Sean Gallagher states that this is ‘to my knowledge, the first book on a medieval or renaissance composer to include recordings of his complete works’. He is too diffident. They are not just recordings but two newly prepared CDs by no less an ensemble than the Clerks' Group under Edward Wickham. Surely, the musicians who have recorded all Ockeghem's sacred music with such eloquence are the best-equipped people, world-wide, to make sense of Regis's often wayward and always unpredictable polyphony. The CDs are conveniently accommodated in sachets inside the front and back coverboards of the book. (They are, of course, the same CDs that were issued two years earlier in a strikingly elegant box-case by Musique en Wallonie; and probably few readers of these lines will need telling that the figure behind both this and the series ‘Épitome musical’ is the indefatigable Philippe Vendrix – whose efforts here merit a serious salute.)

In addition, though, Gallagher prepared new editions of all the music and supervised all the recording sessions. He is of course no newcomer to the topic. His various publications on Regis reach back to 1996 and have been coming out regularly since then. Nevertheless, the experience of those recordings with those particular musicians plainly shows in the book. Profusely equipped with musical examples and references to particular passages on the recordings, his chapters on the music are packed with detailed observations of a kind that could not have happened without that background.

Beyond that, the very difficult Latin texts have been given ‘the treatment’ by Leofranc Holford-Strevens, who has been providing that service for musical texts of the fifteenth century for the past twenty years. The full details of what Holford-Strevens has done to them, and why, will appear elsewhere in a separate article, but the upshot of his investigations is clearly stated here (pp. 181–2). Heinz-Jürgen Winkler in his 1999 monograph described the Regis motet texts in the Chigi Codex as korrupt überliefert, which is true; but they are also very badly written by an author with a weak grasp of Latin prosody and grammar. Gallagher reports that ‘even when one allows for problems of transmission, [they] are awkward, overly ambitious attempts at quantitative verse, riddled with errors of various kinds’. He also hints that they may be by Regis himself, who could have been trying to emulate Du Fay's fluent Latinism.

The book has that rarity among book publications these days, footnotes on the page, which makes life enormously easier for the normal reader (since nothing interrupts the flow of reading more than having to dig into the back of a book for the notes and nothing distracts the attention more than the knowledge that there is material one has not the energy to dig out). Its elegant layout and luxurious musical examples all contribute to a thoroughly satisfying ensemble. In short, this is luxury treatment.

But then, Regis has been unusually well treated over the years, particularly when seen alongside other composers with a comparable surviving output. Already in the second edition of Fétis's Biographie universelle des musiciens (1864) nearly all of his works were listed; and Fétis also got his dates more or less right. Eitner (1903) gave a complete list of the works only excepting the song Puis que ma dame, which had to wait until the discovery of the Mellon Chansonnier in 1939. But the reports continued to be substantial and substantially correct, through the early Grove and Riemann editions, and so on. Not only that, but Regis was the topic of a monograph in 1938 by Cornelis Lindenburg, an intensively detailed doctoral thesis done under the direction of Albert Smijers. At a fairly early stage scholars became particularly aware of the importance of his motets. Perhaps the first clear statement here is that of Heinrich Besseler in his Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (1931), which included the opening paragraph of Clangat plebs. But the story continued with star billing in Wolfgang Stephan's Die burgundisch-niederländische Motette (1937); and in the years after the Second World War Regis continued to occupy a prominent place in the writings of Gustave Reese, Edgar Sparks, Edward E. Lowinsky and others. Lowinsky in particular saw Regis as the chockstone between the generations of Du Fay and Josquin.

Increasingly, then, the focus was on the seven five-voice motets, works that plainly break new boundaries in musical expression, as Tinctoris noted at the time. Two of those motets lack a voice in the surviving source, but it is easy enough to see that they too were marvellous pieces. One of them has now been reconstructed by Theodor Dumitrescu and included on the CDs – sounding strangely English-influenced in some respects.

Beyond those seven magical works, his known output is puzzling and disparate. Two very odd mass cycles and an even odder Patrem vilayge (to which I shall return); one three-voice motet; and two songs, one of them among the loveliest of its generation and the other totally incomprehensible. It is fair to say that the writings of the last sixty years have more or less ignored these other pieces. But the motets did receive another round of detailed investigation in Winkler's 1994 doctoral thesis, prepared under the direction of Ludwig Finscher and published in 1999 as Die Tenormotetten von Johannes Regis in der Überlieferung des Chigi-Codex, with a second volume containing new editions of all the motets in the Chigi Codex.

What Sean Gallagher now does is to pull together the whole picture in the light of modern research and particularly in the light of his enormously broad knowledge of the entire musical repertory from the later fifteenth century (the writing buzzes with fireworks that zoom off and illuminate vast areas of the musical background). His own doctoral thesis (Harvard, 1998), ‘Models of Varietas: Studies in Style and Attribution in the Motets of Johannes Regis and his Contemporaries’, says relatively little about Regis, despite its title, and has very little in common with the present book apart from a few paragraphs here and there. As an example: in his dissertation Gallagher devoted almost twenty very interesting pages (269–86) to the anonymous six-voice motet Ave rosa speciosa, which Edward Houghton attributed to Regis; now he dismisses it with a curt couple of pages as not the work of Regis but owing something to his influence. (I actually think he may be wrong here, but he makes his position quite clear.)

He wastes very little space on summarising what earlier scholars have said, in particular his two excellent predecessors as doctoral candidates on the topic of Regis, namely Lindenburg and Winkler. Perhaps this was because he did not want to discourage readers from continuing to use their books. Or perhaps he decided he needed to keep his own book compact, which indeed it is, with just over 200 pages of main text, among which there are very many full-page and double-page musical examples.

Gallagher has cast his book in just four large chapters. The first takes on all the biographical material and says a little about sources. The second, which is perhaps the core chapter, lays out his views on the L'homme armé mass, plausibly associating it with Cambrai Cathedral and a foundation by Michel de Beringhen – the same man who had earlier founded the Recollection of the Feasts of the Virgin with music by Du Fay. The Ecce ancilla mass is the main topic of the third chapter, which takes the title ‘A Combinative Art’ and includes discussion of the two songs and O admirabile commercium. That leaves him the last chapter in which to describe the other motets. This is all very neatly done; and at last we have the full survey that Regis merits.

But there are obviously issues. One of them concerns the ‘French’ Johannes Regis, mentioned earlier by Pamela Starr and Agostino Magro. He was a canon of St-Martin, Tours, alongside Ockeghem and treasurer of Reims cathedral (while Ockeghem was treasurer of Tours); and plainly he was not the same person as the choirmaster and schoolmaster at Soignies here identified as the composer. Gallagher approaches this problem by saying that there is no direct evidence in the documents that the ‘French’ Regis was a composer or even a musician, which may or may not be relevant. He also says that he was definitely not ‘the’ composer; but that is to duck a serious question buried in here, namely that within the body of music ascribed to Regis there could in fact be two composers. It is easy enough to agree that there is just one composer among the motets in five voices but a little harder to feel confident that this is also the composer of the mass music, for example. Gallagher never addresses that possibility. He does propose that the mass music is from the early 1460s and the motets from the early 1470s, which seems sensible. And it is obviously possible that Regis moved in ten years from being the seriously verbose composer of aimless and gawky lines in the Ecce ancilla mass to the highly attractive and controlled composer of the motets that seem indeed to be from the 1470s. But it is also possible that the composer of the motets in five voices was actually the younger colleague of Ockeghem, himself a major pioneer in five-voice writing. That could explain why most of the Regis motets are in the Chigi Codex, the main source of our knowledge of Ockeghem's masses. After all, now that the Chigi Codex looks most likely to have been copied in 1504–5,Footnote ¹ rather than in the late 1490s, it is harder for us to believe it was a memorial volume for Ockeghem and Regis as we did twenty years ago. And it is in this context that it becomes a matter of major importance whether the anonymous six-voice motet Ave rosa speciosa is really by Regis or not (as I mentioned, I am not convinced by the arguments against it either by Gallagher or by Winkler). I am by no means certain that the two-Regis idea can be made to stand up; but it would be reassuring if Gallagher could one day give a stronger statement of why all this varied music is by a single composer who could not also have composed Ave rosa speciosa.

Gallagher also argues that Regis was not with Du Fay during the 1440s. This is a hard one, on which I have changed my own mind over the years, as Gallagher acknowledges. It goes back to a remark in Du Fay's probate report, which describes Regis as ‘qui fu clerc audit deffunct’. At first I thought (Dufay: 1982), as Gallagher does now, that the reference merely acknowledged Regis as the collector of the income so that it could be used for a memorial mass in the church of St-Vincent in Soignies. Coming back to the matter in the context of a special study of Regis (1989), I felt rather differently about it, thinking I had been a touch naive earlier. This really is a most surprising comment that is hard to dismiss as meaning just that Regis collected the income. Or at least that was how it began to seem to me. But most particularly I felt (though I didn't actually say so) that his earlier music is the music of somebody who has looked at and listened to too much Du Fay but was mad enough and individualistic enough not to get his copies quite right. Gallagher more or less agrees with me on the influence of Du Fay but returns to my 1982 position on the document. Since both my positions on this are now so long in the past I can live with either. But the only new consideration that Gallagher brings to the table here is that this is the second reference to Regis in the executors' account of Du Fay's will, and why is this not mentioned in the first reference? Well: what I do not share with Gallagher is the conviction that a lawyer's report on the estate of a moderately affluent Cambrai canon can be read so closely for biographical details. I also do not share with him the view that the absence of any reference to Regis in the admittedly copious documents from Cambrai Cathedral is a persuasive argument against the theory. Either way: we agree that the mass Ecce ancilla, in particular, is plainly the work of a man who knew Du Fay's later works, admired them, and wished to emulate them but had at that point no very deep understanding of how the effect was generated.

The one area where Regis has been less lucky has been in the matter of editions. An eloquent example of this is the Christmas motet O admirabile commercium, one of his most complex and bizarre pieces – a delightful jumble of all kinds of different materials, memorably described by Reinhard Strohm as ‘a huge Christmas pie’ and performed with truly virtuosic abandon by the Clerks' Group on the accompanying CDs. Cornelis Lindenburg edited it beautifully at the end of his 1938 book: unreduced note-values, regular barring right through the stave every nine minime, nice clearly printed text, fourteen pages of beautiful typography. Eighteen years later the world had changed, and his complete Regis edition for Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae (ser. 9, 1956) is one of the most incomprehensible scores in that distinguished series: quartered note-values as were almost always used in the 1950s; Mensurstriche (one of the horridest manifestations of mid-century musicology) every eighteen minime; beaming and stemming of the notes that may be partly analytical but certainly adds much to the difficulties of reading this intricate music. For some reason it occupies twelve large pages of the worst 1950s engraving. Those were also the years in which serious musicians despised the octave-transposed treble clef, so the contratenor bassus jumps around between treble clef and bass clef in an absurd and seriously distracting manner. (Lindenburg had used the transposed treble clef in his 1938 edition but seems to have changed in line with what was apparently then house policy for CMM.) Small wonder that neither Regis nor Lindenburg was taken very seriously in those years. It was over forty years later than somebody decided it would be easier to understand Regis if we had some clearer editions. So Winkler had another shot (intriguingly published by Gallagher's publisher, Brepols): halved note-values (those were the 1990s); Mensurstriche (still! almost forty years after Lowinsky had exploded the practice); no editorial accidentals (heaven forbid, we all thought back then); fourteen pages (again) of fairly elegant typography on large pages but text just bunged in wherever it happens to come in the Chigi Codex, or at least as close as you can get to matching in type what a skilled scribe chose to do in the early sixteenth century. Those were the days when an editor was stepping well out of line if he allowed his own views or, even worse, analytical considerations to soil an edition; but actually there is some wildly and obviously wrong text placement in the sources, very much in need of careful critical work. Now Sean Gallagher has had a go – or at least, since editing is deemed unscholarly in many of the best academic circles, he has given five musical examples that between them amount to about two-thirds of the whole motet. Being 2011, they are in unreduced note-values, with proper barlines and nice elegant typography that would have taken up fourteen pages, like the first of Lindenburg's editions. But since this is musical examples rather than a critical edition there is absolutely no textual commentary. So with the fourth modern edition of the piece we are not much further along. There is nothing anybody could sing from apart from the 1938 edition of Lindenburg (which is actually still easy enough to obtain new for around €25, thanks to the facilities now provided by the world-wide web).

Which in its turn draws attention to the one respect in which Gallagher seems to have dropped the ball, namely as concerns the Cambrai MS 18, which contains the Patrem vilayge in a copy not known to Lindenburg and apparently not otherwise discussed in the literature. This piece was hitherto known from a Petrucci print that telescopes the texts, which is a very rare thing to happen in non-English music. And his telescoping must be wrong, not least because, as Gallagher notes, the secunda pars opens with two voices singing ‘Crucifixus est’ while the other two voices sing ‘Et resurrexit’; beyond that, there are several places with three texts running simultaneously. The result is complete nonsense, musically speaking. Gallagher mentions that the Cambrai manuscript has the text presented straightforwardly, without any telescoping: indeed it does, though it misses a few phrases of text in the prima pars and a much larger portion in the secunda pars. Rather than give any example of how the music looks in the Cambrai version, he states that Petrucci's absurd telescoping ‘would be consistent’ with the multiple texting of the two early mass cycles. Perhaps, but it would have been so good to have a copy of the music with the coherent Cambrai text, certainly copied long after Regis's death but at least copied at Cambrai Cathedral, no great distance from Soignies and indeed the cathedral church of that diocese. There are some editing problems, to be sure; and there is one chunk of text that is in entirely the wrong place. But the upshot looks a lot more sensible, so it is a pity that Gallagher neither printed it nor included it in the recording.

But that of course brings us back to the matter of editions. It looks as though in most other cases Gallagher now has all the material together for a new edition of Regis. It would be so great if he could provide this.