The three lines of music added to the end of a thirteenth-century antiphoner may seem an afterthought but their contents tie the manuscript to an important and largely unexplained polyphonic compositional technique of the fourteenth century. Folio 169r of the antiphoner Messina, Biblioteca “Painiana” del Seminario Arcivescovile, MS 0.4.16 contains a two-voice Benedicamus Domino on the “Flos filius” tenor. In the fourteenth century, the antiphoner was probably in Otricoli, a town on the border of Umbria and Lazio in the present-day province of Terni. The presence of offices for the locally venerated saints, St. Medicus (Medico) and St. Fulgentius (Fulgenzio) in a section of the manuscript added in the fourteenth or early fifteenth century provides the principal evidence for assigning provenance. At the same time as these offices were added music was written on two folios at the end of the manuscript, containing psalm forms for the eight modes and the two-voice Benedicamus Domino.
Although the polyphonic notation is of a later date than the bulk of the manuscript, the tradition of singing the Benedicamus Domino polyphonically may be as old as the source itself. A rubric on f. 73r after Et valde mane una sabbatorum, an antiphon “ad Benedictum,” notes that “postea duo fratres cantent altissime Benedicamus domino alleluia alleluia.”
Unusually for a polyphonic mensural setting, the music of f. 169r is written on four-line staves, as if an extension of monophonic practice. The lower voice is written entirely in chant notation with each note to be interpreted as a breve of the upper voice. The work is thus one of the equal-note tenor compositions the general style of which was discussed earlier in this chapter during the examination of Florence 999, but which warrants further examination focused particularly on Messina 16’s melody.
