A Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Greece: Byzantine Chant and Other Music Repertory Recovered.

By Diane H. Touliatos-Miles. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. [x, 632 p. ISBN 9780754651680. $134.95.] Appendices, bibliography, glossary, indexes, plates.

Scholars, researchers, students, and anyone interested doing research on the musical sources of Byzantine music at the National Library of Greece have to face a frustrating reality: the lack of an current, accurate, and scholarly descriptive catalog that brings to light the holdings of one of the richest repositories of Byzantine music manuscripts in the world.

The music manuscript collection of the National Library of Greece in Athens consists of 242 centuries-old manuscripts, mainly of Byzantine music but including some Western music as well, 149 of which were never published or properly inventoried before. All previous attempts to orga-nize the materials yielded partial results since none of the people involved in the projects of putting the sources in order was a trained musicologist. Consequently, the release of this updated descriptive catalogue came as a gratifying surprise to all users interested in the wealth of music housed in this library. Diane H. TouliatosMiles undertook this painstaking task with exceptional results.

The author is a researcher, scholar and professor of Western and Byzantine musicology who has published extensively on such topics as ancient Greek music, Eastern medieval chant, and women composers. Her goal in publishing this book was twofold. The first of these was to create an invaluable resource tool in order to make available music sources of noteworthy significance for music research. She accomplishes this by enriching this catalog with notes, bibliography, plates, appendices, and indexes in order to present the repertory of these manuscripts as comprehen-sively as possible. Second, in order to make these sources available to a broader audience, she makes use of two languages, Greek to describe the contents of the sources and English to comment on and provide information about the particular source with relevant bibliographic references for further research.

The catalogue is well structured and easy to use. It starts with a checklist organized by manuscript accession number according to the National Library of Greece (EBE), and its corresponding pages in the book. Following this is an informative preface that provides an overview of the collection and its contents, an annotated list of the collection's highlights, and an account of the author's objectives and aspirations.

The actual descriptive catalogue begins by providing in succession the following information: the name/number of the manuscript, the type of liturgical book, descriptive notes regarding the type of paper, measurements, number of folios, type of notation used, date of creation and prove-nance. Then Touliatos-Miles describes the contents of each folio in Greek (following the recto and verso fashion), frequently accompanied by English transliterations as well as interpolated translations. Following this is a notes section in which she provides frequently extensive information on authorship, types of chants, inscriptions, scribes, and comments about the repertory. Relevant bibliography for further study concludes the description of each source.

Sixteen pages of plates are offered between pages 500 and 501 in order to provide a visual presentation of selected examples from the sources. More specifically, the plates depict illuminations, in color as well as in black and white, including portraits of saints, images of two voiced chants, examples of rubrics, diagrams, colophons, an initial page of a music treatise, different types of notation, and more.

Although Touliatos-Miles may describe some sources meticulously, anyone who has already done some work with these manuscripts may observe sporadic oversights here and there regarding rubrics, chant initial words, or other minute limitations in describing some of the sources. However, these omissions, as Touliatos admits, were consciously made by the author to avoid extending the delay of' the publication any longer.

The appendices begin on page 585. The first of these provides a list of the previously analytically described music manuscripts sorted by book type such as Akolouthia, Evangelium, ancient Greek treatises, etc., with their corresponding chronology. The number of the manuscript is also provided in order to refer back to the descriptive catalogue for more details. The next appendix is devoted to a list of musical manuscripts from the Library of the Holy Sepulcher in Constantinople, now housed in the National Library of Greece. This list is sorted by manuscript number and is enriched with information such as liturgical book type, measurements, folio numbering, type of notation used, and date. These manuscripts had been catalogued already by another scholar so there was no need for Further elaboration or discussion here.

A valuable glossary appendix follows along with an extensive bibliography on the discipline of Byzantine musicology in order to inform the novice and enlighten the scholar not fluent in Greek with regard to terminology. The book concludes with an index sorted by author name with corresponding pages pointing back to the manuscripts.

I cannot stress enough the validity of this resource for those researchers interested in the field of Byzantine chant and medieval music in general. This catalogue is an indispensable navigation tool that guides the user through the recovered musical sources and their diversity in terms of notation, book type and chronology. It is also a must-have for any library that has a collection embracing the fascinating field of Byzantine musicology. Unquestionably, the Byzantine musicological community has acquired a landmark work with the publication of this book, which hopefully will stimulate further study on topics of this rich but greatly overlooked musical tradition.

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ARSINOT IOANNIDOU

The New School