Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas: Re-texting the Proper of the Mass in Beneventan Manuscripts by Luisa Nardini (review)

Reviewed by: Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas: Re-texting the Proper of the Mass in Beneventan Manuscripts by Luisa Nardini Bradford Lee Eden Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas: Re-texting the Proper of the Mass in Beneventan Manuscripts. By Luisa Nardini. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. xvi, 310 p. ISBN 9780197514139 (hardback), 75; ISBN 9780197514153 (ebook), price varies. Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Research and scholarship on and about medieval chant since the mid-twentieth century have been both exciting and extensive. Both general and specialized overviews of repertories, regions, cities, and individuals continue to grow our knowledge, especially around the accretive process of chant composition itself. Nardini succinctly recounts this scholarship in chapter 1 (pp. 19–23). She also discusses the textual and musical similarities and differences between the various genres of these accretions—tropes, sequences, prosulas, and motets—as she telescopes down to the substance of this book: the prosulas found in the proper of the Mass in Beneventan manuscripts between the eighth and fifteenth centuries. The author links the composition of medieval prosulas to the modern-day concept of hypertexts at a number of levels: practical, general, contextual, creative, interchangeability, and reversibility (more detail End Page 703 on pp. 7–10). In order to fully examine and detail her arguments, Nardini provides the reader with more analyses and study beyond the physical book: a companion website offered by the publisher (http: //www. oup. com/us/chantshypertextandprosulas accessed 11 March 2024), which includes manuscript facsimiles, examples, and transcriptions, and a self-produced website (http: //www. chanthypertexts. org accessed 11 March 2024), where she provides a searchable database along with interactive annotations and hyperlinks to external sites. With the book and web-sites, Nardini further extends the hypertext metaphor in both content and interconnectedness. Part 1, "History, Historiography, and Geography of Prosulas, " comprises chapters 1–2. Nardini describes the richness and variety in which medieval cantors expanded the textual and musical repertory of chant during the tenth to thirteenth centuries, with examples and explanations beginning in chapter 1. She guides the reader through a preliminary understanding of the development of the prosula as a genre: a textual and musical expansion of the parent chant. In terms of the textual accretions, rhythmical patterns and rhetorical figures were often taken from contemporaneous hagiographical and devotional literature. In terms of musical creativity, a free-flowing melisma was transformed into a syllabic style in which specific neumes such as the acuasta, oriscus, and liquescences provided performative rhythms that assisted the meaning and drama of the new text. In the move from aural to written transmission of chant, prosulas in Beneventan manuscripts incorporated a wide variety of special neumes to represent both local and regional variants related to performance and preference. Examples of musical variants on the melisma of the alleluia Qualis pater in different Beneventan manuscripts in example 1. 3 (pp. 25–28) illustrate the early attempts of local and regional liturgies to capture aural performance in a written notation. In the remainder of the chapter, Nardini discusses the documentation of prosulas by medieval writers along with the history of Gregorian chant in relation to prosula development. In chapter 2, she examines prosulas in both Beneventan and non-Beneventan manuscripts, providing detailed descriptions of the entire Beneventan repertory as it is known, some of the regional and superregional sources, and ending with other fragmentary and extra-regional concordances. Photographs of manuscript pages and selected prosula examples are in rich abundance throughout this chapter. Part 2, "Prosulas and Their Formal Features, " contains three chapters in which Nardini focuses on details related to prosula notation and their placement in the Beneventan liturgy. In chapter 3, she discusses prosulas and their texts, formal features related to notation, and numerous transcriptions of prosula melodies and texts for comparison and analysis. In chapter 4, she examines prosulas for graduals and tracts along with interlectionary chants, while in chapter 5, she looks at prosulas for the alleluias and offer-tories. Tied to the rise of cathedrals and urban monasteries in southern Italy around 1000 CE, prosulas for the proper of the Mass were an extension of a shift of focus from the Old Testament to the New Testament and the. . .