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  • Editing Music in Early Modern Germany
  • Susan Forscher Weiss
Editing Music in Early Modern Germany. By Susan Lewis Hammond. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. [xvii, 265 p. ISBN-13: 9780754655732. $99.95.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Editing Music in Early Modern Germany is arguably the first full-length study that examines the role of northern editors in adapting and collating Italian madrigals for use by readers in German-speaking lands. The author, Susan Lewis Hammond, highlights the importance of editors within a network that included composers, performers, printers, publishers, and patrons. She states that "the inspiration for the project dates back to Anthony Grafton's graduate seminar [at Princeton University] on early modern print culture, which sparked my interest in the networks of authors, printers, editors, publishers, and agents that brought books to the public" (p. xv). She also builds on the work of other scholars including Martha Feldman, Gary Tomlinson, Emma Dillon, Jane Bernstein, Mary Lewis, Stanley Boorman, Richard Goldthwaite, Lorenzo Bianconi, Tim Carter, and Roger Chartier.

The introduction presents an outline of her method and content, setting up a case for the growing importance of the editor (compiler, translator, poet) in both the selection and presentation of material for German anthologies of music, particularly the madrigal, in the decades around 1600. These anthologies become important vehicles for the distribution and dissemination of the Italian madrigal in German-speaking lands. Lewis Hammond includes a well-known quote from one of, if not the most famous etiquette books of the Renaissance, Baldassare Castiglione's Il libro del cortegiano ("The Book of the Courtier"), published in Venice in 1528. This passage contains advice to a student on how to select, gather, imitate, judge, and transform the best qualities learned from his or her teacher. Oddly, of the many translations of this work, the one in German did not appear until 1566 in Munich, preceded by one in Spanish (1534), in French (1537), in English (1561) and in Latin (printed in Wittenberg) in 1561. An interest in things Italian and in Italian humanism had developed in a number of European countries before it spread to German-speaking lands, and edited anthologies appeared in Europe long before the first publications in Germany. Lewis Hammond contends, however, that despite the earlier presence of anthologies such as Petrucci's Harmonice musice Odhecaton A, published in Venice in 1501, or those by Pierre Attaingnant beginning in the 1520s in France, or even those in the 1530s in Germany, edited by Hans Ott and printed by the Petreius firm in Nurem berg, none gave recognition to the editor on the title page. Rather, it was the printer and/or composer whose names dominated those pages. At the same time, she emphasizes the tension between editor and author; these are revealed especially in the conflict between an author's intentions and the economic constraints of the print shop.

In chapter 1, "The Anthology and the Birth of the Professional Music Editor," Lewis Hammond explores the social and cultural role of the editor in the music book trade of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here she draws on the work of Martha Feldman, who examines the importance of editors' reputations and the authorial function and responsibility thrust upon them. Lewis Hammond argues that the need for editors was "strongest in German-speaking lands where demand for Italian music necessitated the reliance on editors to translate verbal texts into German and rewrite new texts appropriate [End Page 500] for Protestant listeners" (pp. 8–9). To reveal these changes she focuses on editorial additions such as title pages, prefaces, dedications, tables, and visuals that help make a book more attractive and accessible. Following the 1540s, the title pages that typically featured a composer, begin to give prominence to the editor. No longer was the editor an anonymous figure, but rather someone whose services were necessary for getting the music books published and sold. In this chapter, Lewis Hammond also makes a case for the importance of the layout and indexing, guides that provided "a visual snapshot of the anthology" (p. 35). In relating the sixteenth-century procedure to a much earlier manuscript tradition, she draws on the work of...

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