Sean Gallagher, Johannes Regis . Collection ‘Épitome musical’. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2010. xii+249 pp.

Sean Gallagher states that this is ‘to my knowledge, the first book on a medieval or renaissance composer to include recordings of his complete works’. He is too diffident. They are not just recordings but two newly prepared CDs by no less an ensemble than the Clerks’ Group under Edward Wickham. Surely, the musicians who have recorded all Ockeghem’s sacred music with such eloquence are the best-equipped people, world-wide, to make sense of Regis’s often wayward and always unpredictable polyphony. The CDs are conveniently accommodated in sachets inside the front and back coverboards of the book. (They are, of course, the same CDs that were issued two years earlier in a strikingly elegant box-case by Musique en Wallonie; and probably few readers of these lines will need telling that the figure behind both this and the series ‘Épitome musical’ is the indefatigable Philippe Vendrix – whose efforts here merit a serious salute.) In addition, though, Gallagher prepared new editions of all the music and supervised all the recording sessions. He is of course no newcomer to the topic. His various publications on Regis reach back to 1996 and have been coming out regularly since then. Nevertheless, the experience of those recordings with those particular musicians plainly shows in the book. Profusely equipped with musical examples and references to particular passages on the recordings, his chapters on the music are packed with detailed observations of a kind that could not have happened without that background. Beyond that, the very difficult Latin texts have been given ‘the treatment’ by Leofranc Holford-Strevens, who has been providing that service for musical texts of the fifteenth century for the past twenty years. The full details of what Holford-Strevens has done to them, and why, will appear elsewhere in a separate article, but the upshot of his investigations is clearly stated here (pp. 181–2). Heinz-Jürgen Winkler in his 1999 monograph described the Regis motet texts in the Chigi Codex as korrupt überliefert, which is true; but they are also very badly written by an author with a weak grasp of Latin prosody and grammar. Gallagher reports that ‘even when one allows for problems of transmission, [they] are awkward, overly ambitious attempts at quantitative verse, riddled with errors of various kinds’. He also hints that they may be by Regis himself, who could have been trying to emulate Du Fay’s fluent Latinism. Reviews