What the Beneventans heard and how they sang

Abstract

ABSTRACTSingers from the area south of Rome kept the Gregorian repertory received in the ninth century, including a few early tropes and proses, and their traditional Old Beneventan repertory alive side by side with remarkable consistency in oral tradition for nearly two hundred years. This might explain why the received Gregorian repertory retained its archaic traits in Benevento rather than in northern Europe. For the ‘new music’ of the tenth and eleventh centuries, mostly locally composed tropes, proses, and Latin Kyrieleison, south Italian singers adopted the musical surface of Gregorian chant, albeit Italianised (that is, moving largely in stepwise motion), but for the large-scale formal structures they harked back to the nearly obsessive repetition of extended passages that are the hallmark of Old Beneventan.