
reliquas lectiones censeo per psalms, however, and the remaining
subdiaconos vel, si necessitas exigit, readings, I want them to be presented
per minores ordines exhiberi. by subdeacons or, if required by
(Registrum 5,57a) necessity, by lower orders.
This decree puts an end to the musical role of the seven Roman deacons
which is attested additionally by epitaphs from the fifth and sixth centuries.15
From the point of view of McKinnon’s chronology, the singing deacons are
part of the prehistory of the Gregorian repertory; by my reckoning, however,
they must have been involved in its formation. We have no records about the
relationship between the deacons and the Schola cantorum. But it seems
improbable that the deacons, often coming from the local nobility, could
15 Ernst Diehl, ed., Inscriptiones Latinae christianae veteres, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1925–31), nos. 1194
and 1195, vol. I : 231–32. Antonio Ferrua, ed., Epigrammata Damasiana (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio
Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1942), no. 63, pp. 233–35. These documents have been largely ignored in
anglophone literature, but see Anton de Waal, “Le chant liturgique dans les inscriptions romaines du IVe
au IXe siècle,” in Compte rendu du troisième congrès scientifique international des catholiques 2: Sciences
religieuses (Brussels: Societé belge de librairie, 1895), 310–17. Ernesto T. Moneta Caglio, Lo iubilus e le
origini della salmodia responsoriale (Venice, 1977), 184–85.
have attended the “orphanage”; there must have been ways of acquiring
privately a training in chant as well as a normal school education.
Until 595, deacons and Schola had to cooperate in the stational service;
in the Gradual responsory the deacon sang the refrain first, the Schola
repeated it. Since there is no trace of different melodic styles used by
soloist and choir (as in the Byzantine prokeimenon) in the melodic trans-
mission, it is reasonable to assume that they sang the same melodies to the
same words. On the other hand, it would be possible to connect the
existing stylistic differences with the different institutions, if the
Gradual, Tract, and possibly the oldest layer of Alleluia were the respon-
sibility of the deacons, while the Introit, Offertory, and Communion were
the responsibility of the Schola.16 This would imply, however, that the
Schola cantorum preserved the style of the deacons in the respective
genres when it took over their role in 595.
For the Office, our knowledge of the institutions is even poorer. We know
the Schola cantorum performed the Vespers of Easter week17 and some festive
vigils, but we have no further evidence of what they may have done.18
We know of an Office at the Roman titular churches from a passing notice in
Ordo Romani XXVII 79.19 The main institutions concerned with the Roman
Office as we know it are probably the basilical monasteries. The Liber pontifi-
calis includes notices on the foundation of monastic communities at the
Roman basilicas from the fifth century on.20 They developed partly into
Benedictine monasteries (St. Paul), partly into collegiate chapters (Lateran,
St. Peter). The liturgical regulations of the Regula Benedicti of the sixth century
seem to follow the use of the Roman basilical monasteries – with significant
changes. Since Pope Stephen III (768–72) ordered that one of the cardinal
bishops should celebrate the Mass at St. Peter’s on Sundays,21 it seems clear
that the monks attached to St. Peter’s were responsible for the Office only.
We cannot exclude, however, that they additionally served as choir in the
Mass. Johannes, abbot of one of the monasteries at St. Peter’s in 678, bears the
16 For the different conceptions of musical form see Pfisterer, “Skizzen zu einer gregorianischen
Formenlehre,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 63 (2006), 145–61.
17 Stephen J. P. van Dijk, “The Medieval Easter Vespers of the Roman Clergy,” Sacris Erudiri 19 (1969/
70), 261–363.
18 If the twelfth-century antiphoner London, British Library add. 29988 belonged to the Schola, this
would verify the existence of a complete Office for the late phase of the Schola.
19 Michel Andrieu, ed., Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen age III, Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniense 24
(Louvain: Université Catholique, 1951), 366.
20 Louis Duchesne, ed., Le Liber Pontificalis: Texte, introduction et commentaire, 2 vols. (Paris: Thorin/
Boccard, 1886–92), vol. I : 234, 239, 245.
21 Ibid., vol. I : 478.
title archicantor aecclesiae beati apostoli Petri.22 This might imply that the monks
were integrated into the chant tradition of the city of Rome. The stylistic
similarity of the great responsories of the Office and the antiphons of the Mass,
which extends even to melodic identity, seems to confirm the unity of the
chant tradition.
Melodic identity between different liturgical genres is often seen as a sign of
the secondary reuse of pieces from one genre to fill gaps in the other genre
(McKinnon, Maiani). Willibrord Heckenbach, however, judged it an archa-
ism, implying an evolution toward more musical differentiation between the
liturgical genres. My own research in the transmission of the melodies sug-
gests another possibility: melodies that were different might be assimilated
mutually (unconsciously).23
Repertory
The Proper of the Mass appears in the manuscripts as a monolithic block, largely
resisting an analysis of historical layers. In the Office the transmission is much
more diffuse; it will perhaps be possible to distinguish layers, but even the first
step toward doing this, distinguishing between Roman pieces and Frankish
additions, still remains to be done in a comprehensive way.24 The Alleluia is an
exception within the Mass Proper. It was clearly introduced late into the Roman
Mass, i.e., after the “properization project.” The Alleluia might therefore offer
some insights into the mechanisms of properization, but even here it is difficult
to reach a consensus about the definition of the Roman repertory.25
In some cases, favorable circumstances give us a glimpse of the prehistory of
a single piece. Some pieces, especially offertories, have close cognates in other
repertories, in particular the Old Spanish.26 The question of the original
22 Venerabilis Baeda, Historia ecclesiastica, 369. The title archicantor Romanae aecclesiae, given by the
anonymous author of the earlier Historia abbatum (ibid., 391), seems to be a simplification that should
not be pressed.
23 McKinnon, “The Eighth-Century Frankish-Roman Communion Cycle,” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 45 (1992), 179–227. Bradford Maiani, “The Responsory-Communions for
Paschaltide,” Studia Musicologica 39 (1998), 233–40. Willibrord Heckenbach, “Responsoriale Communio-
Antiphonen,” in Ars musica, musica scientia: Festschrift Heinrich Hüschen, ed. D. Altenburg (Köln: Gitarre und
Laute Verlagsgesellschaft, 1980), 224–32. Pfisterer, Cantilena, 173–74.
24 Some attempts can be found in Pfisterer, “Hesbert, Amalar und die fränkische
Responsorienkomposition,” in Papers Read at the 13th Meeting of the IMS Study Group Cantus Planus,
Niederaltaich/Germany, 2006. Aug. 29-Sept. 4 (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for
Musicology, 2009), 535–46. David Eben, “Die Ofiziumsantiphonen der Adventszeit,” 2 vols., Ph.
D. dissertation, University of Prague, 2003 (print in preparation).
25 Cf. McKinnon, The Advent Project, 249–79. Pfisterer, Cantilena, 126–27.
26 Louis Brou, “Le I V e Livre d’Esdras dans la Liturgie Hispanique et le Graduel Romain Locus iste de la
Messe de la Dédicace,” Sacris Erudiri 9 (1957), 75–109. Kenneth Levy, “Toledo, Rome, and the Legacy of
Gaul,” Early Music History 4 (1984), 49–99.
provenance of such “international” pieces can often be elucidated by the study

of the biblical text on which they are based. The Latin text of the psalms exists in
many local versions that seem to be rather stable through the centuries. By that
criterion, it has been possible to establish that most chants common to Rome
and Milan are of Roman origin.27 On the other hand, some chants of the Roman
repertory seem to be of foreign origin, e.g. probably from Gaul or from Africa.28
Texts from outside the psalter are often inconclusive in respect of geography,
but significant in respect of chronology. These conclusions drawn from versions
of the Latin text have to acknowledge many blind spots, since we cannot know
all versions that have existed, and since assimilation to the version in actual use
often covers the tracks of a piece which has wandered from one tradition to
another. Nevertheless, the cases we can recognize show that the Roman Schola
cantorum not only created pieces of their own, but also collected pieces from
other liturgical centers and integrated them into their repertory.
Oral Tradition
The question of how one might imagine the transmission of a large treasury of
melodies without the use of musical notation remained marginal for a long
time. It was in 1970 that Leo Treitler put it into the center of the discussion.
Instead of looking on oral tradition as a less effective way of transmission, he
provided a model for the functioning of oral tradition different from written
tradition. Inspired by a position in Homer scholarship, he saw the performance
of a chant in oral tradition not as reproduction of an individual melody but as an
improvisational reconstruction. Musical formulas and “grammatical” rules are
adapted to a given (written) text; the object of transmission is these rules, not
the performances resulting from their adaption. From this point of view,
notated melodies are neither prescriptive nor descriptive, but exemplary.29
Helmut Hucke transformed this theory of oral transmission into a history
of chant transmission by the way of deduction (thereby changing some of his
former positions): the unanimity of chant manuscripts cannot be due to the
(impossible) unanimity of oral performance, it must be the result of a written
transmission. The various stages of codification (adiastematic notation about
27 Huglo et al., Fonti e paleografia del canto ambrosiano, Archivio Ambrosiano 7 (Milan: Rivista Ambrosius,
1956), 127–36.
28 Pfisterer, “Remarks on Roman and Non-Roman Offertories,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 14 (2005),
169–81. Rebecca Maloy, Inside the Offertory: Aspects of Chronology and Transmission (Oxford University Press,
2010).
29 Leo Treitler, “Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant,” The Musical
Quarterly 60 (1974), 333–72. Treitler, “Centonate Chant: Übles Flickwerk or E pluribus unus?” Journal of
the American Musicological Society 28 (1975), 1–23.
Example 2.1 Comparison of standard and Beneventan versions of the Tract

“Sicut ceruus” (excerpt): S – standard version; B – Beneventan version
900, diastematic notation about 1100) each imply a break of transmission; the
repertory of individual melodies we know is the final result of this
development.30
Kenneth Levy defended the notion of a uniform Carolingian repertory of
individual melodies. By supposing that adiastematic notation was already
used about 800 he connects the testimony of the manuscripts for a stable
transmission already in the ninth century with the notion that stability
requires writing.
My own work continues that of David Hughes on the melodic variants in
chant manuscripts.31 The picture emerging from those studies will be
sketched by some selected examples.
Accidents of Transmission
Example 2.1 shows the second half of the first verse and the first half of
the second verse of the canticle “Sicut ceruus” from the Easter Vigil. This melody
is part of the family of Tracts in the eighth mode; the four Easter Vigil canticles
consist exclusively of formulaic phrases that are connected with certain formal
positions within the verse. The manuscripts from Benevento transmit a common
variant for the second verse that omits the division of the half verse into two
30 Helmut Hucke, “Toward a New Historical View of Gregorian Chant,” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 33 (1980), 437–67. Helmut Hucke and Hartmut Möller, “Gregorianischer Gesang,” in
MGG2, Sachteil I I I (1995), cols. 1609–21.
31 David Hughes, “Evidence for the Traditional View of the Transmission of Gregorian Chant,” Journal of
the American Musicological Society 40 (1987), 377–404.
phrases. The verse begins with the intonation of the first phrase, but ends with
the melisma of the second phrase. Since the first phrase has a recitation on b,
the second phrase a recitation on c, there is an internal change of the recitation
pitch. One could imagine various different scenarios for the origin of this devia-
tion from the formulaic system. At this place, the Beneventan manuscripts are
opposed to the consensus of the rest of the manuscripts, which present the
melody in regular form;32 it is therefore probable that the variant arose when
the chant was transferred to Benevento (probably around 800). It is not possible
to explain this variant by a scribe’s error; even in the case of a defective exemplar
the scribe would have been able to complete the melody by analogy with the
other verses. The most reasonable assumption seems to be that a singer failed to
reconstruct the melody correctly from memory. He began the verse in the correct
way, overlooked by accident the caesura at anima mea, perhaps induced by the
similar behavior of the same words in the first verse. At Deum uiuum he
remembered the melisma connected with these words, so he had to produce
the change of reciting pitch in order to get back into the melody. However the
variant came into being, it remained uncorrected and became part of the
Beneventan tradition of chant, even though everyone familiar with the formulaic
system of the Tracts would have been able to recognize and emend the error.
This (not very common) case gives several clues:
• Even within a simple formulaic system, melodies that are “grammatically”

wrong can remain uncorrected; this implies that the chants are remem-
bered as individual pieces;
• In the reconstruction from memory, the connection of the words Deum
uiuum to a certain melisma was stronger than the integrity of the formulaic
phrase;
• The normal control of the transmission by the collective memory may fail;
there seems to have been no additional control through a normative
notated book. The manuscripts preserve instead the variant that has
emerged in performance.
Assimilation
The Tracts of the second mode rely strongly on formulas, the most stable
element being the medial caesura of the verses.33 Example 2.2 shows on the
32 For some isolated exceptions see Pfisterer, Cantilena, 83.

33 For an extensive discussion of the formulaic system see Emma Hornby, Medieval Liturgical Chant and
Patristic Exegesis: Words and Music in the Second-Mode Tracts (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009).
Example 2.2 Medial caesuras of second-mode Tracts, with neumatic notation

from St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex sangallensis 359
left the normal melisma on the final syllable, if the last word has its accent on
the penultimate syllable; on the right it shows a variant that appears under the
same conditions in the first verses of the tracts “Domine audiui” and “Domine
exaudi.” The difference between these two versions concerns not only the
repetition of the third note, but also the rhythm as indicated by some early
neumatic notations. In the normal version only the last three notes are long, in
the special version the first five notes are long, too. There is no obvious reason
for that difference, but it corresponds to further common features of these
two pieces, so there may be some chronological reason. The special version is
witnessed by the manuscripts of the tenth century and some conservative later
ones; most later manuscripts, however, give the normal version every time,
and one eleventh-century manuscript represents a tradition with the special
version every time.34
One could imagine a development from a unique version to two different
versions arbitrarily or by chance, but this cannot happen independently at
different places. On the contrary, an assimilation of the special version to the
normal one may happen independently. Thus it is probable that the older
manuscripts reflect the state of development at the time of the diffusion of
the repertory, whereas the later manuscripts represent the result of
a regularization.
There may be cases of regularization that have been done intentionally; it is
much more probable, however, that it happened inadvertently. Again this is
not a typical scribal error, but rather a memory error. The transmission of
literary texts knows comparable variants by assimilation especially in texts
people know by heart, as the Bible or Virgil; there these variants may be
judged as a contamination caused by memory. In chant transmission the
frequency of such variants, together with the rarity of typical scribal errors,
is a clear sign for the dominance of the transmission by memory even after the
introduction of musical notation.
34 See Pfisterer, Cantilena, 53.

Example 2.3 Alleluias Emitte and Excita (excerpts) with neumatic notation
from St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, codex sangallensis 359 and Chartres,
Bibliothèque municipale 47
Reiterated Variants
Most variants in chant transmission are not isolated, but reappear regu-
larly in similar melodic situations. Their counterparts in literary transmis-
sion would not be scribal errors, but phonetic changes or dialect variants.
It is reasonable, therefore, to speak of chant dialects. 35 Two early types of
such variants will be presented here: the omission of the lower note of an
ascending motion and the filling in of thirds.
Example 2.3 shows one of several typical situations for the former:
a torculus-figure that connects two notes at the distance of a major third
(most often F-GaG-a), the word accent being placed on the last note.
The first note of the torculus-figure is regularly missing in the geogra-
phical western region (Brittany, Chartres, Aquitaine), it is regularly
present in the east, while between them there is a large transitional
zone. The example shows additionally a case where (due to the lack of
syllables) the first note is connected with the torculus-figure; there the
respective note is written as a quilisma and is present in all early manu-
scripts. This may be explained by assuming that the eastern version is
the earlier one and that the western version is the result of the erosion
of this ornamental note at the point of syllable articulation, whereas it
survived within the syllable.36
Example 2.7 shows the filling in of thirds in ascending and descending
motion with a passing note. This variant appears regularly in a group of
manuscripts whose center may be the monastery of St. Denis near Paris;
through the English ecclesiastical reform of the tenth century it also came
35 This term was introduced by Peter Wagner, in “Der gregorianische Gesang,” in Handbuch der
Musikgeschichte, ed. G. Adler (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1924), 65–105 at 87–88.
36 Pfisterer, Cantilena, 26–29.
to the British Isles. The question of priority between the two versions
cannot be easily judged by internal arguments; more helpful is the geogra-
phical method developed by Romance linguistics. The basic idea of this
method is that novelties originate somewhere and spread out from there.
The spread is dependent on the radiance of the place of origin and on the
ease of communication. The earlier state of development is often preserved
in peripheral and backward regions. Applied to our case, the area of the
St. Denis variant is almost completely surrounded by the area of the
standard variant. Therefore it may be assumed that the standard variant is
the earlier one.37
The areas of this and other dialect variants often overlap; e.g., the tradition
of Cluny partakes to some extent in both variants commented on here.
A genealogical model of so-called vertical transmission cannot explain such
overlappings; it is horizontal transmission that seems to dominate the spread
of variants in chant.
“Old Roman” Chant: Manuscripts and Institutions

Hundreds of manuscripts from the whole of Latin Europe transmit us the
Gregorian repertory with many small variants, but generally with astonish-
ing uniformity. Besides that there is a small group of manuscripts, frag-
ments, and notations of single pieces from the city of Rome that transmit
a related, but clearly different melodic version.38 There are several pairs of
terms to distinguish the two versions; these reflect the different historical
scenarios proposed for the origin of the double tradition of the repertory.
Bruno Stäblein introduced “Old Roman” in contrast to “Gregorian,”
Helmut Hucke spoke of “Gregorian chant in Roman and Frankish trans-
mission” instead.39 Hucke’s terminology has the advantage of preserving
“Gregorian” as a comprehensive term for both branches; additionally it is
compatible with my historical scenario, thus I will use it in the following
discussion.
The most important witnesses of the Roman transmission are three gra-
duals and two antiphoners.
37 Pfisterer, “Y a-t-il une tradition française.”

38 Huglo, “Le chant vieux-romain: Liste des manuscrits et témoins indirects,” Sacris Erudiri 6 (1954),
96–124.
39 Bruno Stäblein, “Zur Frühgeschichte des römischen Chorals,” in Atti del congresso internazionale di
Musica Sacra, Roma 1950, ed. H. Anglès (Tournai, 1952), 271–75. Hucke, “Gregorianischer Gesang in
altrömischer und fränkischer Überlieferung,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 12 (1955), 74–87.

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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

Spanning a millennium of musical history, these monumental volumes

MARK EVERIST is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton.

The Cambridge History of American Music

The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory

The Cambridge History of World Music

The Cambridge History of Medieval Music

The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music

The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music

The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

List of Figures page ix

Introduction and Context 1

1 . Musical Legacies from the Ancient World 15

2 . Origins and Transmission of Franco-Roman Chant 69

3 . Sources of Romano-Frankish Liturgy and Music 92

4 . Regional Liturgies: Spanish, Beneventan, Gallican, Milanese 123

5 . Nova Cantica 147

6 . Music and Prosopography 176

7 . The Silence of Medieval Singers 210

11 . Music Theory 357

12 . Vernacular Song I : Lyric 382

13 . Vernacular Song I I : Romance 428

14 . Instruments and Their Music 451

15 . Teaching and Learning Music 475

16 . Music in Drama 500

17 . The Sources 527

18 . The Revival of Medieval Music 561

19 . Medieval Performance Practice 582

20 . Issues in the Modern Performance of Medieval Music 609

21 . Institutions and Foundations 627

23 . Rhythm and Meter 718

24 . Tonal Organization in Polyphony, 1150–1400 747

25 . Liturgy and Plainchant, 1150–1570 774

26 . Early Polyphony 801

27 . Notre Dame 834

28 . Liturgical Polyphony after 1300 881

29 . The Emergence of Polyphonic Song 907

30 . Vernacular Song I I I : Polyphony 937

31 . The Thirteenth-Century Motet 974

32 . The Fourteenth-Century Motet 1000

33 . Latin Song I : Songs and Songbooks from the Ninth

34 . Latin Song I I : The Music and Texts of the Conductus 1048

35 . Trecento I : Secular Music 1079

36 . Trecento I I : Sacred Music and Motets in Italy and the East

37 . Ars subtilior 1125

38 . Citational Practice in the Later Middle Ages 1147

39 . “Medieval Music” or “Early European Music”? 1177

i.1 Machaut’s virelai “Douce dame jolie,” in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale

10.1 The sequence melody F U L G E N S P R E C L A R A (with its partial text

18.1 “Vue de Coucy-le-Château dans le Vermandois,” from J.-B. de

22.19 (a–c) Displacement syncopation in Zachar, “Sumite karissimi”

7.1 “Collegerunt pontiﬁces,” Graduale Triplex, 135, with kind permission

36.3 Ciconia, “Doctorum principum,” mm. 59–78 1116

1.1 Table of the modes from Boethius, De institutione musica 4.16,

E L I Z A B E T H A U B R E Y is Professor Emerita of Music at The University of Iowa. She

B E N J A M I N B A G B Y is a vocalist and harper, and is the director of the medieval

T E R E N C E B A I L E Y received his undergraduate education in Canada. After graduate

R E B E C C A A . B A L T Z E R is Professor Emerita of Musicology at the University of