The Sources of Beneventan Chant by Thomas Forrest Kelly - 9781138375802

Taylor & Francis

Thomas Forrest Kelly has identified and collected the surviving sources of an important repertory of early medieval music, the so-called Beneventan Chant used in southern Italy in the early middle ages, before this area's adoption of the now-universal Gregorian chant. Because the Beneventan Chant was suppressed during the eleventh century, the music survives mostly in fragments and palimpsests, and the process of restoring the repertory piece by piece is the focus of the studies here. > The area whose capital was the southern Lombard city of Benevento developed a culture identified with the characteristic form of writing known as the Beneventan script, which was used throughout the area and was brought to perfection at the abbey of Montecassino in the late eleventh century. This repertory, along with other now-vanished or suppressed local varieties of music, give a far richer picture of the variety of musical practice in early medieval Europe than was formerly available. Thomas FoA