The liturgical chant sung in the churches of Southern Italy between the ninth and thirteenth centuries reflects the multiculturalism of a territory in which Romans, Franks, Lombards, Byzantines, Normans, Jews, and Muslims were all present with various titles and political roles. Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas examines a specific genre, the prosulas that were composed to embellish and expand pre-existing liturgical chants. Widespread in medieval Europe, prosulas were highly cultivated in southern Italy, especially by the nuns, monks, and clerics of the city of Benevento. These texts shed light on the creativity of local cantors to provide new meanings to the liturgy in accordance with contemporary waves of religious spirituality, and to experiment with a novel musical style in which a syllabic setting is paired with the free-flowing melody of the parent chant. In their representing an epistemological 'beyond', and in their interconnectedness with the parent chant, these prosulas can be likened to modern hypertexts. In this book, author Luisa Nardini presents the first comprehensive study to integrate textual and musical analyses of liturgical prosulas as they were recorded in Beneventan manuscripts. Discussing general features of prosulas in southern Italy and their relation to contemporary liturgical genres (e.g., tropes, sequences, hymns), Nardini firmly situates Beneventan prosulas within the broader context of European musical history. An invaluable reference for the field, Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas provides a new understanding of the phonetic and morphological transformations of the Latin language in medieval Italy, and clarifies the use of perennially puzzling features of Beneventan notation.

"The liturgical chant that was sung in the churches of Southern Italy between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries reflects the multiculturalism of a territory in which Roman, Franks, Lombards, Byzantines, Normans, Jews, and Muslims were present at various titles and with different political roles. This book examines a specific genre, the prosulas that were composed to embellish and expand pre-existing liturgical chants of the liturgy of mass. Widespread in medieval Europe, prosulas were highly cultivated in southern Italy, especially by the nuns, monks, and clerics the city of Benevento. They shed light on the creativity of local cantors to provide new meanings to the liturgy in accordance with contemporary waves of religious spirituality and to experiment with a novel musical style in which a syllabic setting is paired with the free-flowing melody of the parent chant. In their representing an epistemological 'beyond' and because of their interconnectedness with the parent chant, they can be likened to modern hypertexts. The emphasis on universal saints of ancient lineage stressed the perceived links with the cradles of Christianity, Africa and the Levant, and the centre of the Papal power, Rome, while the high number of Christological prosulas in manuscripts used in nunneries might be tied to the devotion to Jesus as 'spiritual spouse' that was typical of female religiosity. Full edition of texts, melodies, and manuscript facsimiles in the companion website enrich the study of the stylistic features and the cultural components of this fascinating genre"--

This groundbreaking book offers the first detailed analysis of the textual, liturgical, and musical aspects of the vespertinus, the chant genre most central to the Christian practices that shaped the religious and cultural landscape of medieval Iberia.

Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, Christian worship on the Iberian Peninsula was structured by rituals of great theological and musical richness, known as the Old Hispanic (or Mozarabic) rite. Much of this liturgy was produced during a seventh-century cultural and educational program aimed at creating a society unified in the Nicene faith, built on twin pillars of church and kingdom. Led by Isidore of Seville and subsequent generations of bishops, this cultural renewal effort began with a project of clerical education, facilitated through a distinctive culture of textual production. Rebecca Maloy's Songs of Sacrifice argues that liturgical music--both texts and melodies--played a central role in the cultural renewal of early Medieval Iberia, with a chant repertory that was carefully designed to promote the goals of this cultural renewal. Through extensive reworking of the Old Testament, the creators of the chant texts fashioned scripture in ways designed to teach biblical exegesis, linking both to patristic traditions--distilled through the works of Isidore of Seville and other Iberian bishops--and to Visigothic anti-Jewish discourse. Through musical rhetoric, the melodies shaped the delivery of the texts to underline these messages. In these ways, the chants worked toward the formation of individual Christian souls and a communal Nicene identity. Examining the crucial influence of these chants, Songs of Sacrifice addresses a plethora of long-debated issues in musicology, history, and liturgical studies, and reveals the potential for Old Hispanic chant to shed light on fundamental questions about how early chant repertories were formed, why their creators selected particular passages of scripture, and why they set them to certain kinds of music.

Nearly a half century after her death in 1972, Mahalia Jackson remains the most esteemed figure in black gospel music history. Born in the backstreets of New Orleans in 1911, Jackson during the Great Depression joined the Great Migration to Chicago, where she became an highly regarded church singer and, by the mid-fifties, a coveted recording artist for Apollo and Columbia Records, lauded as the "World's Greatest Gospel Singer." This "Louisiana Cinderella" narrative of Jackson's career during the decade following World War II carried important meanings for African Americans, though it remains a story half told. Jackson was gospel's first multi-mediated artist, with a nationally broadcast radio program, a Chicago-based television show, and early recordings that introduced straight-out-of-the-church black gospel to American and European audiences while also tapping the vogue for religious pop in the early Cold War. In some ways, Jackson's successes made her an exceptional case, though she is perhaps best understood as part of broader developments in the black gospel field. Built upon foundations laid by pioneering Chicago organizers in the 1930s, black gospel singing, with Jackson as its most visible representative, began to circulate in novel ways as a form of popular culture in the 1940s and 1950s, its practitioners accruing prestige not only through devout integrity but also from their charismatic artistry, public recognition, and pop-cultural cachet. These years also saw shifting strategies in the black freedom struggle that gave new cultural-political significance to African American vernacular culture. The first book on Jackson in 25 years, Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field draws on a trove of previously unexamined archival sources that illuminate Jackson's childhood in New Orleans and her negotiation of parallel careers as a singing Baptist evangelist and a mass media entertainer, documenting the unfolding material and symbolic influence of Jackson and black gospel music in postwar American society.

The Divine Office--the cycle of daily worship other than the Mass--is the richest source of liturgical texts and music from the Latin Middle Ages. However, its richness, the great diversity of its manuscripts, and its many variations from community to community have made it difficult to study, and it remains largely unexplored terrain. This volume is a practical guide to the Divine Office for students and scholars throughout the field of medieval studies. The book surveys the many questions related to the Office and presents the leading analytical tools and research methods now used in the field. Beginning with the Office in the early Middle Ages, the book covers manuscript sources and their contents; regional developments and variations; the relationship between the Office, the Mass, and other ceremonies and repertories; and the deep links between the Office and medieval hagiography. The book concludes with a discussion of recent technical advances for handling the enormous amounts of evidence on the Office and its performance, in particular CANTUS, the vast electronic database developed by Ruth Steiner of Catholic University for the analysis of chant repertories. The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages is an essential resource for anyone studying medieval liturgy. Its accessible style and broad coverage make it an important basic reference for a wide range of students and scholars in art history, religious studies, social history, literature, musicology, and theology.