Three of the articles in this issue of Plainsong & Medieval Music were presented at a session devoted to medieval saints' offices sponsored by the Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society at the 1999 International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. Two of the papers (Caldwell, Hiley) are devoted to English saints, while a third (Hankeln) surveys offices, monastic and secular, of the sainted royal patrons of the diocese of Bamberg, Henry and Kunigunde. Elizabeth Leach's article on the four-voice balades of Guillaume de Machaut brings together considerations of transmission, fourteenth-century contrapuntal theory, and performance practice.

Beginning with this issue of Plainsong & Medieval Music every article will be preceded by a short abstract. Brief identifications of the authors, who will most likely be already known to readers in the relatively small field of medieval music research, will include their e-mail addresses.

The offices for Saints Henry and Kunigunde, patrons of the diocese of Bamberg, are transmitted in both monastic and secular forms that manifest several stages of development. In the century after the canonizations of Henry and Kunigunde (1146 and 1200, respectively) their Offices seem to have been celebrated with a preponderance of chants from the common of saints. During the thirteenth century, however, novae historiae, newly composed offices with rhymed or partially rhymed texts and chants in modal order, replaced the older offices. This process parallels in some respects the phenomenon that James McKinnon called ‘properization’. Also examined are questions of how and why newly composed historiae could supplant the traditional forms of these Offices.

Some basic stylistic features of ten prose offices for English saints are considered. The oldest is that for St Cuthbert (probably c. 930). Others are for Dunstan of Canterbury, Edmund of East Anglia, Ethelwold of Winchester, Kyneburga, Kyneswytha and Tybba of Peterborough, Mildred of Thanet, Oswald of Northumbria, Oswald of Worcester, Swithun of Winchester, and Wulfstan of Worcester. All were probably composed earlier than the office for Thomas of Canterbury (soon after 1170), which with its rhymed, accentual verse text marks a new type of office. Important musical features of these offices include the deployment of chants in modal order, tonality that relies on a framework of finalis and fifth (also the upper octave and lower fourth), cadences approached from the note below, the use of responsory verse tones, and formulaic melodies.

The music for the Office of St Ethelbert, king and martyr, survives uniquely in the thirteenth-century Hereford Noted Breviary. While some of the chants are contrafacta, others appear to be unique to this office and even in some cases to be influenced by the content of their texts, which are based on the vita of the sainted king by Gerald of Wales. The form in which the office was performed depended on its position in relation to the Easter Cycle (the feast fell on 20 May), and this in turn raises issues for the editing of such offices in modern times.

Based on principles found in fourteenth-century counterpoint treatises, this study divides Machaut's balades with four voices into three groups according to their performance possibilities. The pieces of group 1 (Se quanque amours, Il mest avis, De toutes flours, and Quant theseus/Ne quier) can be performed either in all four parts or in three parts by omitting the triplum. Group 2 (De petit po and De Fortune plus Vg's redaction of Se quanque amours) includes those pieces that can be performed in three parts with either contratenor or triplum but not with all four parts. Pieces in this group are often found with all four parts copied together, thus highlighting the difference between the presentation of a piece in the sources and its performance options. The pieces in group 3 (En amer and Dame de qui) are less clearly delimited in their performance possibilities.

The most impressive recent recording is undoubtedly ‘Codex Calixtinus’ (no. 1 in the list below), a boxed set of four discs that presents virtually the complete music of the manuscript entitled ‘Jacobus’, still preserved at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. To be sure, though it has not drawn any comment in this department, the twenty polyphonic pieces that form the appendix to this collection of music have been recorded complete in recent years (Sequentia and Ensemble Venance Fortunat have each devoted a disc to the collection), and the fourth disc of this set duplicates them. Some of these pieces have long been known on records, for they rank with the St Martial sources as the most important examples of polyphony before the Notre Dame period.