ABSTRACT
The analysis of repertories of individual chant genres remains an important focus for musicologists, who have pushed beyond boundaries that constrained the field because of various factors. There is a notable convergence between the ways historians and musicologists are approaching and reassessing manuscript sources. The music within such bespoke rites was often passed down, but it was also continually adapted and sometimes extensively renewed. Musicological work that concentrates on rituals as manifested in specific manuscripts made within particular institutional and pedagogical circumstances is perhaps the most immediately useful for historians interested in liturgy. Such innovative work, offering readings of medieval liturgies informed by extensive study of the liturgical manuscripts, relies on evidence that is necessarily partial and often necessarily speculative. The differences in musical training are perhaps easier to fill in with research that aims for a practical recreation of performance techniques well documented in the sources, using performance strategies that are recoverable through further research.
