ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to develop the notion of the melodyword, the melodic setting of discrete words of the text. The melodic line alone, delivered unambiguously by later medieval notation, then, would seem to offer little in the way of performance indicators beyond the pitches themselves. To analyse the smaller elements of a single office, let alone an office in its wider context, requires the help of the computer and an electronic encoding of the textual, notational and musical details. A presentation of musical examples unfortunately eliminates all of the intimate visual relationship between music and its original notation, mentioned earlier. For the texts, mostly monastic, and for all the chants the base is a version delivered by the majority of sources, linguistically correct for the texts and musically feasible for the chants. The presence of extraneous repetitions of vowels under melismas implies a musically knowledgeable scribe.
