Bibliographical Aspects of Italian Printed Music of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Rent from DeepDyveThe earliest printed music was presented in two different layouts on the page, both derived directly from those used in manuscripts. The first publisher of music (Ottaviano Petrucci, working in Venice in 1501) used both layouts: for many of his titles, he presented compositions in separate partbooks, so that each voice (or, later, instrument) had a separate book, much in the manner that modern orchestral musicians play from separate parts. For his successors, most books were in quarto or octavo, the choice depending on the repertoire presented. This was by far the commonest method of printing music, and will be the focus of the present study. At the same time, some prestigious volumes (of mass settings, in particular) were printed in what is called "choir-book" layout, with the music which each musician was to sing printed in a different part of the two pages of an opening. Later, and not before the seventeenth century, some music was printed in score, with all the parts synchronised and laid out one below another.
Books in choir-book layout or in score presented some problems for the compositor, mostly concerning casting-off and adjusting spacing to allow for different densities of notation for simultaneous music. These problems did not arise when working with partbooks, although the compositor would still have to adjust the spacing of the music to that of the text, or vice-versa. This was difficult only in multiple-impression printing (most frequently found in liturgical books), when music and text were printed at separate passes through the press.
However, partbooks for a single title do raise problems for the modern bibliographer, in deciding whether or not they are to be treated as separate units. 1 The easy solution would be to see them as parts of a larger work, akin to the volumes of a multi-volume prose work, even though, textually, they do not work in that manner. The contents of the different partbooks are to be "read", performed, simultaneously; one book is useless alone, for it contains only one voice-part for a multi-voice composition. Further, there is no evidence that single partbooks were ever intended to be sold alone, without the other books of a title. For many titles, the dedicatory letter or a publisher's letter to the reader appears in only one partbook of the set, and even an index may not be in all books—although that is often a result of a shortage [End Page 195] of space. Finally, many sets of parts are signed consecutively through the set, from one partbook to the next, and some are even foliated similarly. All these features suggest that the set of parts was seen by the publisher and user as a single unit, only complete when all parts were present.
On the other side, apparently suggesting that each partbook was thought of as a separate item, is the fact that, after the earliest years of the sixteenth century, all partbooks had full title-pages, with publication details. In practice, this was necessary for most users, for a set of parts was often not kept together. Instead, sets of Tenor books from a number of editions would be bound together—for they would be sung by the same person—and the corresponding Cantus or Bassus books similarly kept together. But this was a matter of convenience, not a reflection of the relationship between part and whole. It is perhaps analogous to the way in which collections of maps were made up, with a selection that met the needs of the owner.
If, as I suggest, musical partbooks are seen as strictly part of a single unit, the collation of a set of parts can also be seen as a unit, presented on one line. I believe that printers and publishers saw the books in that way, although they did not always arrange the parts...
