Motetti de Passione, de Cruce, de Sacramento, de Beata Virgine et huiusmodi B, Venice, 1503 (review)

In 1501, Ottaviano Petrucci inaugurated the first series of printed part music in the history of Western music with the Harmonice musicesodhecaton A, an anthology containing mainly French secular songs, and in 1503—after issuing other books, including more songs (Canti B numero cinquanta, 1502), Masses (Liber primus missarum Josquin, 1502), and motets (Motetti A numero trentatre, 1502)—he continued his remarkably productive run with a second anthology of motets, Motetti de Passione, de Cruce, de Sacramento, de Beata Virgine et huiusmodi B, commonly shortened to Motetti B. During the following fifteen years he produced some three dozen more books of songs, Masses, motets, frottolas, lute music, and laude, all in accurate and clear readings. Motetti B has now been handsomely edited by Warren Drake, and in good time, since the volume appeared just one year preceding the quincentenary of its first printing. The edition forms part of Monuments of Renaissance Music, a distinguished series established by Edward E. Lowinsky in 1964 and now guided by Bonnie J. Blackburn as general editor. Lowinsky founded this series on the principle that central sources of Renaissance music should be edited as integral wholes, without homogenization of readings of individual pieces by incorporating variants from other sources, and thus modern users can experience the readings that are preserved in a particular manuscript or edition. As Drake states in the section on editorial principles (p. 69):

An edition of a single source differs fundamentally from other kinds of editions, such as the Opera omnia of individual composers. Its foremost purpose is to convey with the utmost fidelity the text (musical and literary) of the original and thereby to suggest . . . its character as a cultural artifact of its time and place.

This does not mean that the editor's job is minimal, however, because each volume in the series provides extensive contextual information, including comments on the sources of the texts as well as critical notes on musical concordances and variant readings in other sources.

To answer the logical question of why he did not also edit Petrucci's Motetti A, Drake explains (p. 1) that the thirty-five works in Petrucci's first volume of motets are almost all attributed to well-known composers and are accessible in modern complete editions of their works, while fourteen of the thirty-four works in Motetti B have never been published in new editions. In fact, Petrucci's other early motet anthologies, Motetti A, Motetti C (1504), and the Motetti libro quarto (1505), have been available since 1991 in modern editions as the first three volumes of The Sixteenth-Century Motet, edited by Richard Sherr (Selections from Motetti A numero trentatre (Venice, 1502); Selections from Motetti C (Venice, 1504); Selections from Motetti libro quarto (Venice, 1505) [New York: Garland Publishing]).

Drake divides the edition into three parts: an introduction; concordance and commentaries on individual compositions, including a list of sources and bibliography; and the edition of the music. The introduction provides an astute overview of the history of the motet in the fifteenth century and rightly emphasizes the explosion of motet production in Italy in the latter decades of the century. Petrucci reflected this growth in the four anthologies of motets mentioned above, which contain a total of over one hundred and fifty works. The Sforza court in Milan served as a particularly important source for motets in the 1470s, and Duke Galeazzo...