This book describes the Church of Jerusalem, as the mother of all Churches, and its liturgy in the beginnings of Christianity. The main objective of this research is to find, in the primary sources (as the pilgrim Egeria, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, the Armenian and the Georgian Lectionaries), the original elements of the Christian liturgy of the early Church of Jerusalem, in the first five centuries, and to collect the various scattered pieces. The author clarifies the image, and reconstructs, as far as possible, the historical-liturgical picture. By this book we will discover how much the other liturgical traditions of various churches, especially the Church of Rome, have copied the Jerusalemite tradition. The detailed description of the Jerusalemite liturgy, especially for the feasts of the liturgical year, offers us a vivid picture of Jerusalem's unique role in Christian devotion and the mysterious connection between the Christian faith and the land of biblical history. The presentation of the anaphora of St. James will enlighten our understanding of the Eucharistic prayer in all the liturgical traditions, especially Syriac, Byzantine and Roman.

Since time immemorial, the response of the living to death has been to commemorate the life of the departed through ceremonies and rituals. For nearly two millennia, the Christian quest for eternal peace has been expressed in a poetic-musical structure known as the requiem. Traditional requiem texts, among them the anonymous medieval Latin poem Dies Irae ('Day of Wrath'), have inspired an untold number of composers in different ages and serving different religions, Western and Eastern. This book, the first comprehensive survey of requiem music for nearly half a century, provides a great deal of diverse and detailed information that will be of use to the professional musician, the musical scholar, the choral conductor, the theologian and liturgist, and the general reader. The main body of the guide is a description of some 250 requiems. Each entry includes a concise biography of the composer and a description of the composition. Details of voicing, orchestration, editions, and discography are given. An extensive bibliography includes dictionaries, encyclopedias, prayer books, monographs, and articles. An appendix lists more than 1700 requiems not discussed within the main text.

This edition, for the first time, presents a complete modern rendering of an extensive repertoire of works crucial to the development of polyphonic Western music, the organa at Notre Dame cathedral of Paris ca.1165-1225. The two chief composers, Leonin and Perotin, devised the first musical notation to indicate pitch and rhythm, and formulated several musical styles and types of composition which were sung throughout Europe for approximately two centuries. Hans Tischler's edition explores the evolution of compositional methods for both composers, examining the individual styles of organum purum, discant, copula, and pseudo-discant. A second evolutionary factor considered is the selected use of melodic formulae and the recurrence of whole phrases and sections which interrelate numerous organa. A third consideration of the analysis is the increasing complexity of the rhythmic treatment in the tenors of discant clausulae, from Leonin's creation of modal notation, to Perotin's invention of additional rhythmic patterns and their notational symbols. The repertoire comprises settings of well over one hundred chants, the majority of them in two or three versions; and each setting is comprised of several independent and exchangeable sections, totaling approximately 1,500. Only portions of this vast repertoire have been previously published, however, this edition includes all relevant extant material, drawn from sixteen manuscripts, several of which contain two or more collections of organal works . It also refers to related compositions in seven additional collections and to chant sources in eight medieval and eight modem codices.