The Ancient Greeks transmitted much of their music theory and performance practices to the Byzantines, who in turn added to and disseminated this information to their western and eastern neighbours. Thus it is easy to see the importance of surviving manuscript sources to present‐day practitioners and scholars. I quickly warmed to this seemingly formidable work on reading the author's Preface where she admits that she never dreamed, when as a young Fulbright musicology student at the National Library of Greece, she would ever compile a catalogue: “But I soon realized that there was no catalogue of the music holdings and that it was necessary to rely on bibliographic references to manuscripts or stumble upon them like a needle in a haystack, requesting various numbered manuscripts without assurance that they contained music”. So she did something, and 34 years and 600 pages later we have an annotated catalogue of 242 music manuscripts from the eleventh century to the nineteenth. “My goal in cataloguing the music manuscripts […] is to make available sources that are unknown or little known outside Greece”.
After a list of the manuscripts (by the library's manuscript number) the author's Introduction gives us background to the collection, indicates previous work done on the collections, gives an account of the development of the various Byzantine musical notation systems, and indicates some of the highlights of the collection. The musical sources featured are rich and varied in types, notations and periods, and the exposition is technical.
Entries in the catalogue average a little fewer than two and a half pages with a good size type. Each commences with the library catalogue number and the title in Greek and English, followed by details of type of paper, size and number of folios, notation used, date and provenance. Then follows, in Greek (but with some English annotations), a detailed description of contents of the manuscripts. Notes and bibliography in English conclude the descriptions. There are 32 illustrations, twelve of them coloured, and two appendices. The first appendix is a list of the manuscripts according to the type of music such as Akolouthia, Anastasimatariou, Evangelium and Sticherarion (the excellent and essential Glossary that follows enlightens us to what these are). The second appendix is a list of 107 musical manuscripts from the Library of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople now housed in the National Library of Greece (the “other music repertory recovered” of the book's title). Finally there is a Glossary, a Bibliography, and an Index (in Greek).
“This catalogue has been structured so that it will be accessible to all scholars, Byzantinists, musicologists and/or novices alike [for] (T)he diastematic neumatic notation of Byzantine music is complicated enough, as is the medieval Byzantine language that accompanies it”. Indeed, and that's not to mention the description of the manuscripts in Greek! So I, and doubtless many other users of this catalogue, will be grateful that Ms Touliatos‐Miles of the University of Missouri‐St Louis, has made great efforts to explain rubrics and include translations into English in the body of the catalogue, plus commentaries, notes and interjections in English within the descriptions “to make the information useful outside of Greece for musicologists, Byzantinists, patristic scholars and others”. In addition there are bibliographic references to assist further studies of the manuscripts. The author must be commended on making interesting what could easily have been a dry‐as‐dust work of esoterica.
The market for this work will be limited, but for musicologists, hymnodists, western medievalists, liturgical scholars and Byzantinists, it will be invaluable. The book is robustly and produced and the page layouts clear. The author notes that the manuscripts have been microfilmed.
