Medieval music refuses to be confined to ancient monasteries or dusty archives. Thomas Forrest Kelly's interests illustrate this, as a model of how ‘old’ music can inspire new questions and new pursuits. This book is a collection of essays dedicated to Kelly and is a product of a conference held in his honour at Harvard in 2009. Its contents run the gamut of his characteristically wide scope, with sections on Beneventan chant and its influence, localised incarnations of medieval chant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studies on specific chant sources and research problems, and accounts of culturally significant premiere performances. In this kaleidoscope of subjects and viewpoints, there is much for students, musicologists, performers and general historians.

Part I, ‘First Nights: Early Music in Paris and Rome’, comprises essays by Craig Wright, Iain Fenlon and Peter Bloom, on medieval notation in Paris, sacred drama in Baroque Rome and the premiere of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, respectively. Wright, a fellow graduate student of Kelly's in the 1960s, opens with a lively account of Nino Pirrotta's class on medieval notations, writing: ‘Our assignment was to convert these medieval documents into equivalents in modern musical notation. At no time did we ask: “Why should we want to do this?” “What might we accomplish?” … It was not our place to challenge the rules of the game’ (p. 4). He then describes the rise of musical notation in the West and the influence of Scholasticism, through the rediscovery of Aristotle, on the rhythmic notations of thirteenth-century Paris. He argues that Aristotle's quantitative reasoning influenced how we conceive of music even today, and has set Western music apart from other musical cultures. (As a personal note, I chose to assign this chapter as required reading for my own Early Notations class this past semester and its accessible style, visual examples of notational systems and convincing thesis inspired even more classroom discussion than I had anticipated!) Fenlon's contribution characterises the sacred drama Sant' Alessio, commissioned by Francesco Barberini from Stefano Landi in the late 1620s, as the Roman response to Protestant threats. Bloom's chapter follows the model of Kelly's famous ‘First Nights’ course at Harvard, detailing the cultural context and significance of Berlioz's famous Symphonie and pointing out the medieval echoes to be heard in his inclusion of the Dies Irae and use of bells.

Part II contains studies of specific repertories of chant with a connection to Kelly's special interest, the Beneventan tradition. David Hiley examines the chronological layers of a set of chants for St Peter, beginning in ninth-century Rome and itemising Frankish additions, before outlining the thirteenth-century attempts to bring out the dramatic aspects of St Peter's life in sources from Winchester and Peterborough. His inclusion of full chant texts and transcriptions as well as several tables displaying liturgical and modal orders illustrate the increasing complexity of historia composition through the Middle Ages. Katarina Livljanić's focus is on the recitative-like melodies of the Genealogy of Christ according to St Luke, as found in seven Dalmatian sources. She identifies two different structures for the chant itself, one showing more Norman influence, and the other, Beneventan. One thirteenth-century fragment (Rab, Nadžupski ured, s.n.) inexplicably presents the names in a melodic order that is not the genealogical order. This seems to reflect the complex relationship between musical literacy and oral (Glagolitic) tradition. Matthew Peattie's study of the interaction between Beneventan chant and Gregorian modal structures suggests the Beneventan musical tradition was modified in various stages. He uses chant examples that differentiate ‘pure’ Beneventan melodies from those that retain their characteristic Beneventan gestures but are partially or fully transposed according to Gregorian rules, or those in mixed modes altogether, if not written out in an entirely ‘transformed modal space’ (p. 139). The last contribution to this section is Andreas Pfisterer's study of three Easter Vigil Canticles from the traditions of Verona, Pistoia, Milan and Benevento, concluding that the mix of pre-Carolingian influences found in the Beneventan tradition is easier to decode when more context is found for it.

The next section of the book features two studies of localised musical traditions that contain medieval influences: seventeenth-century Iceland and eighteenth-century Toledo. Árni Ingólfsson characterises Iceland as being on the ‘double periphery’ (p. 166) – a colony of the already ‘peripheral’ Denmark – possessing musical fragments and manuscripts mostly post-dating the Reformation. One songbook, Rask 98, dated to 1660, is of particular interest as it seems to represent popular music from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, assembled in a way that highlights the effects of oral, rather than written, transmission. Susan Boynton's chapter tells the story of an eighteenth-century Jesuit scholar named Andrés Marcos Burriel, who realised that Toledo's fifteenth-century books did not represent the authentic medieval Visigothic tradition. With the help of a professional scribe, he produced a hand-made facsimile of the manuscript Toledo, Biblioteca Capitular MS 35.7, despite having little idea of how the neumes actually sounded – a situation that, sadly, still haunts modern scholars.

Next, two further studies by Andreas Haug and Susan Rankin stress the importance of chant text. Haug examines the way Latin hexameters were set to music, using poems in song collections, hymns and antiphons. While it seems that caesuras and quantities of Latin syllables are not reliably reflected in musical settings, he does find that the syllable before the caesura will always be unaccented but, because it is the first syllable of a foot, will usually have the ictus. Rankin's chapter on Alcuin's devotional book, written before 786, underlines the differences between the York and Roman liturgies, even though these two regions are usually thought of as having similar traditions. This reminds us of the dangers of extrapolating an earlier history of office chants from Gregorian books written after the ninth century, since the scant evidence remaining suggests that there were significant variations, in both text and melody.

Two chapters concerning music in medieval France conclude the book. Marie-Noël Colette describes the two folios of a fragment (BNF n.a. lat. 2444, ff. 5–6) from around the turn of the eleventh century, containing two Kyrie tropes, two troped Sanctus and two non-troped Sanctus. Given the atypical Aquitanian notation (with identifiable Messine elements) in which it was written, she suggests that perhaps the fragment comes from a lost source from the abbey of Aurillac. The ‘Topography of Music Theory in Paris, 900–1450’ is the collaborative effort of Michel Huglo and Barbara Haggh, with an English translation by Leofranc Holford-Strevens of a letter by Johannes de Muris. Here, they identify music theory books used in monasteries, universities, colleges and secular churches in medieval Paris, using RISM and library catalogues. Their conclusion is that there was, in fact, no official place for music on the curriculum itself, although it would have been taught in the thirteenth century as part of the quadrivium at the University of Paris. Music students studied sections of Aristotle's Problemata physica and Boethius' Logica vetus and De institutione musica; surprisingly there is no evidence that Hucbald's Musica disciplina was known in Paris, nor the writings of Philippe de Vitry. There is much work for the future here, from conducting a palaeographical assessment of the medieval music theory repertory, to assessing its compilations and studying the glosses.

This book highlights the variety of approaches that enlivens the study of chant and medieval music today, offering broad overviews, assessments of specific problems or lacunae in scholarship, and descriptions of new sources and areas of research for further study. Each contributes to the discussion concerning what Craig Wright calls ‘the most basic question: “What is this document that we see on the page?”’ (p. 7).