Fixity, Flexibility, and Compositional Process in Old Hispanic Chant

Old Hispanic (or 'Mozarabic') chant bears witness to a transmission that was rather different from that of the Franco-Roman mass Proper. Despite evidence for the use of notated exemplars from the late ninth or early tenth century, many Old Hispanic melodies did not attain the fixity associated with the Franco-Roman mass. The present essay presents evidence that these chants continued to change in an oral tradition that interacted with the written one from the ninth to the eleventh century. Close analysis makes it possible to pinpoint some features of the melodies that seem to have been fixed in the written tradition, some that varied regionally, and others that could change on an apparently casual basis.