Don Michael Randel
President, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Editor of The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed.
Primary Contributions (1)
Latin liturgical chant of the Christian church on the Iberian Peninsula from its beginnings about the 5th century until its suppression at the end of the 11th century in favour of the liturgy and Gregorian chant of the Roman Catholic Church. The term Mozarabic was applied to Christians living under Islamic rule in Iberia after ad 711; the use of Mozarabic is thus something of a misnomer, since the rite was practiced before the arrival of Muslims as well as in territories that were never captured by them or were recaptured from them over the course of the centuries. The recapture by Christian forces in 1085 of Toledo, the seat of the Spanish church, occasioned the rite’s formal suppression in favour of Roman Catholic practice. A few parishes were allowed to continue to practice the rite, and there remained in the 21st century a Mozarabic chapel in the cathedral of Toledo. The rite practiced there, however, is the result of the attempted restoration of the Mozarabic rite by Francisco...READ MORE