Front and rear flyleaves, formerly pastedowns (now lifted). They contain 3 Glorias, one of which is unique, and two of which have concordances elsewhere.

The parchment flyleaf fragments are not from a Gradual, but from an English polyphonic manuscript with three Gloria settings in score on 5-line staves. The leaves are an important addition to the dismembered royal choirbook reconstructed by Margaret Bent, now consisting of 18 leaves or partial leaves and parts of 32-33 compositions, and datable in the 1420s. The Columbia leaves share scribe, decoration style and dimensions with the other leaves already associated. It is planned to publish all of these leaves with an updated report on the choirbook in a forthcoming volume Fragments of English Polyphonic Music ca. 1390–1475: A Facsimile Edition, as Early English Church Music, vol. 62 (for the British Academy).

(Margaret Bent notes: I owe my knowledge of the Columbia fragments to Michael Laird ([laird.rarebooks@gmail.com]), an expert on Spierinck bindings (Spierinck being the binder of other books containing some of the fragments from this manuscript), whose vigilance led him to inform me of these fragments in 1996; he in turn had been informed by Consuelo Dutschke (the librarian at Columbia). He gave a lecture on Spierinck to the Grolier Club in April 2015, in which he had a group perform some of this music from my transcriptions.)

All three Glorias are known from other sources, but Columbia contributes the hitherto missing opening of Gloria 3. All the music is in score in full black notation. The front and rear flyleaves are unnumbered and in situ. They are here numbered 1 and 2, recto and verso as bound.

Gloria 1 (f. 1 recto), front flyleaf (1) r: a vertically cut strip with the beginnings of four systems of a Gloria concordant with no. 4 in the Old Hall manuscript (British Library, Add 57950) The Old Hall Manuscript, ed. Andrew Hughes and Margaret Bent, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 46, 3 vols. (N. p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1969-73), from Qui tollis, with O signature. Identified by Elizabeth Nyikos.

Gloria 2 (ff. 1v –[2]r) sections, on the same strip (1v), and a full page (2r) with complete ending, of another Gloria in major prolation, also preserved with significant variants and various degrees of incompleteness in British Library, Cotton Titus D. XXIV (Lbl XXIV), 3-2v, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Fairfax 27 (Ob 27), ff. ii-iiv, and British Library, Add. MS 37659 (Lbl 37659) f. 1v, a2,[1] and published in English Music for Mass and Office, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century (PMFC) XVI, ed. Frank Ll. Harrison, Ernest H. Sanders and Peter M. Lefferts (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1983), no. 40. Qui sedes to end. For the earlier identification, see Margaret Bent, 'The Transmission of English Music 1300-1500: Some Aspects of Repertory and Presentation', Studien zur Tradition in der Musik: Kurt von Fischer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Max Lütolf (Munich: Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1973), 65-83.

Gloria 3 (f. [2]v provides the missing opening of a Gloria in major prolation also in Lbl XXIV, ff. 4, 1v, 4v, 1. The undoubtedly original Columbia version is tonally different from the editorial reconstruction in PMFC XVI no. 36. PMFC XVI no. 29 gives the end of the same Gloria from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 384 (Ob 384), f. ii where it is troped, unlike Lbl and Columbia; the connection between these versions is not noted in PMFC XVI. That version has no overlap of untroped portions with Columbia. Beginning to miserere nobis.

full black mensural notation

red hand-ruled stave lines

1-2v