On 3 August 1029, the monks of the abbey of St Martial in Limoges sought to inaugurate a new liturgy for their patron saint, a new liturgy that acknowledged and celebrated his status as an apostle, the younger cousin of Simon Peter, an intimate of Jesus himself, and St Peter's delegate to Gaul.

The earliest efforts to represent accurately the intervallic structure of a melody, beyond the general shape encoded in non-diastematic neumes, or to indicate specific degrees in the gamut, are commonly associated with musical notations of the latter part of the eleventh century. In various chant manuscripts of this period we find systematic use of common or special note shapes, strictly diastematic writing with respect to a drypoint line, and the earliest surviving staff notations.

On 29 June 1909, a jury of six scholars decreed that Pierre Aubry (1874–1910), in his book Trouvères et Troubadours, had stolen the ‘modal’ interpretation of medieval monophony from the young doctor Jean-Baptiste Beck (1881–1943). Aubry was to make amends for his plagiarism in two ways: first, by destroying copies of the book's first edition and issuing an emended one; second, by publishing the trial's verdict in twenty scholarly journals at his own cost. An only slightly emended Trouvères et Troubadours did appear the following year (1910), but Aubry failed to publish the jury's verdict in a single journal. A little over a year after the trial, in August of 1910, he died of a fencing wound. The following year, Beck emigrated to the United States.

From 1992 to 1996 the Liturgical chant bibliography was compiled by Peter Jeffery. His new duties as professor of music at Princeton University will prevent him from continuing his valuable annual listing of chant scholarship. The new author of the bibliography and the editors of Plainsong & Medieval Music would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his unique contribution to this journal over the past four years.