The beautifully produced volumes and CDs of Manuel Pedro Ferreira's Anthology give a panorama of early Portuguese music. Each piece edited in volume 2 has a short commentary (in volume 1) touching on the performance context, the meaning of the text, the sources relied on, and the relationship with previous editions. The selection of pieces draws on those of Portuguese origin, pieces preserved in Portuguese libraries (some of which were transmitted widely), and pieces with some topical connection to Portugal (including some of the Cantigas de Santa Maria whose miracle stories are set in that area of the Iberian Peninsula, and chants in honour of Portuguese saints). Indeed, the introduction begins with a succinct discussion of the different ways one might define ‘Portuguese’ (as implying political unity, referring to a particular territory, or signalling cultural continuity). In this edition and commentary, Ferreira draws on the expertise of several notable editors and musicologists in the field of early Portuguese music, although he has edited the bulk of the material himself. The pieces have been newly edited, with occasionally disconcerting results: the Old Hispanic responsory Dies mei is edited here with final on E rather than the D-final version made familiar by the edition in Rojo and Prado's El Canto Mozárabe (1929). The chant is preserved (in a San Millan de la Cogolla manuscript Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia MS 56, fol. 26) in Aquitanian notation without clefs, so that either interpretation may be correct.

The two CD recordings accompanying the Anthology are performed by Ferreira's ensemble, Vozes Alfonsinas. The first is largely a companion to the edition. It is perhaps a pity that one cantiga (Quen vai contra Santa Maria), one instrumental piece, and the Romance da queda de Granada are not included in the edition as well as being on the CD but, despite this, the selection is well chosen and beautifully performed. Highlights include duet performances of some of the early polyphony. The second CD is a much appreciated inclusion. This is an older recording (from 2000), consisting of material relating to the feast of Saint Gerald of Braga. It begins with the famous Song of the Sybil, sung at Vespers; the ensemble then perform the proper of the Mass, some set to polyphony, as well as the troped Epistle preserved in Braga's Arquivio Distrital MS 1000 (the Missal of Mateus); and they conclude with the chants associated with the first nocturn of Matins. Only a handful of thismaterial is included in the edition, but this does not detract from the beauty of the singing and the value of the disc as an aid to re-imagining the medieval liturgical soundscape of one of Braga's most important feasts.

The sixteen colour plates at the centre of volume 1 are of very high quality. It is particularly valuable to have colour images here of some of the earliest material preserved in Portugal: the Old Hispanic Coimbra fragment,Footnote ¹ and one side of the Lamego fragment, an image previously widely available only in black and white.Footnote ² The majority of the colour plates comprise sources of liturgical monophony. There are also two pieces of two-part polyphony, an incomplete polyphonic fragment (where only half of each system has been preserved), and the Kyrie from the Bruxel Mass. The last two items are not included in the anthology.

Volume 1 opens with a succinct and useful general introduction to early Portuguese music. Extending to almost 100 pages, it is divided into short sections for each topic, usually of two or three pages each, arranged chronologically (Visigothic music, Islamic music, etc.) and by repertory (secular Renaissance song, the impact of humanism on Latin song, etc.). There are some points of considerable interest to a non-specialist in Portuguese music: the links between Portugal and England in the later Middle Ages, for example, as manifested both in Sarum characteristics found in Portuguese liturgical manuscripts and in the polyphonic repertory. The close discussion of Martin Codax's musical style is also of particular value. There are several black and white illustrative images within the introduction (some of which are details of pages reproduced in colour in the centre of the volume).

A project such as this Anthology makes no claim to comprehensive treatment of any of the repertories under discussion, of course; those craving closer examination of the early monophonic repertories of Portugal are well served by the volume Medieval Sacred Chant: from Japan to Portugal, also edited by Ferreira and published in 2008. This collection includes articles about Buddhist, Russian, Byzantine, Old Roman and Gregorian chant, as well as the monophonic material in the Las Huelgas codex, none of which will be discussed further here (see listing on p. 174). João Pedro d'Alvarenga explores the identifying characteristics of the Aquitanian notational style whose influence on chant notation continued in Portugal until the sixteenth century. These characteristics include the single line, the notational axis and the form (for example) of the virga, leaning diagonally upwards to the right. He argues that the changes of the notation over time (for example, the angular appearance and the simplified graphemes) are the consequence of a shift in calligraphic style, from Caroline to Gothic. Later notation is considered by José Maria Pedrosa Cardoso, who brings together Portuguese documentary and notational evidence pertaining to the use of mensural notation for parts of the chant repertory in the sixteenth century. Of all the essays in this collection, the one with the furthest-reaching consequences, to my mind, is that by Ferreira himself. He builds a persuasive case that the responsory Conclusit vias meas, widely transmitted in its Gregorian redaction, had an Old Hispanic origin. A close reading of the chant's pitched melodic profile in its varying Gregorian forms is compared with the adiastematic neumes of the Old Hispanic version. This allows Ferreira to build a hypothesis about the possible tonal language, range, and gestural contour of the Old Hispanic chant. This methodology has been revisited with some success recently, by Ferreira himself, in a paper presented at the León symposium in 2011 and forthcoming in its proceedings, as well as by others. A critical stumbling block in the study of the earliest preserved Iberian music – the Old Hispanic chant tradition – has been the lack of pitch specificity in the notation in which the vast majority of the corpus survives. Indeed the first colour plates in Ferreira's Antologia show us Old Hispanic chants that are untranscribable and unperformable in modern times. Ferreira's essay in Medieval Sacred Chant offers one way in which scholars may be able to pinpoint at least some elements of individual Old Hispanic melodies by comparison with cognate chants elsewhere, even if exact transcriptions remain beyond our grasp.