This handsomely produced and generously illustrated volume contains a collection of important contributions to the history of chant and its notation principally during the early period of musical inscription in the Latin West into the twelfth century. The most interesting articles deal with regional practices, as is often the case with studies of this nature: Jean-François Goudesenne provides a detailed survey of notations present in manuscripts from northern France; Luisa Nardini examines several witnesses from what she calls the Beneventan zone; Giovanni Cunego investigates notations in manuscripts from the diocese of Verona; Joaquim Garrigosa i Massana reviews musical witnesses and their notations produced in Catalonia; and Eva Veselovska considers the range of practices evinced by manuscripts from Central Europe. Each of these studies presents new and original material that will guide further research into their respective areas of concern. If it is true, as I have long held, that the future of chant research lies in regional investigations, then we are well served for such pursuits by these articles.
I would further single out two papers that demonstrate the utility of focusing on individual witnesses. Anne Mannion tracks the development of Anglo-Norman notation through the contributions of the several music scribes who entered music in Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3515. Changes in the neume shapes seem designed to adapt the notation for the regular imposition of the multi-line staff. Beyond the detailed observations Mannion makes in regard to the scribes of this manuscript, she also usefully shows the relationships between their work and that found in many other comparable manuscripts. By elucidating the context in which the scribes of Exeter 3515 worked, she is able to posit the existence of a scriptorium at Exeter Cathedral that produced a number of extant manuscripts and materially contributed to the development of Anglo-Norman musical notation.
Similarly, Stefania Roncroffi combines codicological and palaeographic evidence in a very compelling way to build a case for the reconstruction of a fragmentary antiphoner in Nonantolan notation produced around the turn of the twelfth century. The fragments survive as reused parchment: covers of two parochial registers from Lotta; binding materials in a parochial register from Bombiana; and a bifolium that had also served as binding material in an unknown volume. Roncroffi demonstrates remarkable perspicacity and originality in combining the evidence these fragments exhibit to make the case for their constitutingmembra disiecta of the same codex. Aside from giving us hope that the number of such fragments yet to be recovered may still be enlarged, this reconstruction illuminates liturgical, musical and notational practices in the province of Nonantolan notation and may shed light on aspects of the institutional history of the abbey of Nonantola and its dependencies: Roncroffi proposes that the antiphoner was produced for the abbey of Santa Lucia di Roffeno.
Refocusing on the overall demeanour of the collection, I would observe that many of the papers evince a tendency to emphasize the morphology of the neumes, some in great detail. While it remains true that one must begin all palaeographic investigations, whether textual or musical, with morphology (one must start by being able to read the symbols, after all), such research remains descriptive instead of analytical or critical. Symbols themselves remain inert unless one attempts to go beyond their morphology to the meaning they convey, the meaning the scribes hoped to impute and ultimately the musical events they (both the scribes and the symbols they impose on the page) purport to represent. It is the reader of the neumes who, for the most part, is missing from this discussion, the cantor of the book’s subtitle as user of notation through performance. One author who does consider musical literacy is Óscar Mascareñas Garza, who works through some of the processes involved in translating notation into musical sound, a debate on which I would hope he and the other authors of this collection will eventually expand.
Last, I would like to comment on the authors’ use of terminology with respect to the neumes themselves. The authors in the collection divide between those who use the medieval terms and those who adopt terms that describe the direction the melody takes. I do not object to either strategy, but the authors seem unaware of the rich tradition of medieval texts that preserve the Latin terms and especially the meticulous scholarship of Michael Bernhard on the subject. I refer not only to the authoritative Lexicon musicum latinum medii aevi (Munich: Verlag der Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992-2016; also available online at <https://lml.badw.de/lml-digital/zu-den-datenbanken.html>) but in particular his magisterial article "Die Überlieferung der Neumennamen im lateinischen Mittelalter," in Quellen und Studien zur Musiktheorie des Mittelalters, 2. ed. Michael Bernhard, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Veröffentlichungen der Musikhistorischen Kommission, 13 (Munich: Verlag der Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997), pp. 13-91. Scholars who write about medieval notation have an obligation not only to familiarize themselves with this rich history but to incorporate it into their research.
A case in point is the term that all authors in the collection who use the medieval nomenclature employ for the ascending binary neume, thepes. While the medieval texts attest both pes and podatus, Bernhard shows definitively that medieval authors exhibited an unequivocal preference for the latter. More grievous, however, is the persistence of the neologism epiphonus for the ascending liquescent note in place of the medieval eptaphonus. We have known at least since Constantin Floros published his Universale Neumenkunde (Kassel: Bärenreiter-Antiquariat, 1970) the nineteenth-century origins of epiphonus, while Bernhard demonstrates and documents the medieval pedigree ofeptaphonus. To use the former in place of the latter is simply ahistorical. I would consider these relatively minor blemishes on an otherwise splendid collection of articles that in many ways advances the conversation on chant notation.