The material presented here summarizes information that has come to light in the last ten years regarding the repertory and practice of the Beneventan chant of southern Italy. The information itself is provided in tabular form; the commentary that precedes it gives some brief background and points out a few interesting details.

The Beneventan chant is one of those varieties of liturgical song that made the early medieval musical landscape so much more interesting than it later became, after the Carolingian urge to unity, combined with ecclesiastical reform, created a universal music that we now call Gregorian chant. Some of these early chant repertories have survived: the Ambrosian chant of Milan; the music of the Old Spanish liturgy. Others, like the Gallican chant, have disappeared.

A model for the Roman liturgical order for processions on Sundays was Easter, the festal day described in Ordo Romanus I, rather than the preceding Sunday, perhaps a more obvious pattern for a procession within the Proprium de tempore.Michel Andrieu, ed., Les Ordines Romani du haut Moyen Age, 5 vols. (Louvain, 1931, 1948–61) II, 68–9, Ordo I, 5: ‘nam prima feria regio tertia, id est paschae, secunda feria’, etc. ; I, 7: ‘Diebus itaque sollemnibus, id est Pascha’. ‘Id est’ might be interpreted ‘for example’. Note that Easter is only one example of the papal processional procedures found only in this ordo. See John F. Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 228 (Rome, 1987), 131–2. The present study originated as a paper for the session ‘Music for Festal Days’ at the 34th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 1999. The singing by the Hebrew people of Hosanna and Benedictus qui venit to acclaim the one progressing into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday would seem to be the ideal archetype for a procession with song to replicate a biblical event, reported uniformly in all four Gospels.Matt. 21:8–9; Mark 11:8–10, Luke 19:36–8 (with different wording); John 12:12–13. The Old Testament presaging of Benedictus is Psalm 117:26. The visual replay with the symbols of olive branches and palm fronds and the commemorative Palmesel, integral to the procession, have been studied in critical detail by Karl Young and many who have followed in the wake of his pathbreaking The Drama of the Medieval Church. Much of the music has been expertly studied by Terence Bailey. On musical and prayer formularies from the typikon and early Western patristic citations (i.e. Bede, Aldhelm, Amalarius and Drogo of Metz), see Hermann J. Gräf, Palmenweihe und Palmprozession in der lateinischen Liturgie (Kaldenkirchen, 1950), 10–15, 30–2. See also Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1962), I: 90–8, 519, 527, 533, 549; Terence Bailey, The Processions of Sarum and the Western Church (Toronto, 1971), 33–40 (Examples 6–14); 166–7 (Table 2). (The acclamation Benedictus qui venit–Hosanna in excelsis that follows the Sanctus of the Mass precluded movement by its position within the liturgy.) By the time of the pilgrim Egeria, who visited Jerusalem in the early 380s, the commemoration of the Evangelists' historiae had engendered a meeting at the very spot where in biblical times infants, strewing palms sang the celebrated Benedictus verse, now converted into a refrain.‘Et jam cum coeperit esse hora undecima [die dominica] legitur ille locus de evangelio, ubi infantes cum ramis vel palmis occurrerunt Domino, dicentes: Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Et statim levat se episcopus et omnis populus; porro inde de summo monte Oliveti totum pedibus itur. Nam totus populus ante ipsum cum hymnis vel antiphonis, respondentes semper; Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’. [Peregrinatio ad loca sancta] Itinerarium 31, 1, ed. Pierre Maraval, Egérie: Journal de Voyage, Sources Chrétiennes 296 (Paris, 1982), 274; trans. John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels to the Holy Land (Jerusalem, 1981), 133. Other translations and descriptive material are found in Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. William G. Storey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen (Washington, DC, 1986), 11. On the date of Egeria's report, see Peter Jeffery, ‘The Earliest Christian Chant Repertory Recovered: The Georgian Witnesses to Jerusalem Chant’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 47/1 (1994), 2–3. Perhaps a half-century before, Chrysostom (Homilia habita in magnum hebdomadam 2) had allied the Hosanna exclamation with the exhortation ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul!’ of Psalm 145. See James McKinnon, ed., Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, 1987), 83 (no. 175); cf. Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, MN, 1991), 186. For the Palm Sunday agendas according to other Eastern practices (e.g., Armenian, Georgian and the Anastasis Typikon) see Baldovin, The Urban Character, 77, 80–1, 98.

The structure of the present Liturgical chant bibliography 9 maintains the previously established format: (1) Editions and facsimile editions, (2) Books and reprints, (3) Congress reports, (4) Chant journals, (5) Collections of essays, dictionaries and periodicals, (6) Articles in periodicals. All of the material contained in the bibliography may be accessed by means of the indices of names, subjects and manuscripts. This year, I would like to draw particular attention to several facsimile editions of chant manuscripts: Il Libro del Maestro, Piacenza 9 (9002), The York Processional (9003), the Breviarium notatum strigoniense (9005) and an Antiphonaire cistercien, XII s. (9007). The first mentioned of these facsimiles has been the centre of a number of related publications (9024, 9039, 9060, 9077f, 9138). The famous Ars nova manuscript from Cyprus (9008) has been published in facsimile. Previously, the small chant repertory it contains (fols 1-28) had been available in Richard H. Hoppin: Cypriot Plainchant of the Manuscript Torino Biblioteca Nazionale J. II. 9. A Facsimile Edition with Commentary, Musicological Studies and Documents 19 (American Institute of Musicology, 1968).