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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2008
A mysterious note 
vaguely resembling the apostropha of St Gall 
is often found in Beneventan manuscripts dating from the first half of the eleventh century. The note is named acuasta in one of the lists of Beneventan neumes. It is found less often in later manuscripts from southern Italy. Its appearance but not its meaning is briefly described under the title ‘strophicus” in volume 15 of Paléeographie Musicale. I have noted hundreds of instances of its use in Beneventan manuscripts from all periods except the last. It is easily mistaken for a 
sign for liquescence. Sometimes it is indeed thus used in the late gradual Benevento, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS VI. 35; but earlier it is so often employed for open syllables and simple vowels not subject to liquescence that a liquescent interpretation, even as a partial explanation for its early use, must be given up.
1
Montecassino, , Archivio della Badia, Codex 318, p. 117
Google Scholar. The fanciful names in this table for more elaborate neumes appear to have been invented by the scribe. The manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Conventi soppressi F 3.565, in Carolingian minuscule, lists neumes from Beneventan notation in two sets of tables. The brief list on fol. 32v has neither the note nor the term acuasta; but the longer list on fol. 100v uses the term accusta for a compound neume of five pitches and the term aposita for a pair of these acuastae followed by a punctum in descending stepwise order: 
2 Le Codex VI. 34 de la Bibliothèque Capitulaire de Bénévent (XIe–XIIe siècle), graduel de Bénévent avec prosaire el tropaire, Paléographie Musicale, ser. I, 15 (Solesmes, 1937), pp. 140–1.Google Scholar
3 Le Codex 10673 de la Bibliothèque Vaticane, fonds latin (XIe siècle), graduel bénéventain, Paléographie Musicale, ser. I, 14 (Solesmes, 1931)Google Scholar; Le Codex 121 de la Bibliothèque d'Einsiedeln (Xe–XIe siècle), antiphonale missarum Sancti Gregorii, Paléographie Musicale, ser. I, 4 (Solesmes, 1894)Google Scholar; Cantatorium, No. 359 de la Bibliothèque de Saint-Gall (XIe siècle), Paléographie Musicale, ser. II, 2 (Solesmes, 1924; repr. 1968).Google Scholar
4
Here I omit borrowed Greco-Latin texts and ambiguous notes that may be interpreted as liquescents. The pieces are (1) 
Tenebre facte sunt (SU-PER universam… ET CIR-CA horam…) on fol. 14v; (2) [Tr.] Cantabo nunc dilecto (IN loco uberi… ET plantavi… ET torcular… FE-cit autem spinas… FE-cit autem iniquitatem) on fol. 17v; (3) Ingressa for St Michael, DUM sacra misteria, on fol. 61v; (4) Ingressa for Pentecost, Factus est repente (ET RE-pleti sunt…), on fol.79v; and (5) A [Com] Hodie exultat celum (ET LE-tantur) on fol. 134v.
5 Except in the Dublin fragment with the sequence Laurenti David, Killiney, Co. Dublin, Franciscan Library, MS B 29d. See Brunner, L. V., ‘A Perspective on the Southern Italian Sequence: The Second Tonary of the Manuscript Monte Cassino 318’, Early Music History, 1 (1981), pp. 117–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 So called from the franculus type of pressus neume used for this ending in East Frankish sequence notation of the melismatic variety.
7 See the example quoted on p. 65 from Benevento, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS VI. 39, fol. 53, from the sequence Laudet ecce per omne(m) cuncta mundo leta, beginning ‘Voce iam stridula’.
8 Examples abound. In Benevento VI. 35, see the Alleluia prosula Gratias agimus deo gaudentes, fol. 123v; the prosula Largire dignare for Ite missa est, fol. 159r; and the version of Lux de luce for the Pentecost Vigil, fol. 111.
9
Except perhaps in the rare neume form 
(as found over the word [Multos] in the Old Beneventan communion for St Michael, fol. 61 of Benevento VI. 40). I am not certain whether the opening element of the neume represents an acuasta or not.
10 See Wellesz, E., ‘Early Byzantine Neumes’, The Musical Quarterly, 38 (1952), pp. 68–79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the quotation is on p. 77.
11 A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography (2nd edn, Oxford, 1961), pp. 268–9.Google Scholar
12 Strunk, O., ‘The Notation of the Chartres Fragment’, Annales Musicologiques, 3 (1955), pp. 7–37 Google Scholar, reprinted in Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York, 1977), pp. 68–111, a collection of Strunk's essays.Google Scholar Referring in ‘The Notation of the Chartres Fragment’ (Essays, p. 104 Google Scholar) to a publication by one of the monks at the Greek monastery of Grottaferrata, Strunk says: ‘P. Bartolomeo [di Salvo] drew attention for the first time to the ambiguity of the apostrophos in the early Byzantine notations, and while his views on this subject were at first received with considerable skepticism, it is becoming increasingly clear that they were not altogether wide of the mark.’ Strunk then continues in a footnote: ‘Hφeg too has noticed that in older sources the apostrophos is not invariably a descending sign. Thus, speaking of Laura B. 32, he writes that “an apostrophos can be put not only above a syllable sung on a weak descending note, but also above a syllable sung on a weak note of the same pitch as the preceding one” …of Saba 83, that its writer “used the apostrophos in a more general way … as a minus-sign indicating the absence of dynamic stress.”’
13 Ibid., pp. 108–9. See also Strunk's article ‘The Menaia from Carbone at the Biblioteca Vallicelliana’, ibid., pp. 285–96, which originally appeared in Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata, new ser., 27 (1973), pp. 3–9.Google Scholar Tillyard, H. J. W., in ‘Byzantine Music about A.D. 1100”, The Musical Quarterly, 39 (1953), pp. 223–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, held that the early apostrophos generally indicated ‘a downward progression’ but allowed a vaguer meaning. See also Tillyard, H. J. W., ‘The Stages of Early Byzantine Musical Notation’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 45 (1952), pp. 29–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his Handbook of Middle Byzantine Notation, Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, Subsidia 1/I (Copenhagen, 1935).Google Scholar
14 See Wellesz, E., Eastern Elements in Western Chant: Studies in the Early History of Ecclesiastical Music, Monumentae Musicae Byzantinae, Subsidia 2 (Copenhagen, 1947), pp. 24–31, 68–77, 92–109.Google Scholar
15 See Paléographie Musicale, ser. I, 14, pp. 292, 296, 300, 309–11.Google Scholar
16 No. 52 in Landwehr-Melnicki, M., Das einstimmige Kyrie des lateinischen Mittelalters (Regensburg, 1955; repr. 1968)Google Scholar. The verses Supplices dicamus are unique to Benevento VI. 38. Elsewhere in southern Italy the melody is associated with Auctor caelorum.
17 ‘Consōla’ in verse 9 seems to be treated as if accented ‘cónsōla’. perhaps on the model of ‘cónsǒna’?
18 Compare the introit trope Dilectus iste for St John Evangelist in St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 484; here the syllables italicised below are lengthened by episemas in the manuscript:
19 This melody, the second al libitum Gloria in the Vatican Kyrial of 1905 incorporated in the Graduate romanum of 1908, is indexed by Bosse, Detlev as melody no. 13 in his Untersuchung einstimmiger mittelalterlicher Melodien zum ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’, Forschungsbeiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 2 (Regensburg, 1955).Google Scholar In Aquitanian sources the tune and words of Laudat in excelsis are embedded in an ancient melody for Gloria in excelsis usually called ‘Gloria A’ (Bosse no. 39); whereas in northwest France, Germany and at Winchester Laudat in excelsis was joined to the melody of Gloria iv of the Vatican edition (Bosse no. 56). Both these melodies for Gloria in excelsis were also associated with other tropes.
The trope Rex hodie Christus is notated entire in all four of the Graduals from Benevento that contain ordinary tropes, at the following places:
Benevento VI. 40: Low Sunday, fols. 38v–40r
Benevento VI. 38: Low Sunday, fols. 62v, 63r, 63v
Benevento VI. 35: in a collection often Glorias, fols. 188v, 189r, 189v
Benevento VI. 34: Easter Monday, fols. 129v, 130r, 130v
Rex hodie Christus is also found in the eleventh- or early twelfth-century Montecassino troper now at the Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urb. lat. 602, fol. 52v, though in a different redaction from that in use at Benevento. Here it is also assigned to Easter Monday. The words of Rex hodie Christus were published by Blume, C. and Bannister, H. M. in Tropen zum Ordinarium Missae, Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi 49 (Leipzig, 1905), pp. 273–5Google Scholar, no. 211 (abbreviated as AH). Blume and Bannister based their edition solely on Urb. lat. 602.
Laudat in excelsis appears entire in Urb. lat. 602 and also in part (from Domine fili unigenite to the end) at fol. 31 of an early twelfth-century fragment, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 14733. Laudat in excelsis is included in but one of the Graduals from the city of Benevento, the late manuscript Benevento VI. 34, where it was originally placed first in a series of three troped and two untroped melodies for Gloria in excelsis but is now found at the end of the manuscript.
Rönnau, Klaus in his study Die Tropen zum Gloria in excelsis Deo (Wiesbaden, 1967)Google Scholar uses the term ‘constitutive verses’ to describe those verses that are never missing from a given trope in any source, however otherwise variable its text. The term ‘core verse’ is also used. The first five core verses of Laudat in excelsis (AH nos. 170a and 170b) are found in the earliest Aquitanian troper, the tenth-century manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 1240, at fol. 39, though without music; in the tenth-century troper from Mainz now in London, British Library, Add. MS 19768, at fol. 27, also without music; in a collection of texts without music copied c. 900, Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS 90, fol. 134v; and in the Winchester Troper, now at Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 473, fol. 66v, dating from c. 1000. These core verses of Laudat in excelsis are therefore ‘among the oldest tropes in the repertory’, as Planchart, Alejandro remarks in The Repertory of Tropes at Winchester, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1976), n, p. 273.Google Scholar
20 See Hughes, D. G., ‘Music and Meter in Liturgical Poetry’, Medievalia et Humanistica (1976), no. 7, p. 31.Google Scholar
21
Benevento VI. 40 (one of the two oldest Beneventan graduals) is diastematic but without clefs, like much of Benevento VI. 38 and all of Urb. lat. 602. The much later Benevento VI. 35 notates the melody at the pitch given in Example 1 but without Bb. (Bb is only rarely found in Beneventan manuscripts.) Benevento VI. 34 notates the melody a fourth lower, with F 
, implying that the notation of Benevento VI. 35 ought to be read with Bb.
22 Beneventan manuscripts almost never mark lengthening for repeated final notes at the same pitch by using an oriscus; but it can be shown that two such final notes at the end of a hexameter line must be lengthened in performance. (Another Beneventan Gloria trope, Coetus in arce, which is in hexameters throughout, uses a final cadence with repeated notes at the ends of lines unmarked by oriscus-lengthening; but it also has an alternative regular cadence with marked lengthened notes for long, accented syllables. These marked notes are followed by a note one step lower for the second syllable of the cadence. Both of these cadences must clearly take the same rhythm. It follows that repeated final notes at the same pitch, accented strong to weak, are to be lengthened, at least when they occur at the end of a hexameter line.)
23 See Levy, K., ‘Lux de Luce: the Origin of an Italian Sequence’, The Musical Quarterly, 57 (1971), pp. 40–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
