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In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, successive archbishops of Salzburg attempted to consolidate their power and implement ecclesiastical reforms by means of commissioned printed liturgical books. Achieving uniform worship, however, proved difficult. In editions of the Missale Salisburgense, the revised musical mass prefaces required typographically challenging red notation. The addition or omission of coloured notes by printers and users reveals that the technical limitations of printing together with variable performance practices hindered liturgical uniformitas.

The extensive melodic revision of plainchant in editions of the Graduale Romanum published in Italy from the late sixteenth century onward resulted in musically diverse repertoires that could depart widely from earlier chant traditions. The scale of the changes in these sources, both in type and in number, has obscured certain aspects of their editors’ work: their familiarity with the corpus, their aims and techniques, and their approach to the task. Previous analyses concluded that the editors worked on a chant-by-chant basis, and were either unaware of or ignored any shared melodic relationships between pieces of plainchant. An examination of the revisions to the recurrent melody used by the eight Ostende alleluias in three influential Italian printed graduals – Gardano 1591, Giunta 1596 and Medici 1614/15 – provides a different perspective. Analyses of the reshaped chants reveal that the editors possessed knowledge of the repertoire guiding aims, and favoured revision techniques. The combination of these factors, whether intentionally or not, resulted in the chants’ continued structural connection in the midst of increased melodic diversity. The individuation evident the chants did not necessarily signal the editors’ unfamiliarity with the repertoire, but could have been indicative of their intentional rejection of shared elements. Further, the revisions to the Ostende alleluias reveal that the editorial process could be flexible, with the chants approached both as individual entities and as groups. These findings demonstrate the complexity of the editorial process in early modern Italian printed graduals, and deepen our understanding of this multifaceted repertoire.

The publication of the Missale Romanum (1570), revised at the behest of the Council of Trent (1545–63), had direct consequences for plainchant. In order to celebrate a sung mass, the contents of graduals had to be brought into conformity with the new missal. In 1572 the Venetian firms of Giunta and Varisco issued the first printed editions of the Graduale Romanum in Italy after the missal’s promulgation. The volumes contain prefaces adumbrating the requisite alterations, which from 1580 onwards were mostly assimilated into the contents of subsequent graduals. Three types of modifications affected chant melodies: the removal of text, the addition of text, and the addition of new propers. This study explores these categories in key editions of the Graduale Romanum printed in Italy between 1572 and 1653. Analyses of five offertory chants reveal that the combination of editorial freedom, source interrelation, and textual variants in editions of the Missale Romanum resulted in musical diversity. The removal of text in the offertories Iubilate deo omnis terra and Iubilate deo universa terra reflects the editors’ aesthetic preferences and their understanding of musical grammar. In Dextera domini and Iustitiae domini, the addition of text is dependent on the edition of the missal used in the process of collation, the relationships between the sources, and the editors’ responses to the changes mandated. The added chant Insurrexerunt in me, with its mixture of traditional and contemporary characteristics, highlights the freedom with which the editors sourced, or even composed, chant melodies. These findings highlight textual and musical diversity within newly regularized liturgical structures and clarify the relationship between the Council of Trent and plainchant revision. As a result, they call into question the suitability of the “Post-Tridentine” label often given to early modern chant.