Middle Byzantine notation
A leaf from a noted Service Book, possibly an Irmologion, in Greek, manuscript on vellum [Greece or perhaps Sicily?, 13th century]
Middle Byzantine notation from a Greek Service Book, with the Feast of St George.

c.315 x 223mm, 21 lines in brown ink a Greek minuscule bookhand, staffless Middle Byzantine notation, 3 large initials highlighted in yellow including an initial 'O' in the shape of a fish ('Ο λαμπρός αριστεύς Γεώργιος') (stabilised on modern vellum, marginal dampstaining, text on verso rubbed and faded, likely from use as a pastedown). Bound in grey buckram.

Provenance:
(1) Sotheby’s 5 December 1994, part of lot 50.

(2) Schøyen Collection, MS 1979/7.

Text:
The leaf includes the end of the Feast of St Mary the Egyptian (celebrated on 1 April but also on the fifth and last Sunday of Great Lent), and the Feast of St George (23 April), from '[και τα πάθη της σαρ]κός, τω ξίφει της εγκρατείας έτεμες' to 'πυρούμενον έχάλκευσαν κίνδυνοι'.

Script and music:
The Greek minuscule employed here is clear and legible, and harks back to the so-called codices vetustissimi and codices vetusti of earlier centuries, but the enlarged forms of some of the letters, such as the beta, gamma, theta and phi are features of the 13th century. The script and indeed particularly the decorated decorated initials, highlighted in yellow and, in the case of the 'A' and 'T' punctuated by thicker dabs of ink are extremely similar to a 13th-century southern Italian manuscript of the Odyssey, dating from the last quarter of the 12th or first quarter of the 13th century, British Library, Harley 5674 (see in particular f.44 with the decorated initial). The music is Middle Byzantine notation, a system in which each sign designates the interval between one note and the next but makes no distinction between major and minor, perfect or imperfect, etc.

Image reproduced on cover and inlay of a CD: ‘St. Mark of Ephesus Byzantine Choir: Let my Prayer be Set Forth’, published Boston, MA, in 2009.
Neumi - cantus volat signa manent, Genesis Editrice, Turin, 2011, pp.37-38.