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Melodic Formulas in the Robert ap Huw Manuscript PETER GREENHILL The music text of the Robert ap Huw manuscript is sufficiently large at eighty-six pages containing over ten thousand columns of sym- bols to enable an assessment to be made of the ways in which the music contained there was organized along formal lines. There are many possible avenues for exploring this, but here I propose to con- centrate on the horizontal or linear dimension of the text, by detailing the ways in which formulas were used to repeat and transform seg- ments of text within individual pieces, and by identifying formulaic segments which were duplicated and transformed between different pieces. The text contains evidence of extensive and heavy system- ization of melody, and I believe this can be very useful in helping us to arrive at an understanding of the music. On the basis that at this stage the relative pitches and relative durations of the notes have not been firmly established, it is not really possible to speak with any certainty about the specific contours of the music. Hence I will deal with the text per se, and although it will often be convenient to use musical terminology to do so, it must be understood that it is primarily only the contours of the tablature and of the movements of the harpist which are being described. By citing examples and specifying locations, I hope to make the rather daunting size and intricacy of the text more accessible to study in the long term, and more practically useful in the attempt to recover the music. 1 Formulas for repetition As a consequence of the painstaking thoroughness with which the pieces were recorded in the tablature, with verbal directions where their text was abbreviated, it is possible to be precise about where