The programme notes are written in English, French and German and the texts of the chants are in Latin and English. Latin asserted itself in the 4th century alongside Greek. It is excellent value for money and highly recommendable. _____ Giacomo Baroffio, the author of the texts presented above, is one of the world’s foremost scholars of Gregorian chant, ancient Roman chant, Ambrosian chant, and medieval liturgies. The Gregorian melodies, however, have more individuality and characteristic expression. This CD is a good introduction to Ambrosian Chant. This particular recording presents the sounds of Ambrosian Chant wonderfully. The survival, as binding material, of a single folio written in Beneventan script and neumes provides evidence for the existence of the Ambrosian antiphoner prior to 1058 and the earliest diastematic source for several melodies. Ambrosian Chant is named after and attributed to Ambrose, bishop of Milan (Italy) in the 4th century. A lost Ambrosian antiphoner of Southern Italy TERENCE BAILEY* ABSTRACT. The recording was made in 1995 in the parochial Church of Quatrelle in Mantua, Italy. Five "churches" or dialects developed: the Milanese Church in Northern Italy (Ambrosian chant); the Beneventan Church in South; the Church of the Iberian Peninsula (Mozarabic); the Church of Rome (Old … “T he Ambrosian chant is inextricably connected with liturgy. Gregorian chant supplanted all the other Western plainchant traditions, Italian and non-Italian, except for Ambrosian chant, which survives to this day. The Ambrosian Rite, also called the Milanese Rite, is a Catholic Western liturgical rite.The rite is named after Saint Ambrose, a bishop of Milan in the fourth century. The conference focused on three medieval manuscripts of Ambrosian chant owned by Houghton Library. But the terms Gregorian and Ambrosian are too well established to be replaced, and moreover useful because Gregorian refers to much more than the practices of Rome and Ambrosian to those of a large region of northern Italy. Legend credits the Milanese with defying even Charlemagne in defense of the so-called Ambrosian chant. Ambrosian Chant has continued to be the chant proper to the distinct liturgical practices of the Milanese church. Milan, the "second city" of medieval Italy after Rome, tenaciously clung to its local liturgical privileges. The known Western traditions included Mozarabic (Roman Spain), the Gallican chants of Gaul (France), Ambrosian chant (Milan, Italy), Beneventan (Italy), Anglo-Saxon and later the Sarum (England), Old Roman and Gregorian (Rome). Ambrosian hymnary is the real treasure of the Ambrosian rite, which is the oldest,” he says. The generously illustrated essays explore the manuscripts as physical objects and place them in their urban and historical contexts, as well as in the musical and ecclesiastical context of Milan, Italy, and medieval Europe. “The Ambrosian chant is amazingly ancient, even more ancient than the Gregorian chant,” says Maestro Giovanni Scomparin, musician, researcher and global popularizer of the chant.