Ambrosiana at Harvard: New Sources of Milanese Chant

The Ambrosian liturgy and its music, practiced in and around medieval Milan, is the only one of several regional traditions not to have been suppressed during the Carolingian urge to uniformity that swept away so many dialects of chant in the interest of imposing the universal Roman liturgy and the chant now known as Gregorian. To the extent that these older practices can be recovered and studied, we can have a clearer picture of the early-medieval cultural landscape, and a better sense of the aesthetic variety of medieval music.

Ambrosiana at Harvard: New Sources of Milanese Chant presents studies of three manuscripts of Ambrosian chant housed at Harvard. Houghton Library has recently acquired two such manuscripts, one of them perhaps the oldest surviving source of Ambrosian music. A third manuscript has long been housed at Houghton among other lavishly illuminated books, but its contents have only recently been identified as Ambrosian. The Houghton manuscripts are considered as physical objects and in their urban and historical contexts, as well as in the musical and ecclesiastical context of Milan, of Italy, and of medieval Europe.

Houghton Library Studies Series Editor: William P Stoneman

Houghton Library Studies provides a forum for the scholarly analysis of the wide-ranging materials in the collections of Houghton Library, the primary repository for rare books and manuscripts at Harvard University.

Thomas Forrest Kelly is the Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard. Professor main fields of interest are chant and perrormance practice. He won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for the Beneventan Chant (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Matthew Mugmon is a musicologist at Harvard. His primary field of research is the music of Gustav Mahler and its reception, particularly in the United States.