As its title suggests, this thirty-eighth volume of Études grégoriennes celebrates one thousand years since the founding of the Benedictine priory of Le Mans, which was later to become the revered Abbey of St Peter at Solesmes. Chant scholars and musicians from England, Germany, Belgium, Israel, the United States and France gathered in Sablé and Solesmes in September 2010 to exchange ideas and attend a manuscript exhibition and a concert of medieval music. This collection of proceedings focuses on the origins, development and current incarnations of Gregorian chant. The tremendous contributions of the Solesmes scholars provide the basis for much of the research presented here (as they do, indeed, for a large amount of chant scholarship less closely affiliated with them). The various kinds of articles represented here reflect the diversity of Solesmes publications over more than a century, connecting musicologists to liturgists, historians to performers, and worshippers to listeners. In Dominique Ponnau's opening address to the participants of the colloquium, he emphasises this unifying capacity of chant. He recalls that the Second Vatican Council recognised Gregorian chant as ‘proper to the Roman liturgy’,Footnote ¹ even though one might be tempted to think otherwise, and he encourages researchers and church musicians to work together to ensure that chant is given the pride of place it deserves.

The volume is divided into three sections, the first of which concerns the origins and neumatic notations of Gregorian chant. To introduce this section, Susan Rankin offers a new approach to Dom Mocquereau's ‘notation oratoire’ by using research into the French notation of the fragments of two late ninth- or early tenth-century folios of a gradual kept in Graz (Universitätsbibliothek 748). Rankin casts a different light on Mocquereau's ideas concerning the prosodic accent theory of neume origin. By comparing the notation in Graz 748 to other examples from France at this time, she concludes that scribes were not interested in depicting pitch (indeed, how else to explain the persistence of adiastematic notation long after theorists had developed a method of pitch notation?) but rather that they were interested in recording the proper manner in which chant might be sung. With this somewhat broader understanding of the idea of prosodic accents, Rankin confirms Mocquereau's mode of thinking about text declamation and its influence on neumes. In the next article, Andreas Pfisterer re-examines the claims of the Frankish liturgist Amalar concerning the difference in the performance of responsories between the Roman and Frankish churches. Pfisterer suggests that Amalar was referring to a difference in performance only at major church feasts, ignoring the more minor feasts where Roman and Frankish practice was the same. Through an examination of both the texts and the melodies of certain key responsories, Pfisterer is able to argue convincingly that it was, in fact, the Franks who preserved the original method of responsory performance. The penultimate article in this section, enticingly entitled ‘Scribes at Work’, is an intensely descriptive analysis centring entirely on the Cluny gradual BNF lat. 1087, by Eduardo Henrik Aubert. Unfortunately, neither the long physical description nor the exhaustive details concerning each of twenty-one scribal hands identified by Aubert is of much use to the reader without the manuscript at hand, and the lack of any images or, in the case of a prohibitive copyright situation, hand-drawn approximations as illustrations, simply exacerbates the problem. This first section of the volume is concluded by Yossi Maurey's discussion of the significance of neumas in medieval liturgy, and those expressions of wordless joy as found in the eleventh-century Office for St Martin at the Abbey of Marmoutier. Through a close reading of medieval terminology concerning neumas, Maurey concludes that these neumas were often improvised, and provided an occasion for highly skilled singers to add musical ornament to an important feast day, such as Christmas, Easter or the Feast of the Circumcision (or Feast of Fools).

The second section of the book deals with the development of Gregorian chant from the High Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century. It opens with Xavier Bisaro's philosophical observations concerning ‘the chant of history and the history of chant’,Footnote ² spanning the origins of chant in memory, and continues to chronicle the history of chant though various decadences and reforms, intellectual and social movements (such as Humanism, and New Age) and its place in the church, the monastery and, more recently, in academia. David Hiley's research concerning eleventh-century historiae from Lower Normandy (and sung in Norman Sicily) is next; he studies the offices for Julianus of Le Mans, Egidius, and Mary Magdalen as found in Madrid Biblioteca Nacional 288, written around 1100. By organising information about the melody and text of each chant in each office into large comparison tables, Hiley is able to point out some stylistic hallmarks of later chant composition. Continuing in the twelfth century, Alicia Scarcez leads the reader through the intricacies of two Cistercian reforms and their impact on the Cistercian responsory tradition. With the help of pie charts and tables comparing responsory verses before and after the reforms, Scarcez is able to show that Stephen Harding's first reform (1108) relied on what Hesbert would come to describe as the ‘Germanic’ tradition to form the liturgy, whereas Bernard of Clairvaux's second reform discouraged this and encouraged Hesbert's ‘Latin’ tradition instead. It should be noted that, although most of this detailed article is based on textual comparisons, a limited effort is made to incorporate chant melodies into the analysis at the end of the article, with mixed results. Next, Philippe Canguilhem casts the study of chant in a polyphonic light with his discussion of the connection between fauxbourdon and chant in French musical books from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Canguilhem's research was conducted under the auspices of a project called FABRICA (Faux-Bourdon, Improvisation et Contrepoint mental), begun in 2008, which links the University of Toulouse-le Mirail, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois. Canguilhem includes several interesting images of folios containing early fauxbourdon and discusses the link between seventeenth-century counterpoint treatises and the language of fauxbourdon composition using chant. He points out that, although eighteenth-century printed music went some way towards codifying the parts of the liturgy sung in fauxbourdon, the roles of memory and spontaneity in this tradition were every bit as important for a skilful rendition of this repertory as they were for chant. The final article in this section, written by Cécile Davy-Rigaux, looks at the French history of masses composed in ‘plain-chant musical’ to distinguish this harmonised, stylised conception of chant from the original Gregorian chant. In particular, the masses of Henry Du Mont enjoyed a level of popularity in the latter half of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century that has been seldom noted by modern scholars. Davy-Rigaux situates the ‘plain-chant musical’ repertory in its historical context and provides details concerning its circulation, notation and performance. The reader will appreciate the interesting examples of the various notations reproduced at the end of this article, including the numerical encoding of ‘plain-chant musical’ melodies by Jean-Jacques Souhaitty in 1677 (which looks curiously similar to some forms of modern melodic encoding for computer analyses of chant).

The third and final section of the book is dedicated to Gregorian chant's most recent history, and how it is understood today. Thomas Kelly notes that the span of time commemorated by this colloquium is the same period of time characterised by the rise – and now, the fall – of music writing in the West. Most people outside the academic community come into contact with chant either through recordings or religious ritual of various kinds. Recently, chant has extended its traditional sacred boundaries to be a key component in setting the mood for secular contexts, such as films or video games. It seems the element of oral transmission is as strong in today's chant traditions as a thousand years ago. The next contribution comes from the volume's editor, Patrick Hala, monk of Solesmes, who chronicles the tumultuous years of chant scholarship at Solesmes from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. In addition to a lively account of the battle between Solesmes and the Medici edition for Roman approval, Hala describes exchanges between Solesmes scholars and French musicians, composers and choral directors at the turn of the century. Special mention is given to Camille Bellaigue (music critic with the Revue des Deux Mondes), Jules Combarieu (musicologist and founder of the Revue musicale), Pierre Aubry (musicologist) and Louis Laloy (music critic and composer). Next comes the only German article included in this volume, by Heinrich Rumphorst. It concerns the compositional technique used by Dom de Sainte-Beuve to create some of the new chants added to the Graduale Triplex (1979) for the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. By comparing these chants to other, more ancient chants of the same genre in the Graduale Triplex with similar textual accents and melodic patterns, Rumphorst shows the necessity of a deep and nuanced understanding of the function of neumes, as representatives of the relationship between text and music, in order to create these neo-Gregorian chants so that they will fit in seamlessly with the rest of the corpus. Vasco Zara further explores the modern idea of Gregorian chant with his article comparing its two main identities: its role in the Church, and what it has come to symbolise in the world outside ecclesiastical circles. Within the Church, it must remain true to its role as a vehicle for sacred text but somehow avoid becoming a ‘museum piece’; in secular contexts, chant has become a musical shorthand by various composers and performing groups (such as Frank Peterson's Gregorian) to evoke the sort of mysticism popularly connected with medieval monks and all things generally Gothic. The volume ends with Sylvain Dieudonné's account of today's Notre Dame School, in which he outlines how the three choirs currently employed at the cathedral (children's, youth and adult) negotiate Notre Dame's long and famous history of church music in their services and concerts throughout the year.

Periodicals such as the Études grégoriennes are not often reviewed as a book, but this particular volume presents an exceptional overview of the state of chant scholarship today and the continuing support and influence of the Abbey of Solesmes in charting a future course.