MS Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. XIX, 164–167 (review)

Manuscript Florence Bibilioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. XIX, 164–167 has long been of interest to scholars. Though by no means the most beautifully calligraphed of Renaissance manuscripts (it never received the illuminated initials that should have marked each piece), nor the most imposing (the four paper partbooks that comprise the set measure a slight 6" × 4"), it transmits a significant repertoire. Copied in Florence circa 1520, it includes a number of proto-madrigals by Bernardo Pisano, Sebastiano Festa, and others, some of the latest chansons from France, and a handful of motets. While most of the chansons and motets appear in other sources, eleven of the forty-five Italian pieces are unica, which makes the manuscript an important source of Italian-texted works at a moment of stylistic transition between the frottola and the emergence of the madrigal around 1525.

Alfred Einstein, Bianca Becherini, Frank D'Accone, Knud Jeppesen, and Joshua Rifkin all drew attention to the manuscript long ago, and in 1987 Garland published a facsimile edition with an introduction by Howard Mayer Brown. In 1998, Iain Fenlon and James Haar identified the binding as Roman (which did not discount the manuscript's provenance as Florentine), and two years ago Joshua Drake identified Jacopo Buonaparte as its likely first owner.

The present study, unfortunately, adds little to our understanding of Florence 164–167. Indeed, it reads like an extended set of critical notes and is best perused with the facsimile edition in hand. A brief introduction leads on to a chapter treating the gathering structure, paper types, scribal hands, bindings, concordances, and evidence of ownership. A second chapter discusses the repertoire and its possible connections to the Sacred Academy of the Medici and the group that met in the gardens of the Rucellai. The succinct conclusions (on a single page) reaffirm the Florentine provenance of the manuscript and its connections with the Sacred Academy and Rucellai group, subjects on which Cummings has written at length in his The Maecenas and the Madrigalist: Patrons, Patronage, and the Origins of the Italian Madrigal (2004).

Twenty years ago, during the preparation of the Census Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music, 1400–1550 (1979–88), hundreds of sources were examined and collated, and genuinely brilliant advances were made in music paleography, thanks to which we know much more today about how Renaissance books of music were copied and put together. Cummings's study adopts the range of topics defined by the Census Catalogue, but with a clinical approach that limits his analysis to the hard and fast facts of material description, repertorial concordances, and composer biography. Of course, the author cannot answer every interesting question definitively according to such standards, which means that numerous paragraphs and even one chapter end disappointingly with question marks. To take just one example, when finishing up a discussion of the relationship between Florence 164–167 and Florence 2442 (another of those ordinary little manuscripts the Medici seemed fond of saving), Cummings concludes "does this confirm that Florence 2442 is indeed a northern rather than a Florentine source and that it served to introduce the 'new' chanson repertory into Florence and Florentine sources, Florence 164–7 among them?" (40). Of course we cannot know for certain, though Louise Litterick has proposed an answer —at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society in Toronto (2000) she argued that a large number of chansons in Florence 164–167 derived from Florence 2442 (incidentally, Litterick's paper is not cited, nor is her subsequent work on the subject). Litterick reached her conclusions by comparing the readings in each source, the attributions, and the organization of the two manuscripts. Some might call this style of analysis educated guesswork, but advances in the field of source studies have always relied on it, and I would like to have seen more of it in the present study...