ABSTRACT
Strictly speaking, only the earlier layer of monophonic chant for the Latin liturgy of the Roman church is called Gregorian chant: the texts and melodies in manuscripts before 1100 — a nucleus of liturgical chant — connected and dispersed with the authority and reputation of Gregory I (590-604) by means of poems and illustrations. The origin of Gregorian chant in divine wisdom and inspiration illuminated the music with a dignity which the new melodies and texts in the following centuries could not reach and which also influenced research in this field.
Volume 8 in the Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi series — a publication from the Institut für Musikwissenschaft of the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Bärenreiter-Verlag in Kassel — presents an edition of 470 melodies and texts for the alleluia of the mass, collected from nearly 600 manuscripts from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. This is the first glance into a hitherto unknown repertory of melodies and texts, which represent and illustrate the history and development of liturgical plainchant until the end of the Middle Ages.
It will now be possible to estimate the quantity of new chants, their liturgical function in the course of the year, the strophic forms and vocabulary of the texts, the tonality and style of the new melodies. The question can be asked: is there a uniform corpus or a number of different distinguishable traditions?
