Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

The central antiphon is a metrical hymn that echoes Gabriel’s “Ave”—one of the prime emblems in
Christian theology and art—through five stanzas that recall in turn the five major events of Mary’s life,
each of them commemorated by a major feast in the church calendar: The Immaculate Conception
(December 8), Nativity (September 8), Annunciation (March 25), Purification (February 2), and
Assumption (August 15). There was even a latter-day Marian votive office called La Recollection des