Our principal evidence for understanding Adémar de Chabannes' musical activities lies in the body of music manuscripts that survive with musical notation in his autograph hand. Any investigation of his behaviour as a compiler of liturgies, an editor of music or a composer begins with the study of his scribal activities. Adémar's musical training and most of his professional endeavours as a music scribe took place within the extraordinarily vigorous musical community at Saint Martial. As discussed in Chapter 1 above, the abbey's scriptorium, during Adémar's lifetime, attained considerable expertise in the production of music books for the liturgy and the inscription of musical notation. A leading figure in these developments was Adémar's paternal uncle, Roger de Chabannes, Adémar's mentor during his first prolonged stay at the abbey, around AD 1010, and cantor of the abbey at the time of his death, 26 April 1025.

Roger participated in, or perhaps even supervised as cantor, a complete reorganization and codification of the liturgical music used at Saint Martial in Pa 1085 and 1120. They represent a significant achievement in view of what appears to be the failure on the part of the scriptorium to complete two independent but related collections of liturgical music around the year 1000: the endleaves of Pa 1834, which contain a collection of Proper tropes, and the last gathering of Pa 1085, the antiphoner created during the project of codification, which is a palimpsest whose lower text preserves processional antiphons.