Single music bifolio (c.1150–1200) with compact cursive notation and highly abbreviated texts, sewn upside down into the back of a fourteenth-century text manuscript. The fragment itself does not have any foliation, and the foliation below is based on the names of the images provided by the library.
What the library has labelled folio I_v (but which, when turning the fragment upright to its original direction, would be recto) contains music for a unique two-voice Marian song that begins Ave alma, ave plena gratias. The two parts are notated successively. The first voice begins partway through the song, and the folio has been trimmed, cutting off the upper part of the first stave. Squiggly duration neumes show longer, held pitches, resembling wavy duration neumes Susan Rankin identified in I-Bu 1549. The Ave alma, ave plena gratias scribe divides music and text into 18 sections with vertical barlines in the two separate parts; above 11 sections, there are rubricated abbreviation marks (‘q’; ‘o’; ‘v’; and ‘siml’) that relate to the polyphonic sonority at the start of each section.
Folio II_v has three elaborate monophonic melodies for the Invitatory Psalm, Venite exsultemus. The folio begins with the fifth section of the Psalm (‘Quadraginta annis’) and continues with two melodies for the first section (‘Venite exsultemus’). The top of the folio is trimmed, cutting off the upper part of the first stave; the following two entries are preserved in full. All melodies are unique, but the second melody relates to an Invitatory Antiphon (René-Jean Hesbert’s number 1180 in COA, volume 3; Cantus ID: 001180).
What are now labelled as the rectos of both folios are obscured and largely illegible.
In general, I-Lc 500 shares some visual similarities with I-Bc Q.3, fragment 14 (studied by Giovanni Varelli), but the bifolios share no scribes.