In the mid-fourteenth century the Black Death inflicted one of the most devastating losses of life in human history. This was met by exercises of collective piety such as the singing of psalms and the celebration of special votive masses, which encouraged social cohesion in the face of the tragedy. This article presents results from an analysis of fifty-seven manuscripts containing copies of the monophonic ‘Recordare domine’ Mass, reportedly created at the behest of Clement VI at Avignon during his Black Death-spanning pontificate. Of these, seven manuscripts contain fully notated renditions of each of the chants for the Mass Propers, enabling us to decouple questions concerning the organisation and transmission of the melodies from those of the texts set to them. When the different versions of the Mass are compared, two major findings emerge. First, differential patterns of consistency within the texts and melodies suggest that the texts of the ‘Recordare domine’ Mass may have circulated separately from the melodies set to them, with the choice of music left to the discretion of the local performing clergy. Second, the patterns of variation between different versions of the Proper texts and melodies allow us to see how a variety of composition strategies (including mnemonic processes) were used to create new music for the mass. The ‘Recordare domine’ Mass thus sheds light not only on the performance of organised sacred music at a pivotal point in European history, but also more generally on the processes of chant composition as a tool for use in response to social stress.

On 3 August 1029, Adémar de Chabannes inaugurated his newly-composed liturgy for the Feast of Saint Martial that recognized Martial, patron saint of the abbey that bears his name in Limoges, as an apostle. The Mass of the day was celebrated at the cathedral of Saint Stephen in Limoges, with the full support of Odolric, abbot of Saint Martial, and Jordan, the city's bishop. Adémar created a grand musical canvas to form part of the spectacular ceremony that took place that day. Among the original compositions he created for the Mass are several in which the literary text moves far into the background behind elaborate melismatic settings, and, in one case, the offertory of the Mass, the text virtually disappears. With these gestures, Adémar seems to be stepping beyond the verbal text to address the non-Latin speaking populace of Limoges directly in melody, to convince them of the necessity of acknowledging what most of them knew to be untrue: that Martial, their patron saint, was an apostle.

Eight times a day, the prayer Deus in adiutorium meum intende sounded from the lips of the faithful as the standard introduction to the Office Hours. Infiltrating daily life through the liturgy and popular interjections, the psalm verse Deus in adiutorium served a devotional function marked by versatility and popularity. Yet, despite its omnipresence, as well as its inherently vocalic identity, the verse was only rarely troped musically or poetically. A collection of thirteenth-century monophonic and polyphonic tropes of the verse circulating in France in motet collections and festive offices represents one of the few moments of heightened musical interest in the prayer. This article draws attention, for the first time, to the musical and textual connection between these tropes and Pater creator omnium, a thirteenth-century refrain song. This monophonic song from France also belongs firmly to the medieval cento genre, with both its musical and textual construction based on the piecing together of borrowed text and music – including Deus in adiutorium. This article argues that Pater creator omnium stands at the intersection of two important yet understudied histories: the musical and textual troping of Deus in adiutorium and the medieval cento. Analysis of this song ultimately illustrates the creative processes behind the making of a pre-modern song.

An early fourteenth-century gradual produced for use in Avignon and today preserved in Rome at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore is a new source for understanding the musical and liturgical exchange between France and Italy in the fourteenth century. The present article will consider compositions written after the main body of the gradual, and found now in the initial fascicle and on the last three folios of the manuscript. These folios contain a hitherto unknown source for the Credo of Tournai as well as other works not recorded elsewhere; for example, a polyphonic Gloria, a polyphonic Credo, a troped Sanctus and a Credo in cantus fractus.

Guillaume de Machaut's autobiographical poem, Le Voir Dit, has been known to musicians mainly by reputation. In 1928 Friedrich Ludwig printed extracts from passages on music in the introduction to his edition of Machaut's complete musical works, in 1969 Sarah Jane Williams examined Machaut's remarks about manuscript production, and in a more general article, for the 1977 Machaut anniversary, she introduced Le Voir Dit to non-specialists. On the whole, however, musicians have been content to leave study of the complete text to scholars of Middle French. Their priorities are, of course, very different; much of the most influential writing on Le Voir Dit from the last twenty years has been concerned to show how the text might be read in a structuralist or post-structuralist manner, and has placed relatively little emphasis on more positivistic questions such as how the text was compiled or its relationship to the historical persons and events it mentions. Yet to anyone interested in the origins and function of this extraordinary document such issues seem fundamental; indeed, the historically minded reader might wonder how the text can be understood at all until such matters have been addressed.

The music for the Office of St Ethelbert, king and martyr, survives uniquely in the thirteenth-century Hereford Noted Breviary. While some of the chants are contrafacta, others appear to be unique to this office and even in some cases to be influenced by the content of their texts, which are based on the vita of the sainted king by Gerald of Wales. The form in which the office was performed depended on its position in relation to the Easter Cycle (the feast fell on 20 May), and this in turn raises issues for the editing of such offices in modern times.

The manuscript 3314/15 of the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek at Darmstadt (originally from Seligenstadt) contains a fragment of a mid-twelfth-century tonary that is essentially identical to interpolations in the tonary of Theoger of Metz transmitted in the manuscript Kassel, 4o Mss. Math. 1. The Seligenstadt tonary is of especial interest, inasmuch as it is one of the first sources to cite differentiae peregrinae in addition to the ordinary differentiae for the psalm tones in each of the ecclesiastical modes. These irregular differentiae were designated ‘peregrinae’ for the first time by Berno. Differentiae peregrinae are occasionally mentioned in the south German cultural sphere during the twelfth century, but by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were being discussed frequently. It is precisely at this time that the fourth differentia of the eighth ecclesiastical mode came to be known as the ‘tonus peregrinus’.

Among the ten celebrations of the Mass of St Basil in the Orthodox Church during the year are the conclusions to the three Vesper services immediately before the three major feasts of Christmas, Epiphany and Easter. Two of these Vesper services – those for Christmas Eve and the Eve of Epiphany – are of particular musical interest since they contain psalms with troparia or antiphons, for both of which the entire music can be transcribed from thirteenth-century manuscripts, so that these two services can be celebrated with what are, almost certainly, the oldest known complete examples of Byzantine psalm singing. From a recent paper of mine on these psalms, it can be gathered that they are examples of what is known as ‘responsorial psalmody’, the psalm itself being sung by a soloist, and the attached troparion by a choir of trained singers or psaltae. In both services they occur as punctuations of a series of readings, appearing in each case after the third and the sixth reading. On the Eve of Epiphany we should perhaps expect to find further psalms after the ninth and twelfth readings, since the series extends to thirteen readings in modern service books and to twelve in the early Middle Ages; yet no such psalms appear now or seem ever to have been sung at this point. And similarly, on Holy Saturday, when according to the ancient Jerusalem cursus twelve readings were given, to be extended in Constantinople to fifteen, no equivalents seem to have been performed at any point.

From 1992 to 1996 the Liturgical chant bibliography was compiled by Peter Jeffery. His new duties as professor of music at Princeton University will prevent him from continuing his valuable annual listing of chant scholarship. The new author of the bibliography and the editors of Plainsong & Medieval Music would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his unique contribution to this journal over the past four years.

It is possible to attach too much significance to the names of both the hypakoae and the prokeimena. The word ‘hypakoe’ means ‘respond’, but this by itself does not mean that the Byzantine hypakoae were chants that derived from responsorially performed psalms (even though that is what they may ultimately have been), for the name might well refer simply to a responsorial method of singing them which, evidence suggests, prevailed between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

The biography of Pope Celestine I (422–32) in the first edition of the Liber pontificalis (c.530) credits him with introducing the singing of ‘psalmi ante sacrificium’ at Mass. Several decades later, the second edition added that these psalms were sung ‘antephanatim ex omnibus’. Since the early ninth century, these statements have been interpreted to mean that Celestine introduced the introit chant, a conclusion challenged for the first time about twenty-five years ago. The new interpretation of the passage proposed that Celestine did not introduce the introit, but the responsorial psalm sung between the (two) readings at Mass. An analysis of the terminology used in Celestine's biography, especially the word sacrificium, indicates that the Liber pontificalis author did most likely intend to attribute to him the introduction of the introit, which was certainly in existence by the early sixth century. The presence of a processional solea in certain churches of Rome and the North Adriatic littoral indicates that architectural accommodations were being made for the entrance procession by the fifth century. Psalmic texts form the basis of the repertoire, and non-psalmic introits give every indication of post-dating those with texts drawn from the Psalter.

Relationships between Aquitanian versus and troubadour song have often been adduced, particularly with respect to formal structures or terminology (the term vers used by some troubadours could come from versus). This study adopts a different approach, emphasizing comparative examination of musico-poetic techniques on which much work remains to be done. It uses the refrain – not hitherto a subject of substantive comparative study of these repertories – as a focus of analysis in selected versus and early troubadour pieces. It demonstrates both the rich inventiveness of refrain techniques and how these techniques, deployed in different linguistic environments and in different cultural contexts, shed light on the specificities as well as similarities of each repertory and nourish the individual expressiveness characteristic of the early twelfth-century ‘New Song’.

Two recently discovered manuscripts have shed new light on chant cultivation at Egmond Abbey during the late Middle Ages. Together with the only previously known chant source from the abbey, these enable us to reconstruct the hitherto unknown Office of its patron saint, Adalbert (25th of June). Palaeographic details, moreover, provide new insights into the significance of Egmond as a centre of chant cultivation.

What did the planctus mean to Abelard? During the 1130s Abelard was rethinking this musical genre and its potential for expressing personalized, dramatic lament. Abelard's relationship with Heloise at this time (and indeed her own literary output) may have provoked a reaction to the generic features of the planctus.

Chansonniers copied from the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries are the earliest extant sources to include an extensive corpus of lyrics in European vernacular languages. However, contemporary literary sources refer to the existence of earlier books of vernacular lyrics, and a handful of notated lyrics survive from as early as the twelfth century. This article explores a certain type of notated song that predates the relatively well-documented chansonnier tradition by some decades, specifically focusing on the case study of the crusader recruitment song Chevalier mult estes guariz (RS 1548a), composed around the mid-1140s. Probably the earliest extant copy of an Old French lyric (with or without musical notation), this unicum is distinct from songs of the kind preserved in the chansonniers in several respects, especially in its musical form, its manuscript appearance and its intended use in the Middle Ages. I examine this song from several angles, including its crusading theme, provenance, authorship, manuscript presentation, musical construction, intended audience, and the broader contexts of its composition and copying. Such close examination of a single song not only offers insights into the context of an early tradition of written-out vernacular monophony but also casts new light on the origins of the later chansonnier tradition.

It is well known how, at the time of the Conquest, Osmund, son of Henry, Count of Sées, and Isabella, sister of William the Conqueror, accompanied the new king to England; how he there became first William's chaplain, then Chancellor (1072), and finally Bishop of Salisbury (1078).

More than thirty years ago, Jacques Handschin drew general attention to certain striking melismas in Ambrosian chant. He identified these as tropes – referring to them as ‘prototypes’ – and he noted the importance in their construction of repetitions, both exact and approximate, repetitions that involved both brief motives and lengthy passages.