Music in the Medieval English Liturgy: Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society Centennial Essays.

ed. Susan Rankin and David Hiley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 55[pounds]

What liberties could singers of organum take at cadences in Winchester? How can one analyse music that cannot be transcribed with certainty? How |English' is English liturgical music? Answers are found in this substantial volume of essays, which opens with David Hiley's informative archival study of the Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society.

The essays span the 9th to the 16th century, and fall into three chronologically ordered sections. Four studies of musical embellishment at Winchester comprise the first, |Liturgy and liturgical music in the eleventh century'. Ritva Jacobsson analyses unique trope texts in the Cotton Troper, an 11th-century fragment with many concordances in the Winchester tropers. The unica are varied in style, language and versification; to Jacobsson they represent part of a vast pre Winchester repertory circulating in England and consisting of tropers from remote corners of Germany and southern Italy as well as identifiably English pieces. Some Cotton unica may have been omitted from the Winchester tropers because of their bland texts or defective Latin.

Series of post-Pentecostal alleluias and of certain responsories can reveal the provenance of liturgical books, because many are unique to individual churches. Michel Huglo investigates the Alleluia series of the Winchester tropers as well as the office responsories that were set to organum. After comparing them with series in insular and Continental sources, he concludes that Bury St …