Clefs high and low

Readers of Andrew Johnstone's article '"High" clefs in composition and performance', EM, xxxiv/1 (Feb 2006), pp.29–53, will find confirmation of his conclusions, approached from a somewhat different angle in my article, 'Tones, modes, clefs and pitch in Roman Magnificats of the 16th century', EM, xxii/4 (Nov 1994), pp.641–64. I also wish to make a minor correction to Johnstone's note 1, where he says 'Parrott's view [about high clefs] has been adopted by Jeffrey Kurtzman in The Monteverdi vespers of 1610; music, context, performance. . .' In fact, I argued as early as 1978 that the chiavette in the Missa in illo tempore, Lauda Jerusalem and the two Magnicats of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 suggest downward transposition by a 4th in my book Essays on the Monteverdi mass and vespers of 1610 (Houston, 1978), pp.37–40. Both Johnstone's article, and Andrew Parrott's 'Monteverdi: onwards and downwards', EM, xxxii/2 (May 2004), pp.303–17, highlight two of several musicological esssentials neglected in Roger Bowers's Monteverdi essays: (1) primary sources in all their multiplicity; (2) the secondary literature on the topic under discussion. Both are minimally necessary for any study to be taken seriously.