Full Description
The area whose capital was the southern Lombard city of Benevento developed a culture identified with the characteristic form of writing known as the Beneventan script, which was used throughout the area and was brought to perfection at the abbey of Montecassino in the late eleventh century. This repertory, along with other now-vanished or suppressed local varieties of music, give a far richer picture of the variety of musical practice in early medieval Europe than was formerly available. Thomas Forrest Kelly has identified and collected the surviving sources of an important repertory of early medieval music; this is the so-called Beneventan Chant, used in southern Italy in the early middle ages, before the adoption there of the now-universal music known as Gregorian chant. Because it was deliberately suppressed in the course of the eleventh century, this music survives mostly in fragments and palimpsests, and the fascinating process of restoring the repertory piece by piece is told in the studies in this book. A companion volume to this collection also by Professor Kelly details the practice of Medieval music.
Contents
Contents: Introduction; Part I Repertory, Sources, Style: The Beneventan Chant; Notes on a census of Beneventan manuscripts; Music of Benevento cathedral. Part II Individual Sources: Palimpsest evidence of an Old-Beneventan gradual; Montecassino and the Old Beneventan chant; Beneventan fragments at Altamura; A musical fragment at Bisceglie containing an unknown Beneventan office; A Beneventan borrowing in the Saint Cecilia gradual; New Beneventan liturgical fragments in Lanciano, Lucera, and Penne containing further evidence of the Old Beneventan chant; New evidence of the Old Beneventan chant. Part III Context: The oldest musical notation at Montecassino; Abbot Desiderius and the two liturgical chants of Montecassino; Beneventan liturgy and music in Tuscany: Lucca, Biblioteca Capitolare Feliniana ms. 606; Non-Gregorian music in an antiphoner of Benevento; A Beneventan notated breviary in Naples (Archivio Storico Diocesano, Fondo Ebdomadari, Cod. Misc. 1, fasc. VII; Musical relations between Venice and Benevento; Tradition and innovation in the antiphoner Benevento 848; Indexes.
