Murray,

MUSIC Explores the practice of music education before Bach Weiss, Music Education in the
and
Cyrus Middle Ages and the Renaissance

RUSSELL E. MURRAY, JR., is Professor Music Education in the Middle Ages and
of Music Hiory and Literature and the Renaissance explores the teaching and

Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Associate Chair of the Department of learning of music in the early centuries of
Music at the University of Delaware. the Weern art music tradition. The au-
thors of these essays seek to underand the

Music Education in the

SUSAN FORSCHER WEISS is Chair of methods and philosophies of various teach-
Musicology, The Peabody Initute of the ers, as well as what udents learned and
Johns Hopkins University. how the act of learning is embedded in the
broader context of music and music-making
CYNTHIA J. CYRUS is Associate Dean in this period. Gender, social atus, and
and Professor of Musicology at the Blair the role of the church are considered along
School of Music at Vanderbilt University. with the educational rationale and motiva-
tions of medieval and early modern peda-
gogues. From England to Italy, these essays
provide an expansive view of the beginnings
of music pedagogy as a tradition. Opening
the way and suggeing further avenues of
inquiry, Murray, Weiss, Cyrus, and their
contributors add invaluable nuance to the
place of education in our current maer
narratives of music hiory.

The contributors are Charles M. Atkinson,

Colleen Baade, Susan Boynton, Cynthia J.
Cyrus, Kriine K. Forney, Anthony
Grafton, John Griths, James Haar,
PUBLICATIONS OF THE
EARLY MUSIC INSTITUTE
INDIANA Jacket illustration: Lady Musica from
Reisch, Margarita Philosophica Nova. Gordon Munro, Russell E. Murray, Jr.,
University Press EDIT ED BY Jessie Ann Owens, Dolores Pesce, Peter
Paul Elliot, editor Boston Public Library, Rare Books
Bloomington & Indianapolis
www.iupress.indiana.edu and Manuscripts Division, G 404. 17.
Russell E. Murray, Jr., Susan Forscher Weiss, and Cynthia J. Cyrus Schubert, Pamela F. Starr, Gary Towne,
1-800-842-6796 Used by permission. INDIANA Susan Forscher Weiss, and Blake Wilson.

MusicEMARmec.indd 1 5/14/10 5:05 PM

Music Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

,
PUBLICATIONS OF THE EARLY MUSIC INSTITUTE

Paul Elliot, editor

,
 Music Education in
the Middle Ages and
%the Renaissance&
EDITED BY

Russell E. Murray, Jr., Susan Forscher

Weiss, and Cynthia J. Cyrus

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Music education in the Middle ages and the
Renaissance / edited by Russell E. Murray,
Jr., Susan Forscher Weiss, and Cynthia J.
Cyrus.
p. cm. (Publications of the Early
Music Institute)
Includes bibliographical references and
index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35486-0 (cloth : alk.
paper) 1. MusicInstruction and
studyHistory5001400. 2. Music
Instruction and studyHistory15th
century. 3. MusicInstruction and
studyHistory16th century. I. Murray,
Russell Eugene. II. Weiss, Susan Forscher.
III. Cyrus, Cynthia J.
MT1.M98165 2010
780.71dc22
2010007346
1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 10
To my wife Lysbet and my daughter Diane
keen proofreaders and patient listeners

RUSSELL

To my husband Jim, our children, grandchildren, and

all my students for inspiring me to explore the many
aspects of musical learning past and present

SUSAN

To John and Helen Cyrus, models of a lifetime spent in learning

CYNTHIA
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Reading and Writing the
Pedagogy of the Past Russell E. Murray, Jr.,
Susan Forscher Weiss, and Cynthia J. Cyrus xi

PERSPECTIVE 1
1 Some Introductory Remarks on Musical
Pedagogy James Haar 3

PART 1 MEDIEVAL PEDAGOGY

2 Guido dArezzo, Ut queant laxis, and Musical
Understanding Dolores Pesce 25
3 Some Thoughts on Music Pedagogy in the
Carolingian Era Charles M. Atkinson 37
4 Medieval Musical Education as Seen through Sources
Outside the Realm of Music Theory Susan Boynton 52

PART 2 RENAISSANCE PLACES OF LEARNING

5 Sang Schwylls and Music Schools: Music Education
in Scotland, 15601650 Gordon Munro 65
6 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerps
Women Kristine K. Forney 84
7 Juan Bermudo, Self-instruction, and the Amateur
Instrumentalist John Griths 126
 PERSPECTIVE 2
8 The Humanist and the Commonplace Book:
Education in Practice Anthony Grafton 141

PART 3 RENAISSANCE MATERIALS AND CONTEXTS

9 Musical Commonplaces in the
Renaissance Peter Schubert 161
10 Music Education and the Conduct of Life in Early Modern
England: A Review of the Sources Pamela F. Starr 193
11 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? Handwritten Clues in
Renaissance Music Textbooks Susan Forscher Weiss 207

PART 4 MUSIC EDUCATION IN THE CONVENT

12 The Educational Practices of Benedictine Nuns:
A Salzburg Abbey Case Study Cynthia J. Cyrus 249
13 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in
Early Modern Spain Colleen Baade 262

PART 5 THE TEACHER

14 Isaac the Teacher: Pedagogy and Literacy
in Florence, ca. 1488 Blake Wilson 287
15 Zacconi as Teacher: A Pedagogical Style in Words
and Deeds Russell E. Murray, Jr. 303
16 The Good Maestro: Pietro Cerone on the
Pedagogical Relationship Gary Towne 324

PERSPECTIVE 3
17 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover: Reflections on Format
in English Music Theory Jessie Ann Owens 347

List of Contributors 387

Index 391
 Acknowledgments

This book results from a collaborative eort on the part of many individu-
als, all of whom, if they could, would thank the many people who provided
them with help, encouragement, and the occasional helpful citation. While
we cannot possibly acknowledge these people individually, we oer a general
thanks on our contributors behalf. As for ourselves, we wish to acknowledge
the many people who have played a role in our shared project.
We owe our greatest debt to the authors themselves, whose commitment,
determination, and patience is matched by the quality of their contributions
to this volume. It has been our great pleasure to work with these scholars
throughout this long and complex project. We have learned from their re-
search, and have been inspired by their commitment. Our work has been made
all the easier by the care that they have taken in preparing their essays, and we
can only hope that we have presented their work to its best advantage.
The initiation of this project in the form of a three-day conference, its
continuation in an online bibliography, and its culmination in this volume
were all supported by a generous Collaborative Research Grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, and we would like to thank the
Endowment, and specifically Elizabeth Arndt, whose indefatigable work on
our behalf and her unwavering interest in our work were both enormously
helpful and deeply gratifying. We have also been supported by our various
chairs and deans at the University of Delaware, the Peabody Institute, and
Vanderbilt University, and we owe special thanks to the Peabody Institute
and the Johns Hopkins University for their hosting of the original confer-
ence, and to the Blair School of Music of Vanderbilt University for a generous
subvention to partially defray publication costs.
In addition to the institutional support we have received, we also owe an
enormous debt to a number of colleagues who have provided advice and en-
x Acknowledgments

couragement along the way, most notably Allan Atlas, Patrick Macey, Honey
Meconi, Cristle Collins Judd, and Craig Wright, each of whom provided sup-
port and wise counsel at various stages of this endeavor. We are fortunate to
have such generous colleagues whoalong with a host of others, too numer-
ous to be named herehave all contributed in small but crucial ways. We
are also indebted to all the libraries and their stas for their generous help in
securing the many images reproduced in this volume.
Of course, this book would never have seen the light of day without the
hard work of many people at Indiana University Press. We are especially in-
debted to our editor, Jane Behnken, whose excitement at our initial proposal
and continuous work on our behalf were a source of strength, particularly
when the inevitable glitches and delays tried our patience. We also wish to
thank Janes assistants, Katherine Baber and Sarah Wyatt Swanson, and our
project editor June Silay, for keeping track of all those details that so easily
slip through the cracks, along with David L. Dusenbury for his assiduous
copyediting and Paula Durbin-Westby for her expert indexing. Finally, we
would like to thank the anonymous readers of our initial proposal: their many
helpful comments have made this a stronger work.
Virginia Woolf famously noted that a writer needed a room of ones
own in order to create. While we often think of that room in the physical
sense, it is just as often the room created by the patient love of family and
friends that makes the writers work possible. The three of us owe our final
thanks to our friends and families, who provided the much-needed grounding
and space for us to take on this task. Our work is richer for their presence in
our lives.

Russell E. Murray, Jr.

Susan Forscher Weiss
Cynthia J. Cyrus

16 July 2009
 INTRODUCTION

Reading and Writing the

Pedagogy of the Past*
RUSSELL E. MURRAY, JR., SUSAN FORSCHER
WEISS, AND CYNTHIA J. CYRUS

This collection of essays addresses questions of how music was taught and
learned in the past. The answers to these questions not only inform our un-
derstanding of musical literacy and musical learning in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, but can help guide our investigations of the subject in other eras.
In past scholarship, many of the most valuable observations on musical learn-
ing in this period have been found in the margins of other kinds of studies:
biographies, institutional or regional histories, source studies, iconographical
research, history of theory, investigations of compositional and performance
practices, and so on. This volume places the issue of musical learning at the
center of investigation.
In order to bring these questions into better focus, we have limited the
chronological and the geographic scope of this collection to music in the
Western European art tradition in the period dating from the Middle Ages to
approximately 1650. Even within these limited parameters the authors explore
a variety of topics and methodologies, providing a sampling of strategies for
approaching the questions that will, we hope, spur further scholarly pursuits
in this area. The result is thus as much prescriptive of further study as it is
descriptive of the present state of inquiry.
From their various perspectives, the essays in this volume address five
basic issues that seem central to the investigation of music teaching and learn-
xii Introduction

ing. The first and perhaps most obvious question is one of methodthe heart
but not the sum total of the term pedagogy. What were the pedagogical
methods used by various teachers? How did they parallel or depart from
those of other teachers and even other disciplines? How much variation was
there in the accepted methods of teaching, and how self-aware were teachers
of their own pedagogical stances?
A second question is repertorialboth intellectual and material: what
did the student learn? In part, this involves fitting the act of learning into the
broader context of music and music-making in the period. It may also invite
comparisons to other repertoires or even other kinds of pedagogical endeav-
ors of the time. Also of importance is the question of the materials used for
learning and teaching. While some materials, such as treatises, seem uniquely
pedagogical, what other materials served pedagogical ends?
The third is a question of identity. Who were the teachers, and who were
the learners? How did their social role, gender, or professional status shape
the course and outlines of their musical education, and how, in turn, did that
education play a role in their own identities?
The fourth overarching question is one of place. Where and when was
music learned? Beside the physical locations associated with the formal and
informal institutions of learning, we need to address the cultural locations of
class and gender. The question also suggests the need to understand the place
of the activity itself and its place within the lifespan of the learners.
Finally, the authors address the question of educational rationale: why
was music learned? What were the motivations of the learners and the teach-
ers? How was their activity supported and encouraged by the institutions and
social structures of the time? What was the value of music learning within
the culture?
While no individual author can focus on every issue in a given chapter, in
the aggregate these case studies create a broad portrait of musical pedagogy
that embraces all of these issues, often in intriguing combinations. The au-
thors, in addressing musical questions, employ a wide cross-section of mate-
rial and methodology from the social sciences and humanities, among them
art history and cultural history; history of medicine, science, and technology;
economic history; linguistics, and the history of the book. What unites these
scholars is an interest in the ways in which knowledge and the materials of
learning were passed from one individual to another.
By presenting such a wide range of topics and methodology, we hope
to establish useful approaches to studying the educational practices of the
 Introduction xiii

period. Comparing the materials and techniques of our colleagues in the hu-
manities and social sciences brings us closer to defining the parameters of
our own field. The end result is a more coherent picture of musical learning
within the larger socio-cultural context of education in general. In short, the
editors see this project as the beginning of a discussion that we hope will
inform investigations of the past for decades to come; for the question of how
music was passed on from one individual to another is fundamental to the
understanding of musics place in that culture.

The volume is framed by three essays of a broader nature, intended to provide

a context for the more focused investigations and thus referred to as perspec-
tives. While not intended as introductions to general areas of investigation,
they nevertheless touch on issues that can be viewed as both centripetal and
as points for outward expansion. James Haars essay provides a context for
much of what follows, posing salient questions about the development of
pedagogical thought over the course of the Renaissance, and focusing on the
somewhat messy, but ultimately illuminating synthesis of pedagogical ideals
found in the first of Ludovico Zacconis pratticae. Anthony Grafton takes the
reader outside of the purely musical realm, exploring the ways in which the
typical student in the Renaissance approached the use of classical texts, teas-
ing out the strategies that they used to assess, understand, and remember the
information under consideration. His exploration of the theory and practice
of the commonplace reminds us that the study of music took place within
the larger context of instruction of literary studies, and that epistemological
and methodological concerns of one field could easily find a home in others.
Finally, Jessie Ann Owenss closing essay brings us back to the material world,
focusing our attention on the physical materials used by teachers and learn-
ers, and providing us with a useful reminder that these objects had special
meaning to their users, and that we can learn a great deal by knowing the
positions that they occupied in the pedagogical world.
These three essays present strands that can be followed in the work of
our other authors; yet the varied approaches taken by the others go beyond
the categories suggested by Haar, Grafton, and Owens, and are organized in
an independent scheme, suggesting more specific anities. We begin with
three case studies from the Middle Ages. Dolores Pesce returns to one of the
touchstones of musical pedagogy, Guidos system of solmization. Question-
ing the simple, skill-based reading we have given Guidos approach, she sug-
gests a larger, Boethian context combining sense and intellect into a coherent
xiv Introduction

pedagogical whole. Charles Atkinson likewise questions the simple view we

have of the basis of medieval musical pedagogy, showing that the methodol-
ogy of the time partook of a rich blend of ancient sources and the traditions
of grammatical instruction. Susan Boyntons work echoes the extra-musical
context suggested by Pesce and Atkinson, describing the use of some non-
didactic materials such as customaries and glossed hymnaries as a source for
understanding the act of teaching across the period.
The second section of the volume deals with the places of learning. Gor-
don Munro and Kristine Forney look at the roles of institutions over the
course of time, responding to new social realities. Munro charts the develop-
ment of music schools in Scotland as they respond to the secularization of
musical institutions under the Protestant regime, while Forney chronicles the
somewhat extraordinary opportunities provided to young women in Antwerp
to learn sacred and secular music within the context of the church and the
home, along with the important musical role played by the teaching guilds of
the sixteenth century. John Griths shows how objects with multiple uses
(pedagogical, theoretical, and performance) can serve as important sources
for understanding both formal and informal education, entering the world of
the urban amateur as he created his own school of self-study.
The authors of the third section look at larger strategies for teaching,
and evidence for diering attitudes toward pedagogy. Peter Schubert extends
Anthony Graftons discussion of commonplace books by looking at the ways
that musicians compiled musical commonplaces, and used them as the basic
material for their composition. Pamela Starr looks at attitudes toward music
and by extension, its teaching, in early modern England, gleaning evidence
from conduct and courtesy manuals of the day. Susan Weiss makes the case
that marginalia and annotations, often treated as at least an aesthetic hin-
drance, provide important clues for the understanding and reception of musi-
cal thought, and insights into the development of theoretical ideas.
The locale of musical learning intersects with the social categories of
individuals who were granted musical instruction, and the rationale for that
instruction can therefore vary quite widely depending on the needs of the stu-
dent. Nowhere is this truer than in the convent. Cynthia Cyrus and Colleen
Baade explore the education of the female religious in two dierent national
traditions. Cyruss purview is the Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg, where she
traces the move toward a more literate approach to musical learning in the
post-Tridentine period, and its impact on the musical practice of the women.
Baade extends our understanding of the level of training received by nuns
 Introduction xv

in the more prestigious convents, and reveals the importance of both family
dynamics in the perpetuation of musical culture and the roles of women as
teachers in this large musical society.
Our final section brings us to where we might rightfully have begun
with the teacher of music. The meeting of teacher and student is, of course,
the ultimate vantage point in our study of pedagogythe place where theory,
practice, philosophy, and practicality meet. Blake Wilson demonstrates that
the ideals of pedagogy were often intimately woven into the daily practice of
musicians and music lovers, and that not all schooling occurred in a formal
setting. With the growing literacy of the larger population, their interactions
with musicians and composer provided surprising chances to teach and learn.
Russell Murray returns to Haars focus on Zacconi, here reading his sec-
ond Prattica of 1622 for evidence of a pedagogical program in his approach to
teaching counterpoint, comparing it to the pedagogical imperatives expressed
in his numerous stories of the teaching habits of many of the musicians he
had encountered in his life. But perhaps the clearest statement of teaching
philosophy is found in Pietro Cerones sprawling El melopeo y maestro, and
Gary Townes painstaking reading of that text fleshes out Cerones philoso-
phy, providing us with perhaps the clearest picture of the individual teacher.
In the end, our study of institutions and individuals, as well as of sources
and their uses, points us toward the most fundamental of questions, and that
has to do with the basis of knowledge that stood behind all teaching in this
period. Teachers of any discipline had implicit understandings of the ways of
knowing and of teaching. This philosophy of teaching is recoverable from the
writings that were left behind, as well as from the materials used and how
they were employed. It is especially important to understand that the teach-
ing of music was not separate from other areas of knowledge, and that many
of the same conditions held consistent in all fields. It is therefore our task to
outline these philosophical and pragmatic underpinnings and to relate them
to the larger context of education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. While
our scope is broad, its focus remains firmly fixed on recognizable figures and
materials from the musicological tradition. The major figures discussed are
familiar from the musicological literature: Isaac, Morley, Cerone, Pontio,
Zacconi, Scaletta, Bermudo, and a variety of other theorists, teachers, stu-
dents, printers, and patrons. While each author has developed his or her own
methodological approach to the materials, a common thread or a series of
threads established early in the process link their arguments and the materi-
als. Student notebooks, manuscripts, and prints with marginalia, traditional
xvi Introduction

theory-treatises, and musical anthologies all play a part in our eorts to de-
code the teaching strategies of our predecessors.
Together, the chapters presented here focus our attention on an often
ignored part of musical life. While the results of pedagogical practicethe
music itselfis justifiably of primary concern, there is likewise a need to ex-
plore the learning and teaching that led to the creation of these musical works.
Our goal here is to study the ways in which music was learned by perform-
ers and composers, professionals and amateurs, men and women, singers,
instrumentalists, and hearers of music in the historic past. By identifying
the methods and materials of musical pedagogy, we come that much closer
to understanding the subtleties of the musical discourse that preceded and
surrounded musical creativity in the Middle Ages and thereafter.

In her 1997 book, Composers at Work, Jessie Ann Owens noted that musical
education remains an area badly in need of further investigations. Although
she cited a number of scholars working in the area of musical literacy in the
Early Modern era, there existed at that time no comprehensive scholarly
source on the subject of musical pedagogy.
Our own interest in the subject began with a symposium held at the
opening roundtable of the 14th Congress of the International Musicological
Society in Bologna, in 1987. A wide range of topics was addressed, from music
curricula and treatises to what was being taught within the university and
in surrounding schools, dance halls, and in private lessons. Another area of
discussion focused on the nature of the manuals or other texts used to teach
music. The central question posed by Craig Wright, the session chair, was
how the earliest manuscript materials should be viewed: is it better to view
them as mere reflections of what was taught (essentially transcriptions of uni-
versity lectures) or as prescriptive sources of pedagogy? This led to a parallel
discussion of the innumerable books of musical learning that appeared fol-
lowing the advent of printingeverything from childrens primers to manu-
als for amateurs learning the rudiments of music or how to play instruments
such as the cittern. Finally, we concluded that it is one matter to know what
materials were used in musical instruction and quite another to know what
actually went on in music lessons, be they in the classroom or on a one-to-
one basis, within or outside a school or institution. These general questions
became, then, the core of the investigations presented in this book.
In the intervening years, a few studies have appeared, but have received
little attention in the discipline as a whole. Bernarr Rainbow addressed this
 Introduction xvii

problem directly in The Challenge of History, in which he highlighted the

need for historical awareness as an integral component of music education.
He attempted to arrive at a deeper understanding of and justification for
music education by concentrating on its application in two historic periods
antiquity and the Middle Ages. Rainbow is also the author of Music in Educa-
tional Thought and Process, which traces the development of music education
from 800 BC to 1985, and more recently of Four Centuries of Music Teaching
Manuals, 15181932.
Within the field of musicology, a number of scholars have addressed is-
sues of education in the context of larger studies. Examples can be found in
Craig Wrights work on music at Notre Dame, in Anna Maria Busse Burgers
study of memory and music, in John Kmetzs study of German partbooks, and
in John Butts exploration of education and performance. Klaus Niemller
has looked at music in Latin schools in Germany, while Edith Weber has
looked at what was taught in humanist and Protestant schools. More recently
Michael Long, among others, has looked at teaching in medieval Italy, and
Kate van Orden has explored the connection of music and literacy for chil-
dren in France in the sixteenth century. And finally, a recent collection of es-
says edited by Susan Boynton and Eric Rice illuminates the role of education
in the lives of young singers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
In recognition of this growing interest in historical approaches to musical
pedagogy, we organized a three-day conference with the generous support of
the National Endowment for the Humanities. This conference, Reading and
Writing the Pedagogies of the Renaissance: The Student, the Study Materials, and
the Teacher of Music, 14701650, was held in June 2005 at the Peabody Institute
of the Johns Hopkins University. All of the contributions to this volume grew
out of papers presented there, and the conversations and collaboration that
the conference engendered have enriched all of our individual contributions
to this book.
Work in other disciplines, of course, has much to teach us about general
educational practices of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Some scholars in
related fields take as their focus a broad array of educational strategies. Ad-
dressing topics that range from in-home education through apprenticeship
to the various kinds of schools and universities, scholars such as Nicholas
Orme, Paul Grendler, Anthony Grafton, James van Horn Melton, Rebecca
Bushnell, and others have provided a solid cultural backdrop for educational
practice. Hints of themes such as emerging notions of childhood, shifts of
methods and approaches to scholarship and learning in sixteenth-century
xviii Introduction

practice, the impact of humanism, and the financial and intellectual import
of education have emerged as serious topoi over the last two to three decades.
We have encouraged our authors to invoke a broad range of cross-disciplinary
experts, as the historical study of music is situated in a broader institutional
context for the education of children and adults in the historical past. A more
extensive survey of the scholarly literature has been provided in MIML: Mu-
sical Instruction and Musical Learning, a searchable bibliography on how music
was taught and learned, circa 14501650.

NOTES
1. Bernarr Rainbow, The Challenge of History, Philosophy of Music Education Re-
view 3 (1995): 4351; Music in Educational Thought and Practice: A Survey from 800 BC (Ab-
erystwyth: Boethius, 1990; repr. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2006); Four Centuries of Music
Teaching Manuals, 15181932 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2009).
2. Craig Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 5001550 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989); Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of
Memory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); John Kmetz, The
Piperinus-Amerbach Partbooks: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Musical Pedagogy, in The
Sixteenth-Century Basel Songbooks, Publikationen der Schweizerischen Musikforschenden
Gesellschaft, ser. 2, vol. 35 (Bern: Haupt, 1995): 83124; John Butt, Music Education and
the Art of Performance in the German Baroque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994); Klaus Wolfgang Niemller, Untersuchungen zu Musikpflege und Musikunterricht an
den deutschen Lateinschulen vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis um 1600 (Regensburg: Bosse,
1969); Edith Weber, Lenseignement de la musique dans les coles humanistes et protes-
tantes en Allemagne: thorie, pratique, pluridisciplinarit, in Enseignement de la musique
au moyen age et la renaissance (Luzarches, France: ditions Royaumont, 1987): 10829;
Michael Long, Singing Through the Looking Glass: Childs Play and Learning in Medieval
Italy, Journal of the American Musicological Society 61 (2008): 253306; Kate van Orden,
Childrens Voices: Singing and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century France, Early Music History
25 (2006): 20956; Susan Boynton and Eric Rice, eds., Young Choristers 6501750 (Wood-
bridge, UK: Boydell, 2008). For a more comprehensive listing of such sources consult the
MIML database described below.
3. MIML: Musical Instruction and Musical Learning, designed and edited by Cynthia
J. Cyrus with Susan Forscher Weiss and Russell E. Murray, Jr., and hosted by the Jean and
Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University: http://miml.library.vanderbilt.edu/
(first posted April 2006).
Perspective 1
 1
Some Introductory Remarks
on Musical Pedagogy%
JAMES HAAR

It is a privilege and a pleasure to be asked to open a volume such as this; so I

thought when I was invited to write this piece, and so I still think. But when
I sat down to begin writing these remarks I realized, after some stale and un-
profitable early attempts, that it might be something of a chore as well. Even
before looking at the range of subject matter in the titles of this volume, I
recognized that musical pedagogy is a large and varied field and that the Early
Modern period with its mix of medieval and classicizing elementsa mixture
so markedly characteristic of the musical artsis not short and compact but
long and untidy. How to begin a discussion of what suddenly seemed so big
and unwieldy a subject?
Several issues were paramount: terminology, in particular the word
pedagogy, and location and time frame. For a specific location I chose to
concentrate on Italy (aware that other chapters are focused on musical edu-
cation not only in Italy, but also in Germany, Spain, England, and the Low
Countries). For the former, I turned to trusted sources of etymology, such as
Greek, Latin, and English dictionaries. From the classical sources I learned
that a pedagogue was, in ancient times, a person (often a male slave) charged
with the education and governance of children, chiefly boys. Ignoring the
gender warning flags (for I knew that the education of women would fig-
4 James Haar

ure prominently in this volume), I went on to the Oxford English Dictionary,

which added that a pedagogue is a schoolmaster, teacher, preceptor (now
usually hostile, with implication of pedantry, dogmatism, or severity). The
noun pedagogy is, according to the same source, associated with introductory
training. As for music, to the ancients the word indicated lyric poetry and its
setting in song. I like this not just because the word music is Greek in origin,
nor even because the classical tradition was important in Renaissance peda-
gogy, but rather for the words relation to the Muses, to Apollonian elements
in art, and ultimately to the concept of the liberal arts within which music
was included.
There are of course many ways to define music. For this term as well as
for pedagogy we need not restrict ourselves to what the ancients, or even the
august editors of the OED, thought. I will try to avoid suggestions of hierar-
chical ranking: flute lessons, the sociological background of hip hop, and the
theoretical substratum of Ars Nova polyphony are all valid elements in musi-
cal pedagogy. What I will take from the dictionary definitions is a recognition
of the importance of providing an education in music to childrenwhich is
where I will begin my remarksas well as the validity of considering music as
a science and a liberal art, however much various cultures including our own
have, with reason, stressed the primacy of musical performance.
Training in instrumental performance was, throughout the period of our
concern here, mostly an individual practice, often a father-son relationship
that resembled guild apprenticeship. We know of many instances of the suc-
cess of this instruction, as well as occasional examplesthat of Benvenuto
Cellini is a famous oneof the resentment it caused. Playing genteel in-
struments, especially keyboards and the lute, was an instruction-aided goal
for aristocratic amateurs in what was otherwise a professional and definitely
a non-aristocratic calling. Not all or even many children were taught to play
an instrument. By comparison, a much larger number learned to sing; it is not
too much to say that instruction of the young in music centered on singing.
What did this consist of?
Fillipo Villani tells us that Francesco Landini, the greatest musician of
late fourteenth-century Florence, who was blind from early childhood, decan-
tare pueriliter capit, that is, began as a child to repeat in singing, doubtless
meaning that he learned to sing by repeating what his teacher sang to him,
perhaps simple songs but also melodic formulas such as psalm tones. Not
only the blind boy Landini but probably most children began to sing before
FIGURE 1.1. Bonaventura da Brescia, Breviloquium musicale (Brescia, 1497), sig. Aiii verso
(Bologna, Museo Internazionale, A 57).
6 James Haar

they learned to readimitating adult song in general, but under a teacher

learning the elements of trained vocal utterance as well as the basic features
of the musical system.
It seems likely that children learned to read music soon after, if not
at the same time as, they learned to read texts. Elementary musical text-
books from our period, for which I will use the frequently encountered term
cantorinothe young singerwere probably not designed to be read by the
students themselves, though older children could certainly have done so.
Their emphasis on learning about music through reading its notational sym-
bols suggests on the other hand that musical instruction stressed reading at
a very early stage. The Breviloquium musicale of Bonaventura da Brescia, first
published in 1497 and often reprinted (as Regula musicae planae), intended
by the author for the poor and simple religious but surely used for teach-
ing children, is a cantorino typical of its time, dealing with the elements of
cantus planus. It begins with the Guidonian hand, illustrated with square
notesone for each syllable on or between lines drawn on the fingers along
with clefsthe whole not only illustrating the solmization series but pre-
figuring the sta-clef system, shown at the base of the hand (see figure 1.1).
These are explained in the text but were doubtless gone over visually, with the
children tracing them on their own left hands, memorizing their sequence,
then leaving the lesson with a personal copy of the basic elements of music,
sound and sight, printed invisiblyor perhaps visibly, if they took noteson
their hands.
As the hand is further explained, clefs are defined in a way which at first
seems unnecessarily wordy but is both clear and thorough: every letter-name
is a clef identifying the note, something of importance for those who had
recently learned their letters; every separately designated clef is a fa, whether
C, F, or B; (thus the C clef indicates both C-fa and B-mi). There is no men-
tion of the G clef since it is not normally seen in plainchant. B-fa and B-mi
are separately discussed; this must have been the most dicult element in
the hand, needing repeated and varied explanation. Bonaventura shows his
erudition in a passage probably not read to children, in which he reveals that
his musical system is based on Pythagorean tuning.
Mutations, for many of us the most dicult element in the hexachordal
system, are explained in the Breviloquium musicale with admirable clarity and
economy, once again in reference to the Guidonian hand. The only normal
mutations are those to and from solmization syllables attached to the notes.
Thus G sol re ut has six possibilities: three upward (sol-re, sol-ut, re-ut) and
 Some Introductory Remarks on Musical Pedagogy 7

three down (re-sol, ut-sol, and ut-re), representing changes from natural to soft,
natural to hard, soft to hard hexachords (this last an imperfect mutation
because of its mi-fa problem) and their reverse motions. Only B-faB-mi has
no possible mutations since it represents not one but two pitches.
A discussion of intervals, taken one-by-one from unison to octave, seems
pedantic until one sees that each is illustrated by musical examples which
were doubtless written by the teacher or copied out by the students them-
selves on slates, to read and sing, learning them in the usual way by singing
scalewise successions, then unmediated intervals. Having mentioned the
solmization types of fourths and fifthsdoubtless also memorized by the
studentsBonaventura can proceed directly to the eight modes, each briefly
described and illustrated by examples calling for newly learned expertise in
singing melodies that are surprisingly full of skips and the athletic rise-and-
fall of line. He gets briefly through imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect modal
rangesmaterial that is often tedious to read but essential in learning ac-
curacy in modal identification. Bonaventuras economy does not serve him
as well in his account of modal mixture and commixture, which students
could not have grasped without further illustration.
The remainder of the Breviloquium musicale is devoted to the psalm tones,
giving their intonations, tenors, and finals, but not, oddly, their varied termi-
nations, which might have been too detailed for the purposes of an introduc-
tory book. By way of a closing statement, Bonaventura tells his students that
in chanting the Mass and Oce they should sing nocturnal Responsories
loudly to wake up the sleepy; Introits, with trumpet-like sound to get the at-
tention of the faithful; most Mass chants, calmly and smoothly. This advice,
surprising in the context of the book, is attributed to Guido dArezzo, who is
not (otherwise) known to have said anything of the kind.
Except for a few details, Bonaventuras little book aims to present the
essentials of a musical system of unchanging stabilityor at least one that
was unchanged since the time of Guido. Though directed at clerical novices
it would have served any beginners and all children, who could well have
learned to read music as they learned their letters, the local vernacular, and
basic Latin. Changes in musical style did not aect the elements of music in
the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; but by mid-century Bonaventuras
work must have seemed out of date: reprints of it, frequent up to ca. 1540,
become rare and then stop altogether. Some idea of what was taught children
and novices toward the end of our period, however, is given by the Cantorino
of Adriano Banchieri, published in Bologna in 1622.
 Some Introductory Remarks on Musical Pedagogy 9

Much of the material in the Cantorino is, details aside, nearly the same as
that covered by Bonaventura. The two books dier in appearance mainly be-
cause Banchieri includes much more music, forming something like a pocket
Liber usualis. He uses both the four-line (red) sta and square black nota-
tion normal for printing chant (canto plano) and white mensural notation for
canto fermo. This latter, which is what his book is chiefly devoted to, is chant
which includes some figural (mensural) values and is to be regarded as the
basisliterallyfor counterpoint improvised or written over it. Counter-
point itself is not dealt with since principianti (beginners) are not ready to
deal with it.
The most striking dierence between Bonaventura and Banchieri is that
the latter substitutes for the Guidonian hand, so central to the earlier writers
pedagogical method, a shorter and simpler hand (see figure 1.2) ranging from
A re to g sol re ut, fourteen notes in place of the classic twenty. Banchieri,
citing the Aristotelian axiom that it is idle to do with more what can be done
equally well with less, says rather surprisingly that the full Guidonian hand
is needed for study of canto figurato, counterpoint with its four vocal ranges;
the shortened diagram includes the total compass of the eight modes, all that
is necessary for those singing in unison (and for children, he might but does
not add, singing at the octave). It is clear, though he does not say so, that for
Banchieri the octave modal scales are more important than the hexachords,
even though he maintains the use of Guidonian solmization.

"

Instruction at a more advanced musical level must have taken various forms,
often perhaps consisting of individual tutelage. It surely included counter-
point and details of the mensural system, the latter probably taught after
many of them were no longer in use. If the teacher was an active composer,
his pupils may have been, at least in an informal sense, apprentices. One
wonders whether a composer as prolific and in-demand as Orlando di Lasso
might at times have had a small workshop, members of which could have

FIGURE 1.2. ( facing) Adriano Banchieri, Cantorino, utile a novizzi, a Chierici secolari e
regolari, principianti del Canto Fermo alla Romana (Bologna, 1622), 26 (Bologna, Museo
Internazionale, C 74).
10 James Haar

written bits and pieces of music, even an occasional motet pars or Magnificat
verse, done in imitation of the masters style and forming part of his published
work. At any rate, composition was surely undertaken through study and,
in a hopeful sense, emulation of real music.
Manuscript and, beginning in the closing years of the fifteenth century,
printed treatises emphasizing or at least including substantial sections de-
voted to practical music could certainly take a student to the point of begin-
ning to compose. The books would have been particularly useful if they were
in the hands of capable and experienced teachers. Gauriuss Practica musicae
was one of the most successful of these books, far more widely read than were
his volumes devoted to musical theory, the science of music. Books on the
latter subject did, however, continue to be read and to be written. Whether or
not they were used by university students, as fourteenth-century music trea-
tises certainly were, there was a market for instructional books dealing with
ancient and modern theoretical issues. I would like very much to dwell on this
category of musical pedagogy, which is not as much studied as it deserves to
bebut space does not permit.
By the mid sixteenth century writers on music were combining theo-
retical and practical elements into single works. Notable examples are the
Dodecachordon (1547) of the Swiss musical humanist Glareanus, using ancient
Greek theory to justify an expansion of the traditional modal system; the
Antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (1555) of Nicola Vicentino, with
its adaptation of the classical Greek genera to modern polyphony; and, most
influential of all, the Istitutioni harmoniche (1558) of the Venetian Gioseo
Zarlino, which might be subtitled The importance of the senario (that is,
the series one-to-six) in the theory and practice of music. Students in the
field that has come to be known as history of theory have paid close atten-
tion to the theoretical novelties in these works, but far more notice has been
taken of their sometimes more conventional practical contents. I think this
emphasis is misplaced, resulting in a superficial view of the musical thought
of the periodbut that too is a subject for a dierent study.
Zarlino was the dominant figure in later sixteenth-century writing on
music, but his careful balance between theory and practice was gradually
lost as theorists either specialized more or else aimed at encyclopedic uni-
versality, while the rapid and dramatic changes in musical style in the period
began to preoccupy writers of practical musical texts to an increasing extent.
Some were content to produce tame digests of Zarlinos work; others turned
to handbooks of vocal and instrumental performance, emphasizing the ap-
 Some Introductory Remarks on Musical Pedagogy 11

parently growing richness and popularity of ornamental passaggi. A few

chose to write large books incorporating rules and instructive language into
a discursive, sometimes almost conversational framework, mixing axiomatic
material with anecdotes and personal opinions. This can sometimes lead to
tedious verbosity but it can also be surprisingly rewarding, like the post-lesson
conversation of a garrulous but experienced and informed teacher. In this
category the longest and in some ways most remarkable work of musical peda-
gogy is Cerones El melopeo y maestro (1613). I find this sort of book at once
tiresome and fascinating. For our subject it has the potential for providing in-
formation that humanizes and enriches pedagogy as no formally constituted
textbook can. The rest of these remarks will be devoted to an examination of
another such idiosyncratic book, the Prattica di musica of Lodovico Zacconi
(1592).
Zacconi (15551627) was born and died in Pesaro on the Adriatic coast
of central Italy. He joined the Augustinian order and became a priest, but
seems to have taken frequent leaves from his ecclesiastical duties. He spent
six years in Venice, and shorter periods in Mantua, at a Habsburg court in
Graz, and Munich, where he knew Lasso in the closing years of the latters
life. He learned to play the organ, to sing polyphonic music, and to play the
lute and gamba, but probably did not advance beyond amateur status as a
performer. He may have studied with Andrea Gabrieli and Ippolito Baccusi,
but seems to have written music only for didactic purposes. He was not a
trained linguist nor a creative thinker, and he seems to have avoided the whole
field of musica theorica. We might define him as a reasonably well-informed
observer of the musical life of his time, with a notable interest in the history
of music through the whole of the sixteenth century, and possessing enough
competence to enable him to make his way professionally at a modest level.
Neither composer nor virtuoso performer nor creative theorist, he might in
brief be summed up as a musicologist avant la lettre. What sets Zacconi apart
is his urge to communicate everything he has learned about music, and his
ability to do so in unusually vivid language. His treatise is uneven in quality
and untidy in organization; but if one reads him with a certain patience there
are many rewards on the way.
Books II through IV of the Prattica are relatively orderly, dealing re-
spectively with the mensural system, proportions, and the twelve modes or
tuoni harmonialithe latter not to be confused, says Zacconi, with the eight
psalm tones, which he calls aeri da salmeggiare. These topics correspond
with books II, IV, and I of Gauriuss Practica musicae, whose third book is
12 James Haar

devoted to counterpoint. Reading Zacconis Prattica back-to-front, then, one

would expect the first book to be about counterpoint, possibly prefaced by a
brief introduction on the origin and powers of music. This turns out not to
be the case, though polyphonic music is what Zacconi is focused on. The first
book is instead concerned with teaching his readers, who presumably knew
the most basic elements of music but might need a review, how to become
better musicians and more literate composers. In this respect, his book is on
the one hand unique, and on the other is allied with the cantorino tradition;
in any event it merits closer inspection here.
The intensely personal tone of Zacconis writing is apparent from the
start. In the first five chapters (fols. 15) he spends more time explaining why
he is writing the book than laying out its subject matter. Zacconi has seen too
many people departing from the rules and correct paths of music; he aims to
keep his readers on the right track. Disposing of Boethian cosmic theory in a
couple of sentences, he announces a presupposition that sounding music
will be his theme. There are for Zacconi two kinds of music, canto chorale or
plainchant, and canto figurale or mensural polyphony; only the second is to
be considered. Mensural theory is indeed treated, in the second book; coun-
terpoint is notat least, not in any systematic way. A kind of explanation for
this is given in chapter 4 (fols. 3v4v), in which Zacconi defines some terms
as he means to use them. A theorico, formerly one devoted to the science of
harmonics, is now one who has mastered the science of composition; only
if he sings is he also a musico. A prattico arranges notes, prepares music on
the written page, becoming a musico if he performs it as well. A cantore sings,
reading but not composing or writing music. Thus his Prattica di musica (chap.
5, fols. 4v5) is to be a study of music as it has been written according to es-
tablished rule; though touching on the activities of composer and singer, it is
neither a counterpoint treatise nor a singing manual.
In these early chapters Zacconi appears undecided as to what this first
book should actually be, veering between the personal communication he
obviously enjoys writing, and more orthodox introductory content. Thus
chapters 6 through 8 (fols. 57) describe music as the sole art dedicated to
pleasing people, producing only good eects and hence attractive both to its
practitioners and its listeners. Giving one of what is to be a whole series of
yanks at his authorial helm, he turns in chapter 9 to listing theorists described
as antichi, with expected names such as Pythagoras, Boethius, and St. Au-
gustine. Composers designated as antichi are, surprisingly, not Orpheus or
Terpander but the following: Jusquino, Giovan Motton, Brumello, Henricus
 Some Introductory Remarks on Musical Pedagogy 13

Isaac, Lodovico Senfelio (fol. 7). Following them is a list of vecchi, two of
whom were still alive when Zacconi was writing: Adriano Vuilarth, Morales,
Ciprian Rore, il Zerlino, il Palestina. No theorists contemporary with these
composers are mentioned. The next three chapters contrast the music of the
antichi, depending for its eect on the invention and artistic use of fughe,
that is, imitative procedures, with the vecchi, who added to this some new
vaghezzenot defined, but presumably new harmonic color and, as Zacconi
later makes clear, the use of ornamental passaggi. At this point no moderni are
named or described, but we may assume that they carried on and developed
modern charms without sacrificing contrapuntal skills; despite his admira-
tion of contemporary vaghezze, Zacconi remains essentially conservative in
outlook. But in his view people must move with the times; thus, even singers
can no longer be called good just by being secure: they must sing con gratia,
& accentuatamente, that is, using the techniques and styles already in practice,
and to be demonstrated in print in a few years time, of Giulio Caccini.
Zacconis lists of composers have been noted by a number of scholars.
Though not exceptional in themselves, they cannot be dismissed as mere
name-dropping. Throughout the Prattica Zacconi cites, often including mu-
sical examples, the work of many of the composers on his lists, going as far
back as the contents of Petruccis Odhecaton and ranging from small details
to a complete Mass, Palestrinas Missa Lhomme arm, published in 1570.
Whether he owned a number of music prints, ranging from the beginnings of
printed polyphony to his own time, we cannot be sure and may be entitled to
doubtsurely Zarlino, for example, had much greater ready access to music,
though in comparison to Zacconi he cites it more sparingly. But Zacconi
surely saw a lot of music, and he may have copied out many passages which
struck his fancy, holding them available for later use. In paying real and
respectful attention to the music of several generations of earlier composers,
Zacconi, who clearly thought that one must understand the past for its own
sake and in order to grasp fully the achievements of the present, qualifies as a
pedagogue of a historical breadth and generosity that is unusual in his time.
A series of short chapters (1316, fols. 89v) is devoted to another change
of direction, to what Zacconi calls the intrinsic and extrinsic eect of music.
In a passage of extraordinary acuity (chap. 13, fols. 88v), he says that the in-
trinsic quality of music is the arrangement of numeri sonori (a Zarlinian term)
in the mind of the composer. It becomes extrinsic after it is written down,
and hence can be seen by others, and even more so when it is performed, and
thus heard by others; but the piece as imagined by the composer is a thing
14 James Haar

apart from its performance. Though he occasionally criticizes composers as

a class, Zacconi clearly respected and perhaps came close to idolizing them;
he took to a new degree the respect for the composer that is evident in the
work of Glareanus and Zarlino, and wanted to inculcate this admiration in
his readers.
For music to become extrinsic in the first degree, it had to be notated.
Zacconi is full of admiration for the notational system of his time; indeed his
whole pedagogical method is based on notation. He would like to have given its
history, but here his limited knowledge restricted him to a few remarks (chaps.
1516) about early notational signs and the achievements of Guido dArezzo.
A rather disappointing set of chapters on the scientia of music follows (chaps.
1722, fols. 9v12v). By scientia he does not mean the old Quadrivial science of
music, explicitly kept out of his book, but rather a kind of expertise and refine-
ment in both composition and performance. Zacconi cannot find language
for generalizing about this subject, the acquisition of compositional and vocal
technique, though he can see and hear its successful results. The best he can
recommend here is discovery of the good through trial and error, followed by
a stern rejection of the bad. As we shall see, he does better when speaking of
observable detail in the making and performing of music.
Chapter 23 (fols. 12v13v) returns once more to ancient music and its
inventors, vigorously dismissed as fable, proceeding dalle cose incognite all
occulte; & dalle dubbiose all oscure. In ancient times, people may have sung
poetry in an artless way, like modern shepherds in the fields or those who sing
Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto in the streets. Real music, meaning mensural
polyphony, is not known to be older than the time of Ockeghem, who is said
to be Josquins teacher. Enough of this nonsense! says Zacconi, it is time to
begin discussing the music of today.
In chapter 24 (fols. 13v15) Zacconi does indeed beginand at the begin-
ning. Guidos innovations are again mentioned, as is his invention of the hand
for pedagogical use, so that not only men but even children have been able
to learn. We turn the page to find the hand (see figure 1.3), and indeed the
very hand used by Bonaventura da Brescia a hundred years earliernot, of
course, printed from the same woodblock but identical in all but the tiniest
details. Like Banchieri, Zacconi finds the hand suitable for the study of po-
lyphony with its four vocal ranges. At this point a series of chapters, really a
cantorino for adults, describes the elements of music: sta, clefs, metric signs,
notes, rests, dotsall necessary elements of music; buone voci, vaghi accenti,
FIGURE 1.3. Ludovico Zacconi, Prattica di musica, utile et necessaria si al compositore
per comporre i canti suoi regolarmente, si anco al cantore per assicurarsi in tutte le cose
cantabile (Venice, 1596), vol. I, chap. 24, fol. 14v (Newark, University of Delaware
Library Special Collections).
16 James Haar

belle pronuncie, & glornamenti are not necessary (nor are they notated), but
they add to the charm of music and the repute of performers. For the mo-
ment we will skip past these pages to chapter 59 (fols. 5151v), titled Del novo
& moderno modo dinsegnare a cantare. Zacconi begins by arming the use
of the complete hand for learning about polyphony and how to compose. For
those who simply want to learn to sing, all that is needed are the seven letters
AG, still bearing their solmization syllables. Each type of voice learns a
single octave: bass, Aa; tenor, cc'; alto, aa'; soprano, c'c''. Familiarity with
the octave above or below ones range allows for singing melodies exceeding an
octave. This, it is said, can be learned quickly and easily. Zacconis innovation
seems to me less good than that of Banchieri, which is designed to accom-
modate the eight modes (see above). Its implied though unstated novelty is
that it emphasizes octaves over hexachords (as well as the linkage, observable
in traditionally scored polyphony, between bass and alto, tenor and soprano).
The Guidonian hand was not yet cut o, but by 1590 it was clearly beginning
to tremble.
In recounting the elements of music Zacconi connects them all with no-
tation, trying to show its rationalityone might almost say its inevitability.
Everything has a reason, and Zacconi adduces reasons almost as if answering
questions from a child. Why, for instance, does the sta have five lines, or
strings (corde)? Because this number will accommodate an eight-note scale
(scala); notice the renewed stress on the octave (chap. 26, fols. 15v16). How
many clefs are there, and why are they drawn the way they are? Three, one
for each location (F, C, G) of ut; since they must be placed on a string, not a
(passive) space, they must make their precise location clear, and are drawn ac-
cordingly (chap. 27, fols. 16v18). The nature and meaning of mensural indica-
tions and the primacy and meaning of Tempo (c, C) are thoroughly addressed
(chaps. 2833, fols. 1822); Zacconi carefully avoids comparing real and rela-
tive time, and relegates triple time to the category of proportionsmore signs
of incipient modernity.
Turning to notes, Zacconi shows the eight mensural valuesmaxima to
semicroma (chaps. 3435, fols. 2224)and dwells on their use in filling out
the tempo or tactus (tatto). The hexachord syllables when sung turn written
notes, silent if unaccompanied by language, into figures filled with sound;
like an alphabet, they suce for all of music (chaps. 3840, fols. 2627v).
Zacconi seems curiously unconcerned about mutations, merely pointing out
that to obtain an octave one just blends hexachords. This may be a sign that
he was tiring of cantorino simplicity; though he explains dots and rests (chaps.
 Some Introductory Remarks on Musical Pedagogy 17

FIGURE 1.4. Ludovico Zacconi, Prattica di musica, utile et necessaria si al compositore

per comporre i canti suoi regolarmente, si anco al cantore per assicurarsi in tutte le cose
cantabile (Venice, 1596), vol. I, chap. 55, fol. 44 (Newark, University of Delaware
Library Special Collections).

4142, 47, fols. 27v28v, 3436), he begins to move into more advanced ter-
ritory, introducing ligatures, full and half coloration, and minor color (chaps.
4346, fols. 28v34).
What Zacconi wants to turn to, as book I proceeds, is how singers can
use mastery of the elements of musicchiefly, musical notationto achieve
good eects. Thus in speaking of B fa-mi (chaps. 4851, fols. 3640v) he begins
at the beginning but moves into more interesting territory, showing among
other things where E la-mi in a piece with a flat signature is sung fa, and where
mi. Zacconi mentions sadness and happiness as polarities in musical expres-
sion, but although he says that flats produce dolcezza, and naturals asprezza,
he does notI repeat, does notequate minor and major (these terms are
not so much as mentioned) with sadness and joy.
An excursus on the diesis, with a Marchettan third-of-tone interval and
ventures into the chromatic and enharmonic genera (chaps. 5051, fols. 38v
40v), taking on Vicentino and Zarlino as it goes, is not very felicitous. Here
Zacconi may have been out of his depth. More successful, if at the same time
another abrupt change of direction, is a chapter on syncopation (chap. 52,
fols. 40v41v). In avuncular fashion, Zacconi cautions inexperienced sing-
ers not to try figure sincopate alone; they will at first need to sing them con
una forza accentuate until they feel more secure and can proceed smoothly.
18 James Haar

This, like many of Zacconis scattered observations, is all but timeless in

character.
There follows a series of chapters on diculties a singer may encounter:
odd rhythms, such as sudden short bursts of triplets, illustrated by a clutch
of examples from Josquin, Isaac, Obrecht, and Layolle (chap. 53, fols. 4243);
abrupt mi-fa successions, and extravagant melodic leaps, with examples rang-
ing from Josquin to Giaches Wert (chap. 54, fols. 4344); odd passages us-
ing small note values and rests, before which il timido e poco sicuro cantore si
spaventa (chap. 55, fol. 44). More dicult than all of these can be passages
written contra tatto (against the tactus). Zacconi provides one, presumably of
his own composition, challenging singers to get it right. I give it to the reader
(see figure 1.4) to try, barring it by the semibreve and remembering that it
must come out in complete semibreves.
Zacconi moves into still more dicult problems, including performance
of canons whether or not provided with resolutions (chap. 56, fols. 44v47)
and compositions that can be inverted, retrograded, or aected by propor-
tional signs (chap. 57, fols. 4750v), creating complexities that can often bead
the brow of even a good singer.
Perhaps judging at this point that his readers might be getting discour-
aged, Zacconi says that everyone is inclined by nature to sing; but as with
learning to speak well, one has to learn to sing harmoniously and in company
(chap. 58, fol. 50v). The first step is to learn the letter names and solmization
syllables according to Zacconis new method (chap. 59, fols. 5151v; see above).
Next, one should copy out ascending and descending scales, practicing mu-
tations on them (chap. 60, fols. 51v53v). Here we see Zacconi, clearly not a
master of organization, reverting to the cantorino level.
Who should become a singer? In chapters 61 and 62 (fols. 53v55v), Zac-
coni tells us that singers should be refined, gentle young peoplechiefly
male. The old should give it up unless they are composers or others who are
learned in music. Women should be trained to sing rarely and only in or-
der to praise God. It might be prudent to refrain from editorializing here; I
would only remind my readers that Zacconi was a cleric who was active at the
full tide of the Catholic Reformation. He concludes the chapter by advising
singers not to use facial and bodily gestures, to avoid an artificial tremolo and
anything suggesting showing-o or disapproval of other singers.
Chapters 64 and 65 (fols. 5758) deal with how singers should deliver the
text. Here Zacconi shows a lack of interest in the sets of rules given by other
sixteenth-century theorists such as Zarlino. He contents himself with what
 Some Introductory Remarks on Musical Pedagogy 19

was, for his time, a commonsense piece of advice: singers should enunciate
text as if they were reading it aloud.
Most of the remainder of book I is devoted to improvised ornamental
passaggi or the art of gorgia (chap. 63, fols. 55v57; chap. 66, fols. 5876; chaps.
7778, fols. 82v83v). Zacconi, one of the first to write on this practice, gives
page after page of examples, apologizing for their primitive character as he
does so and dropping a number of helpful hints: stay in time; practice for-
mulas on the five vowels; learn to execute a succinto & vago vibrato, and then
apply it in all passaggi; share use of gorgia among voice parts.
Zacconi manages to cram a few more admonitions and bits of advice into
miscellaneous chapters as book I draws to a close. Among the more interest-
ing is a list of qualities a maestro di cappella must have: he should know the
modes or tuoni; he must hear errors and identify and correct the oending
voices; and, most importantly, he must keep the tactus even (chap. 67, fols.
7677). In the midst of this Zacconi lets fall the extraordinary, dare I say
prescient, remark that ordinary musicians are often better at all of this than
are composers, who sometimes have a kind of durezza or grossezza that keeps
them from hearing acutely.
Pausing to speak of what kind of voices produce the best musical results
(chap. 68, fols. 7778), Zacconi says he prefers the voce di petto or chest tone
to the voce di testa or head tone, in what seems to me a quite early use of voice
teachers language. He mentions the voce obtusa, one that does not speak
clearly, as unfortunately common in untrained singers but occasionally use-
ful to lend balance (one wonders what size choir Zacconi was thinking of).
Avoid singers who are falsi (untrue) in pitchespecially those who go flat.
As maestro (chap. 69, fols. 7878v), give your singers the final and principal
notes of the mode before starting, since a good beginning is vital and one does
not want there to be a bisogna di ritornar da comminciare (need to go back and
begin again). When starting a new piece (in, say, the same mode as the one
just finished), raise or lower the pitch so as to make a fresh start. Do not let
the singers shout, when they are performing in church. Again it can be hard
to remember that all of this was written more than four hundred years ago.
Zacconi has more to say, but his remarks become increasingly disjointed;
he appears to sweep up the workroom floor as he brings the first book to a
close. And I must similarly bring my remarks to a close; but just as Zacconi
reminds his readers that there are a lot of good things to come in his three
remaining books, so I urge you all to stay attentive as you read the many in-
teresting studies that follow this brief introduction.
20 James Haar

NOTES
1. A Lexicon Abridged from Liddell and Scotts Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1958), 511; John T. White, The White Latin Dictionary (Chicago: Follett, 1955),
s.v. pedagogus.
2. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 3rd edition (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1964), s.v. pedagogue.
3. See the thoughtful entry on the word, by Bruno Nettl, in The New Grove Diction-
ary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001) 17:
32537. Curiously, the New Grove contains no entry on pedagogy, musical or otherwise.
4. Benvenuto Cellini, Opere, ed. Bruno Maier (Milan: Rizzoli, 1968), Vita I, chap.
5: 55: Cominci mio padre ansegnarmi sonare di flauto e cantare di musica; e con tutto
che let mia fussi tenerissima . . . io ne avevo dispiacere inistimabile, ma solo per ubbidire
sonavo e cantavo.
5. Philippi Villani, De origine civitatis Florentie et de eiusdem famosis civibus, ed. Giu-
liano Tanturli (Padua: Antenore, 1997), 150. Cited by Alessandra Fiori, Francesco Landini
(Palermo: Epos, 2004), 24.
6. Two facsimiles exist: Regula musica plana (Milan: Bollettino Bibliografico Musicale,
1936); Regula musica plana (New York: Broude Brothers, 1973). An English translation by
Albert Seay was published in 1979; see Bonaventura da Brescia, Rules of Plain Music (Colo-
rado Springs: Colorado College). For reprints of Bonaventuras volume, see ke Davidsson,
Bibliographie der musiktheoretischen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (Baden-Baden: Heitz, 1962),
1718. Davidsson (pp. 1022) lists an often-reprinted book called Musices compendium ad
faciliorem instructionem cantum choralem discantium . . . qui Cantorinus intitulata (Venice:
Simon de Luere, 1509).
7. Seay, Rules of Plain Music, 9. Bonaventura is author of a longer treatise, the Brevis
Collection Artis Musicae, ed. Albert Seay (Colorado Springs: Colorado College, 1980).
8. In many respects, Bonaventuras method here and elsewhere is close to that of
Franchinus Gauriuss Practica musicae (Milan: Ioannes Petrus de Lomatio, 1496), book I.
Both Gaurius and Bonaventura depend ultimately on the work of Marchettus of Padua
(Lucidarium, ca. 13171318).
9. Bonaventura gives the number of notes above and below the chorda, a tone a third
above each modal final, as a determinant of plagal versus authentic (Seay, Rules of Plain
Music, 26). This seems to be an early reference to terminology that is usually associated
with mid sixteenth-century theorists such as Glareanus.
10. Seay, Rules of Plain Music, 22526.
11. Adriano Banchieri, Cantorino, utile a novizzi, a Chierici secolari e regolari, princi-
pianti del Canto Fermo alla Romana (Bologna: Heredi di Bartol[omeo] Cochi, 1622; facs.
Bologna: Forni, 1980). In his preface, Banchieri says that he compiled the book for use of
members of his Olivetan order, but decided farne alcune copie per uso universale di qual
si voglia giovinetto Religioso principiante.
12. Banchieris Il principiante fanciullo (Venice: Bartolomeo Magni, 1625), which I have
not seen, might make an interesting to comparison with his Cantorino.
13. Banchieri, Cantorino, 26; see pp. 2730 for his explanation of the system.
14. Banchieri adds the seventh syllable ba-bi in his Cartella musicale (Venice: Giacomo
Vincenti, 1614).
15. For an example, see James Haar, Lessons in Theory from a Sixteenth-Century
Composer, in Altro Polo: Essays on Italian Music in the Cinquecento, ed. Richard Charteris
(Sydney: Frederick May Foundation, 1990), 5181.
16. An occasional single piece ascribed to a little-known musician shows up in Lasso
prints. Lasso himself may have written at least one madrigal for a volume by one of his teach-
 Some Introductory Remarks on Musical Pedagogy 21

ers in Italy. See James Haar, A Madrigal falsely ascribed to Lasso, Journal of the American
Musicological Society 28 (1975): 12629.
17. Zarlino did write several essentially theoretical works (Dimostrazioni harmoniche,
1571; Sopplimenti musicali, 1588). Zarlinos senario, the numbers 1 to 6, includes the Pythago-
rean ratios 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (fifth), 4:3 (fourth), plus two others: 5:4 (major third) and 6:5
(minor third) in a system of just intonation.
18. For Zarlinos influence on other theorists, a subject that to my knowledge has not
been studied thoroughly, see Claude Palisca, Zarlino, New Grove Dictionary, 27: 753. On
manuals dealing with the art of passaggi see Howard Mayer Brown, Embellishing Sixteenth-
Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), esp. viixiv.
19. Gary Towne surveys many aspects of Cerone as teacher in his contribution to this
volume (chap. 16). Cerone, who was active in Spain and Italy, also wrote an elementary book,
Le regole pi necessarie per lintroduttione del canto fermo (Naples: Gio. Battista Gargano e
Lucretio, 1609).
20. Ludovico Zacconi, Prattica di musica, utile et necessaria si al compositore per comporre
i canti suoi regolarmente, si anco al cantore per assicurarsi in tutte le cose cantabile (Venice: Gi-
rolamo Polo, 1592; repr. Bartolomeo Carampello, 1596). In 1622 Zacconi published a seconda
parte of the Prattica (Prattica di musica seconda parte. Divisi, e distinti in Quattro Libri [Ven-
ice: Alessandro Vicenti, 1622]), concerned chiefly with new developments in counterpoint.
Both volumes are available in facsimile (Bologna: Forni, 1967). I should note that Russell
Murray has recently worked on anecdotal aspects of Zacconis work, concentrating on the
seconda parte (1622) of the Prattica. He delivered a paper on this subject at the 1999 annual
meeting of the American Musicological Society in Kansas City; and see also his contribution
to the present volume, Zacconi as Teacher: A Pedagogical Style in Words and Deeds.
21. On Zacconi see Gerhard Singer in The New Grove Dictionary, 27: 707708. Infor-
mation about him is derived mostly from an unpublished autobiography that survives in
Pesaro (Bibl. Oliveriani, MS 563). For a summary of this work, see Friedrich Chrysander,
Lodovico Zacconi als Lehrer des Kunstgesanges, Vierteljahrsschrift fr Musikwissenschaft
7 (1891): 33796; 9 (1893): 249310; 10 (1894): 53167. See specifically 10 (1894): 53349 for
the biographical information.
22. Zacconi, Prattica (1592), IV, chap. 16 (fols. 202v203).
23. Gauriuss Practica musicae, nearly one hundred years old by the time Zacconi
wrote, was still influential; Zacconi had surely read it. He must also have read Zarlino,
whom he had met (and was not well received by) in Venice; but for him Zarlino was prob-
ably a rival rather than a model.
24. Zacconi, Prattica (1622), IV, chap. 23 (p. 278) mentions with favor Monte and Mar-
enzio, whom he must have considered as moderni even though both were dead well before
1622.
25. Zacconi, Prattica (1592), I, chap. 12 (fol. 8): Per il che possiamo senzaltra conclu-
dere, che essendo i cantori quelli i quali con le buone Musiche raddoppiano gleetti che
essendo le Musiche moderne fatte con buonissimo regole, & cantate da buonissimi cantori,
patroni de gli accenti vaghi, & delle gratiose maniere, che le habbiano molto piu forza che
non haveano lantiche gi che i cantori di quel tempo, non attendevano ad altro che a cantar
bene le loro cantilene, & a non fallarle: perche in quello consisteva tutto il loro honore, & la
lor gloria: come anco hoggi giorno la gloria, & lhonore di un buon cantore non solo consiste
nellesser sicuro cantante: ma anco nel cantar con gratia, & accentuatamente.
26. For the reference to the Odhecaton, see Zacconi, Prattica (1592), I, chap. 79 (fols.
83v84). The Palestrina mass is given in full (except for the Patrem), with resolution of the
tenors prolatio notation, in vol. II, chap. 38 (fols. 115v122).
27. Zacconi, Prattica (1622), III, chap. 33 (pp. 16162), recommends this practice of
scoring and copying such passages into notebooks as useful for aspiring musicians. See
22 James Haar

James Haar, A Sixteenth-Century Attempt at Music Criticism, Journal of the American

Musicological Society 36 (1983): 19798.
28. Zacconi, Prattica (1592), I, chap. 24 (fol. 14): Per volendoli ogni dicult torre
simagin che con questo modo, non solo gli huomini fatti; ma gli fanciulli ancora lhave-
riano potuta imparare.
29. Returning to the subject of mutations later in the same book (chap. 60, fols. 51v
53v), Zacconi is still casual about them, although he does give some useful examples.
30. Zacconi, Prattica (1592), I, chap. 55 (fol. 44).
31. . . . fanno assai volte sudar la fronte a qualche buon cantore (fol. 47).
32. Chrysander, Lodovico Zacconi, 33796, focuses on Zacconis gorgia (see note
20, above, for a full citation).
33. Zacconi, Prattica (1592), I, chap. 67 (fol. 76): E ben vero che uno piu dall altro ha
ludito pronto & acuto, che per si vede challe volte anco chi non compone rimette prima di
un compositore; ma quella tanta grossezza dudito che si chiama durezza in chi compone, si
parte dal proprio naturale, et da glascoltanti piu tosto vien giudicata ignoranza.
 Part One

Medieval Pedagogy$
 2
Guido dArezzo, Ut queant laxis,
and Musical Understanding+
DOLORES PESCE

"

Guido dArezzo (b. ca. 991/2; d. after 1033) is associated with the invention of
a singing method that uses the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la, a method we
now call solmization. In our modern application of this concept, we sing a new
melody using the text syllables themselves. Is that what Guido intended? How
did a singer in Guidos time use this device? Were older methods of learning
discarded?
My purpose in this essay is to examine what Guido actually said about
solmization syllables in his Epistola ad Michahelem (Letter to Michael), to
speculate on what he left unsaid, and ultimately to shed light on what musi-
cal understanding meant to him. Simply put, the syllables, viewed in the
context of their self-contained six-note segment, embody all essential pitch
principles. In directing his singers to internalize the proprietas or property
of every pitch by means of this vehicle, Guido called into play both sensory
perception and intellect.
Boethius had defined a musicus as someone who understood the prin-
ciples of music and who could judge composition and performance, while a
performer was a mere practitioner. This distinction was carried over into
mid-ninth-century Carolingian writings, but with some ambiguity. Because
the Church needed performers of chant (i.e., cantors), performance could no
26 Dolores Pesce

longer be relegated to a second seat. Given his task, Guido had little use for
the speculative inquiries of the musicus, for he needed to train boys to sing
chant as eciently as possible. As a result, understanding had to serve the
act of singing.
Guido wrote four treatises: the Micrologus (after 1026), the Regule, the
Prologus (a prologue to an antiphoner), and the Epistola (before 1033). He
used the Latin word sensus only twice, once in the Micrologus and once in
the Prologus. The Prologus passage is relevant for this study: In our times, of
all men, singers are most foolish. For in every art, exceedingly more numer-
ous are the things that we learn through our sensus than those that we have
learned from a teacher (Prologus, 13). Sensus has a range of lexical meanings,
divided roughly into the categories of corporeal and mental, with the latter
being further subdivided into moral and intellectual. The moral aspects do
not seem relevant to the present discussion. Appropriate translations for the
corporeal are perception, feeling, sensation, and for the intellectual aspect
of the mental, sense, understanding, mind, reason. Although Guidos use
of sensus in the Prologus does not clearly indicate the roles of feeling versus
thinking, the Regule (ll. 810) contain other relevant evidence:

Great is the gap between musicians and singers;

the latter talk about what music comprises, while the former understand
these things.
For he who does what he does not understand is termed a beast.

So, Guido clearly derided a singer who remained the unknowing cantor.
He wanted a singer to be independent of a teacher and, ultimately, to be able
to sight-sing any melody. To this end he promoted, in all four of his treatises,
notational and pitch-training devices that superseded the rote learning meth-
ods on which musicians had hitherto relied.
In his Micrologus, Regule, and Epistola, Guido stated that one must learn
the pitch system of seven letters and reinforce this with an understanding of
their location on the monochord. The next step was to learn intervals. In the
earlier two treatises, Guido said that one should hammer out the intervals on
the monochord until they are impressed on the memory. He implied that if
one has learned intervals well in the abstract, retaining them in the memory,
then the sounding of a new melody at the monochord would be consciously
or unconsciously perceived as a succession of intervals rather than of isolated
pitches, thus aiding the ear. Sensory perception rather than thinking seems
 Guido d'Arezzo, Ut queant laxis, and Musical Understanding 27

EXAMPLE 2.1. Hymn Ut queant laxis, as presented by Guido in the Epistola.

foremost in this stage of training, although Guidos wording in the Micrologus

does not rule out an intellectual component.
Guido refined his instructional method in the Epistola when he recom-
mended that one learn the proprietas or property of every tone through
an associational device such as the hymn Ut queant laxis (see example 2.1).
Ut re mi fa sol la are the respective first syllables of the first six lines of this
hymn. For each phrase one memorizes the starting pitchs propertythat
is, its quality based on the configuration of tones and semitones around it.
Then one matches a new melodic phrase to one of the hymns phrases. In so
doing, one gets ones bearings for a given tone within a nexus of tones. Thus,
learning a new song would still require memorizing its specific succession of
intervals, but now geared to a focal point. In the earlier Micrologus, Guido
certainly understood the concept of a focal point when he explained that one
could recognize a mode by hearing the tones immediately preceding the final
(chap. 11). But it was not until the Epistola that he articulated a precise and
novel approach to teaching a pitchs property.
Not incidentally, Guido no longer prescribed learning the six melodic
intervals in and of themselves on the monochord. Immediately following Ut
queant laxis, he oered a didactic exercise Alme rector (see example 2.2). It al-
lows one to practice intervals in relationship to a given tone, in a systematic
orderfor example, an ascending second, third, fourth, and fifth from D, and
so forth. Guido apparently intended this more abstract, systematic exercise
to complement the associative learning of a tones property as oered by Ut
queant laxis.
The other component of Guidos approach that solidified between the
writing of the Micrologus and the Epistola was a notation that used color to
28 Dolores Pesce

EXAMPLE 2.2. A didactic exercise Alme rector, as presented by Guido in the Epistola.

distinguish two vital pitches, F and C, both of which have a semitone below
them. These colors allow a singer to discern visually when a semitone ap-
pears in a phrase of a new melody, reinforcing his awareness of the property
of the tone that governs that phrase.
Thus, Guidos new singing method consisted of the a priori learning
of a tones property (using Ut queant laxis and Alme rector), which is then
applied by association with Ut queant laxis at the time of hearing or sight-
reading a new melody, and reinforced in the latter case by the visual aid of
colored lines. Guidos method required that a singer train his senses to per-
ceive correctly, and then reflect upon what is transmitted. Both the associa-
tive Ut queant laxis and the more abstract exercise Alme rector can instill in a
singer tone-consciousness, so that the singer can apply his previous knowl-
edge to a new situation rather than start from scratch. At the moment of
sight-reading or hearing a new song, the singer perceives and recognizes the
property of a tone and thus acts knowingly, although this knowledge is not
of the detailed acoustical-theoretical sort that was fostered by Pythagorean
writers. It arises, instead, primarily through a combination of sensory and
intellectual experiencea sensus that is both corporeal and mental. Thus,
the musicus/cantor distinction is blurred: Guidos musician is a thinking
practitioner.
Returning to example 2.1, we now explore how exactly Guido tells us to
use Ut queant laxis:
 Guido d'Arezzo, Ut queant laxis, and Musical Understanding 29

TABLE 2.1. Descents and Ascents from Each Starting Pitch of Ut queant laxis.

ut C ascent of a fourth
re D descent of a second, ascent of a second
mi E descent of a third, ascent of a third
fa F descent of a third, ascent of a third
sol G descent of a fourth, ascent of a second
la a descent of a third

And thus do you see that this melody begins in each of its six phrases with
six dierent pitches? If someone, thus trained, knows the beginning of every
phrase so that he can without hesitation immediately begin any phrase he
chooses, he will easily be able to sing the same six pitches according to their
properties wherever they appear. Also, when you hear any neume that has
not been written down, consider which of these phrases is better adapted
to its ending, so that the final pitch of the neume and the beginning of the
phrase may be of the same pitch.

Guido explicitly says: learn the phrases of the hymn, each of which
starts on a dierent pitch. Then, match the final pitch of the new melody to
the opening pitch of one of the hymns phrases. Guidos wordingconsider
which of these phrases is better adapted to the new melodys endingrests
on an assumption that one should know what goes on within the hymns
phrase, that is, how the intervals are situated around the starting pitch.
Then, given that one knows that phrase of Ut queant laxis well, one can
more easily learn the new melody, which would presumably have the same
arrangement of intervals around its final pitch. However, interpreting Guido
literally is problematic. Table 2.1 shows the actual descents and ascents from
each starting pitch of the hymn, with ut positioned on C. The phrase be-
ginning on D lacks an adequate amount of surrounding interval motion
to dierentiate it from Gboth ascend only a second, whereas it takes an
ascent of a third to distinguish them. One has to consider D in relation-
ship to the whole six-note segment (utla) in order to understand its tonal
property. Therefore, a less literal interpretation of Guidos words would be:
match the final pitch of the new melody to the opening pitch of one of the
hymns phrases because they share the same arrangement of intervals within
the six-note segment. A possible scenario in practice would be: take a new
melody that ends on D. Sing all of Ut queant laxis, then start over and stop
when you get to the first tone of the second phrase. Think about how that
tone feels or is situated with respect to the intervals around it. Now sing
30 Dolores Pesce

your new melody and make sure that it ends with the same feel. This seems
a reasonable interpretation of how Guido intended Ut queant laxis to serve
associative learning.
One can take this discussion a step further and reflect on the degree
to which Guido retained traditional associative melodies such as Primum
querite as a means of identifying the mode of a chant. To that end, a largely
undiscussed passage in the Epistola is of interest. Following the letter in which
Guido informs his friend Michael about his method of using Ut queant laxis,
we find an overview of Guidos pitch theory. After he presents intervals and
related tones, Guido takes the phrase Tu Patris sempiternus es Filus from the
Te Deum and presents it at four dierent pitch levels. He states: In accor-
dance with the fact that these pitches have a dierent arrangement of tones
and semitones, one may thus sing that melody in various modes according to
the property of every single sound.
Thus, he reintroduces proprietas or property, which he had first broached
when discussing the intervallic quality of each starting tone of the Ut queant
laxis phrases. But he has now linked that concept to mode: If one changes
a melody to a dierent pitch, one changes the proprietas, and therefore, one
changes the mode. The next connection is also of interest:

So, it ought to be considered carefully regarding every song according to

which kind of property it sounds, whether at the beginning or at the end,
although we are accustomed to speak only of the end. Certain neumes have
been invented, by whose shape we are accustomed to observe this, as for
example: Primum querite regnum Dei. Secundum autem simile est huic. For,
when after some chant has ended, you see that this neume agrees well with
that ending, you recognize at once that that chant ending is in the first
mode.

This seems to be a retreat into a tried and true method of modal recogni-
tionmatch your melody to one of the eight well-known melodic formulas
and you thus know its mode. But Guido here links the formulas to the pre-
ceding discussion of proprietas: you recognize the property of the new song
by matching up the melody with a designated melody that reveals the same
property, and in turn the mode. He thus points out a complementary rela-
tionship between this associative method of modal identification familiar to
singers and his intervallic way of thinking related to proprietas; he encourages
using the modal formulas with some recognition of the principles behind
themthat is, in an informed way.
 Guido d'Arezzo, Ut queant laxis, and Musical Understanding 31

We come full circle, then, to the issue of understanding. A Guidonian

singer would begin his interval training by gaining an aural memory of how
Ut queant laxis flows. But to use it eectively, he would have to understand its
core information: that within the totality of the six-note configuration utla,
a given tone has a contextual identitya propertythat can be abstracted
and matched to a new melody that ends on that same tone. We return to the
earlier hypothetical scenario: Take a new melody that ends on D. Sing all of
Ut queant laxis, then start over and stop when you get to the first tone of the
second phrase. Think about how that tone feels or is situated with respect
to the intervals around it. Now sing your new melody and make sure that it
ends with the same feel. Intellect and senses combine in this experience.
We can extrapolate from what Guido explicitly says to this model of musical
understanding.
One final point takes us back to the Primum querite formulas and their
lingering importance in Guidos theory within the Epistola. He had integrated
them into his theory of pitch property instead of discarding them altogether.
He could perhaps be considered conservative for doing so, but I prefer to
think of this as a practical pedagogical solution. By retaining a feature of tra-
ditional training, he was able to adapt what his singers already knew, rather
than start from scratch with a new method. Undoubtedly Guido encouraged
a greater reliance on intervallic hearing and reading in the Epistola than he
had in the Micrologus. He may have envisioned an eventual learning state in
which the melodic formulas were unnecessary. In the meantime his prefer-
ence, as expressed to Brother Michael, was that his singers use his Ut queant
laxis melody, which neatly and succinctly embodies all pitch properties in one
device. Leading to a musical understanding that is born of sensory percep-
tion and intellect, it constitutes Guidos legacy to music pedagogy up to the
present day.
In closing, I want to bring into focus how Guidos approach to informed
singing fits into the wider context of medieval speculative philosophy, for
his concerns with the senses and intellect as mutual guides to musical un-
derstanding are broadly reflective of the debates of his day. Beginning in the
ninth century and with a second wave in the eleventh, thinkers debated how
to understand the Eucharist, that is, whether the bread and wine are the body
and blood of Christ in veritate (in truth) or merely in figura (symbolically).
On one side of the argument, the physical implied the spiritual, and did not
need interpretation; Gods Word, available through Scripture, supplied the
link between the two. On the other side, some writers recognized that sen-
32 Dolores Pesce

sory data were the starting point for all genuine understanding, but that the
mind played the crucial role in reaching that understanding. So, in the case of
the Eucharist, the bread and wine are apprehended as such exteriorly by the
senses; but they assume spiritual significance as the body and blood of Christ
only interiorly, that is, the mind interprets them as symbols.
Outside the question of the Eucharist, the relative roles played by the
senses and the intellect figured in the more general discussions of language
and meaning that channeled into Abelards philosophy of language in the
twelfth century. Boethius was important to these discussions since he had
translated and commented on Aristotles De interpretatione, which, with
Boethiuss commentary, formed the basis for Abelards own commentary.
Boethius, who was known throughout the Middle Ages, comments on the
interrelationship of language with sense, imagination, and understanding.
He states:

For intellections rest on the foundation of sense and imagination, like a fully
colored painting on the backdrop of a pencil sketch. In other words, they
provide a substratum for the souls perceptions. When a thing is seized by
the sense or imagination, the mind first creates a mental image of it; later,
a fuller understanding emerges as the hitherto confused pictures are sifted
and coordinated.

He continues:

But these very products of the mind generate intellections in their wake:
For instance, if one sees a sphere or a square, one grasps its shape in the
mind. But one also reflects on the likeness while it is in the mind, and,
having experienced this mental process, readily recognizes the object when
it reappears. Every image mediated by the senses is capable of generating a
likeness of this type. The mind, when it engages in understanding, reasons
through such forms.

Boethiuss discussion resonates with the interpretation oered here of

how Guido intended his singers to reach musical understanding. Guido pro-
vided his singers with aids by which they could internalize a sense of a pitchs
proprietas or property: Ut queant laxis and Alme rector. This stage resembles
Boethiuss grasp[ing] its shape in the mind. Then, when the singer sight-
reads or hears a new song, he or she perceives and recognizes the property of
the tone on which the song ends as being similar to the property of one of the
tones that have been ingrained in the minds memory. This stage resembles
 Guido d'Arezzo, Ut queant laxis, and Musical Understanding 33

Boethiuss readily recognizing the object when it reappears, for every image
mediated by the senses is capable of generating a likeness of this type. Gui-
dos singer thus sings knowingly, fueled by a combination of sensory percep-
tion and intellect. When Guido instituted his pedagogical approach based on
Ut queant laxis, he oered for those of his time, and of the future, a concrete
realization of Boethiuss last phrase in the above citation: The mind, when it
engages in understanding, reasons through such forms.

NOTES
1. An overview of solmization is found in Andrew Hughes and Edith Gerson-Kiwi,
Solmization, in Grove Music Online. See Oxford Music Online: www.oxfordmusiconline
.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/26154 (accessed 25 September 2008).
2. Gottfried Friedlein, ed., Anicii Manlii Torquati Severini Boetii De Institutione Ar-
ithmetica Libri Duo, De Institutione Musica Libri Quinque (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867), 22325;
trans. Calvin M. Bower, in Fundamentals of Music (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989), 5051; and in Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler, eds., Source Readings in Music History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 14243.
3. Guido commented in both the Micrologus and Epistola that he did not wish to pres-
ent musical matters that were of little benefit to singing. In the Micrologus, he turned to the
science of music only in the last chapter, entitled How the nature of music was discovered
from the sound of hammers. The Epistola ends with a reference to Boethius, whose book
is useful to philosophers only, not to singers. See Dolores Pesce, Guido dArezzos Regule
rithmice, Prologus in antiphonarium, and Epistola ad michahelem: A Critical Text and Trans-
lation with an Introduction, Annotations, Indices, and New Manuscript Inventories (Ottawa:
Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1999), 531.
Lawrence Gushee comments, The pragmatic emphasis of the Micrologus is not, in
my opinion, a new phenomenon, but the resolution of ambiguous views of the positions of
musicus and cantor that had existed since Aurelian at least. See his Questions of Genre
in Medieval Treatises on Music, in Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenk-
schrift Leo Schrade, ed. Wulf Arlt, Ernst Lichtenhahn, and Hans Oesch (Bern and Munich:
Francke, 1973), 409; see also pp. 36872, 407408. Another important study on the subject
of musicus and cantor is Erich Reimer, Musicus und Cantor: Zur Sozialgeschichte eines
musikalischen Lehrstucks, Archiv fr Musikwissenschaft 35 (1978): 332.
4. For the Micrologus, see Guido dArezzo, Micrologus, ed. Joseph Smits van Waes-
berghe, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 4 ([Nijmegen, Netherlands]: American Institute of
Musicology, 1955); see also Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three Medieval Treatises, ed.
Claude V. Palisca, trans. Warren Babb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 5783.
The Micrologus usage is less relevant to the present discussion: Nec mirum regulas musi-
cam a finali voce sumere, cum et in grammaticae partibus pene ubique vim sensus in ultimis
litteris vel syllabis per casus, numeros, personas, tempora discernimus (van Waesberghe,
CSM 4: 145). Sensus here seems to suggest meaning.
5. Pesce, Guido dArezzos Regule, 327403.
6. Ibid., 40535.
7. Ibid., 437531.
8. Ibid., 406407: Temporibus nostris super omnes homines fatui sunt cantores.
In omni enim arte valde plura sunt que nostro sensu cognoscimus, quam ea que a magistro
didicimus.
34 Dolores Pesce

9. Charlton T. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 167071.

Charles Du Fresne Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis (Graz: Akademische
Druck-U. Verlagsanstalt, 1954) defines sensus as intellectus, while intellectus, in turn, in-
cludes sensory perception and mental understanding, as well as moral consciousness.
10. Pesce, Guido dArezzos Regule, 33033: Musicorum et cantorum magna est distan-
tia; isti dicunt, illi sciunt, que componit musica. Nam qui facit quod non sapit, dinitur
bestia.
11. Guido discusses monochord divisions and the resulting intervals in the Micrologus,
chaps. 36. In chap. 4, referring to the six intervals, his directive is: Since all melody is
formed by so few formulas [clausulae], it is most helpful to commit them firmly to memory,
and, until they are completely perceived and recognized in singing, never to stop practicing
them, since when you hold these as keys, you can command skill in singingintelligent-
ly, and therefore more easily (Babb, Hucbald, Guido, and John, 61). The original here is:
Cumque tam paucis clausulis tota harmonia formetur, utillimum est altae eas memoriae
commendare, et donec plene in canendo sentiantur et cognoscantur, ab exercitio numquam
cessare, ut his velut clavibus habitis canendi possis peritiam sagaciter ideoque facilius
possidere (van Waesberghe, CSM 4: 105106). Babb thus translates sagaciter as intel-
ligently, but its root sagax allows for quick perception by either the senses or intellect.
Guidos corresponding discussion in the Regule occurs in lines 30118; see Pesce, Guido
dArezzos Regule, 33653.
12. Pesce, Guido dArezzos Regule, 46667 and appendix C. The hymn Ut queant laxis
as Guido described it now appears in chant-books for the Nativity of St. John the Baptist on
24 June, with its phrases starting successively on the pitches C, D, E, F, G, and a. The text
was associated with eight dierent liturgical melodies through the twelfth century, but none
matches the Guidonian profile. Although there is no conclusive evidence, scholars infer that
Guido composed the melodic version of the hymn as we know it. See in particular Jacques
Chailley, Ut queant laxis et les origines de la gamme, Acta musicologica 56 (1984): 4869.
13. Pesce, Guido dArezzos Regule, 47275 and appendix C. The rubrics found next
to each phrase inform us whether or not the intervallic configuration of that particular
phrase can be found at more than one starting pitch. See discussion of related tones in
ibid., 2022.
14. Guido discussed the idea of colored notation in the Prologus; see ibid., 41831.
15. In his discussion of monochord divisions, Guido promoted a basic understanding
of string ratios. See Micrologus, chaps. 36, and 20. The Pythagorean number information
could add another level of meaning for some people and Guido acknowledged the utility of
learning it, but not in the context of singing.
16. What follows is an elaboration of ideas presented in Pesce, Guido dArezzos Regule,
1920, 2326.
17. Ibid., 46869: Vides itaque, ut hec symphonia senis particulis suis a sex diversis
incipiat vocibus? Si quis itaque uniuscuiusque particule caput ita exercitatus noverit, ut
confestim quamcumque particulam voluerit, indubitanter incipiat, easdem sex voces ubi-
cumque viderit secundum suas proprietates facile pronuntiare poterit. Audiens quoque
aliquam neumam sine descriptione, perpende que harum particularum eius fini melius
aptetur, ita ut finalis vox neume et principalis particule equisone sint.
18. Byzantine intonation formulas (enechemata), with nonsense words set to them
as identifications of the individual modes, are found in all Carolingian tonaries until the
mid-eleventh century, and in some cases as late as the twelfth. These formulas end with
long melismas on the words noenoeane for the authentic modes and noeagis for the pla-
gal modes. Model antiphons beginning Primum querite provided another way to identify
mode; of unknown origin, they were introduced with the intonation formulas and ulti-
mately displaced them. These antiphons ended with the same melismas as the intona-
 Guido d'Arezzo, Ut queant laxis, and Musical Understanding 35

tion formulas. See Michel Huglo, Tonary ( 2), in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music
Online: www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/28104 (accessed 25
September 2008).
19. Pesce, Guido dArezzos Regule, 49697: Et secundum quod ipse voces diversam
habent tonorum et semitoniorum positionem, sic variis modis secundum uniuscuiusque
proprietatem eam pronuntiet.
20.
0. Ibid., 498500: Igitur curiose est intendendum de omni melo, secundum cuiu-
smodi proprietatem sonet, sive in principio sive in fine, quamvis de solo fine dicere soleamus.
Quedam enim neume reperte sunt, quarum aptitudine hoc solemus advertere, utpote: Pri-
mum querite regnum Dei. Secundum autem simile est huic. Cum enim finito aliquo cantu
hanc neumam in eius fine bene videris convenire, statim cognoscis quia cantus ille finitus
sit in primo modo . . .
21. See Klaus-Jrgen Sachs, Tradition und Innovation bei Guido von Arezzo, in
Kontinuitt und Transformation der Antike im Mittelalter: Verentlichung der Kongreak-
ten zum Freiburger Symposion des Medivistenverbandes, ed. Willi Erzgrber (Sigmaringen:
Thorbecke, 1989), 23738. Sachs argues that, since Guido urges the singer to seek proof of
intervals through monochord measurements (in the Micrologus and Regule), he has not dis-
carded the Pythagorean tradition, but instead echoes the Boethian division into sensus and
ratio, die beiden partes iudicii der armonica vis. On the other hand, Sachs takes Guidos use
of sensus in the sentence quoted earlier from the Prologus (ll. 13) to mean an amalgamation
of the senses and intellect.
22. The Eucharistic debate between the ninth and twelfth centuries is discussed by
Brian Stock in a chapter entitled The Eucharist and Nature, in The Implications of Lit-
eracy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). See esp. pp. 25973, where Stock discusses
two ninth-century writers, Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus of Corbie, who respec-
tively supported the idea of the bread and wine as a mark of truth and as a symbol.
23. The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. Jerey E. Brower and Kevin Guilfoy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), includes a chapter on Abelards philoso-
phy of language, by Klaus Jacobi.
24. These translations of Boethiuss commentary on Aristotle, Commentarii in Librum
Aristotelis Peri ermeneias, are taken from Stocks chapter, Language, Texts, and Reality,
in The Implications of Literacy, 36672.
25. Mary Carruthers, in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), discusses how a mnemonic structure can
have heuristic value as an elementary device for retaining and recollecting materials, yet
not necessarily hermeneutic value as an interpretation of their meaning. She mentions
how in the fourteenth century, Robert of Basevorn used the solmization syllables to cre-
ate a division into six of the theme Ego vox clamantis in deserto, parate viam Domini,
in which the six syllables are the first words of the six subdivisions (p. 105). According to
Carruthers, This is a most revealing application of the technique called solmization, for
it shows that Robert of Basevorn understood that the device was primarily a mnemonic,
and could thus be utilized in non-musical contexts (p. 106). The present essay argues that
Guido envisioned his syllables being used in a more meaningful way than Carrutherss
specific statement about solmization allows, because, viewed in their entirety within the six-
note segment, they embody all essential pitch principles. Carrutherss more general point
about how mnemonics work brings in the concept of likeness discussed above: rules
were thought to be, as Aristotle says, built up from repeated memories, the principle being
to recognize and organize likeness, even in things never seen before. This is not mnemonic
in the restricted sense that moderns tend to understand it, but in the larger sense of how
all learning takes place (p. 106).
36 Dolores Pesce

26. As suggested above, the written enters into this discussion of musical learning
when Guido prescribes using colored sta lines to accentuate where semitones occur in a
melodys unfolding. This visual aid reinforces a singers awareness of the property of the
tone that governs a phrase, and thus plays into the signification of tonal property. It re-
mains unclear, however, whether Guido required the written component at an early stage
of learning, or whether he may have considered the oral use of Ut queant laxis and Alme
rector to be sucient.
 3
Some Thoughts on Music
Pedagogy in the Carolingian Era%
CHARLES M. ATKINSON

Given that many musicologists hold academic positions, and given the aca-
demic culture we have all grown up in, pedagogy is a topic with which we are
all familiar. Moreover, many of the primary sources we work withespecially
if our research is oriented toward intellectual historyhave some didactic
purpose. One might therefore assume that an examination of music pedagogy
in a well-researched period such as the Carolingian era would be a relatively
easy task. That proves to be an incorrect assumption. The mere fact that one
occupies oneself with music as a part of the intellectual history of the Middle
Ages does not mean that one actually knows what was taught on that subject
in monastic and cathedral schools in the eighth and ninth centuries. We can
know what was recommended to be taught, and we can gain some idea of what
teaching materials were availablebut finding out what was actually taught
about music in Carolingian schools is no easy matter. The present study will
briefly address each of these issues in order to gain some insight into the na-
ture and character of music instruction during the Carolingian era.
Most readers of this essay will be at least somewhat familiar with what
Charlemagne and his Minister of Education, Alcuin of York (ca. 735804),
thought should be the subject matter taught in schools of the Frankish King-
dom. Two capitularies issued by Charlemagne document the importance he
38 Charles M. Atkinson

attached to the founding of schools and give us information as to their func-

tions. The first of these is the Admonitio generalis issued by Charlemagne to
the Frankish clergy in 789 (see text I).

Text I. Admonitio generalis: Et ut scolae legentium puerorum fiant. Psal-

mos, notas, cantus, compotum, grammaticam per singula monasteria
vel episcopia et libros catholicos bene emendate [thus in three MSS;
emendent in one, emendatos in ten others]; quia saepe, dum bene aliqui
[aliquid in three MSS] Deum rogare cupiunt, sed per inemendatos li-
bros male rogant. Et pueros vestros non sinite eos legendo vel scribendo
corrumpere; et si opus est euangelium, psalterium et missale scribere,
perfectae aetatis homines scribant cum omni diligentia. (Ed. Alfred
Boretius, MGH Leges II, vol. I: Capitularia Regum Francorum, no. 22,
chap. 72, p. 60.)

In its seventy-second chapter, this document states that in every monas-

tery and diocese there should be schools for teaching boys to read, and im-
plies that they should be given instruction in Psalms, written characters,
chants, calculation, and grammar (psalmos, notas, cantus, compotum, gram-
maticam). It goes on to emphasize the necessity of having accurate texts of
religious works, making the statement that catholic bookspresumably
bibles, psalters, and liturgical booksshould be carefully emended. The
importance of these books in the spiritual life of a monastery or congrega-
tion is underscored by the statement that all too often men desire to ask
some grace of God aright but ask it ill, because the books are faulty. Hence,
young clerks should not be allowed to corrupt these texts, either in reading
aloud or in copying, and the making of new copies of books such as the
evangel, psalter, or missal should be done by a grown man, not a boy, work-
ing with care.
The second Carolingian document to urge the formation of schools is the
capitulary De litteris colendis, issued circa 795. It oers an eloquent rationale
for teaching (see text II).
It has seemed to us and to our faithful councilors that it would be of great
profit and sovereign utility that the bishoprics and monasteries of which
Christ has deigned to entrust us the government should not be content
with a regular and devout life, but should undertake the task of teaching
 Some Thoughts on Music Pedagogy in the Carolingian Era 39

Text II. Karoli epistola de litteris colendis: Notum igitur sit Deo placitae
devotioni vestrae, quia nos una cum fidelibus nostris consideravimus utile
esse, ut episcopia et monasteria nobis Christo propitio ad gubernandum
commissa praeter regularis vitae ordinem atque sanctae religionis con-
versationem etiam in litterarum meditationibus eis qui donante Domino
discere possunt secundum uniuscuiusque capacitatem docendi studium
debeant impendere . . . Quamvis enim melius sit bene facere quam nosse,
prius tamen est nosse quam facere. (Ed. Alfred Boretius, Karoli epistola
de litteris colendis (780800), MGH Leges II, vol. I: Capitularia, no. 29,
pp. 7879.)

those who have received from God the capacity to learn . . . Doubtless good
works are better than great knowledge, but without knowledge it is impos-
sible to do good.

As even this brief excerpt suggests, the scope of teaching advocated in

De litteris colendis is broader than that in the Admonitio generalis. Here, the
door is opened to virtually all of ancient learning, with a more complete un-
derstanding of the Bible as the primary goal (see text III):

Text III. Karoli epistola de litteris colendis: Hortamur vos litterarum studia
non solum non negligere, verum etiam humillima et Deo placita inten-
tione ad hoc certatim discere, ut facilius et rectius divinarum scriptura-
rum mysteria valeatis penetrare. Cum autem in sacris paginis schemata,
tropi et cetera his similia inserta inveniantur, nulli dubium est quod ea
unusquisque legens tanto citius spiritualiter intellegit, quanto prius in
litterarum magisterio plenius instructus fuerit. (Ed. Alfred Boretius,
MGH Leges II, vol. I: Capitularia, no. 29, p. 79.)

We urge you not only not to neglect the study of [ancient] literature, but
indeed to learn it eagerly, with humble and devout attention to God, so that
you may be able to penetrate more easily and correctly the mysteries of the
divine scriptures. Since figures of speech, tropes and the like may be found
within the sacred pages, there can be no doubt that anyone reading them
can more quickly understand them spiritually to the extent to which he has
first been fully instructed in the mastery of [non-spiritual] literature.
40 Charles M. Atkinson

With an exhortation such as this it is hardly any wonder that Carolin-

gian schoolmasters would ultimately seize the opportunity to teach sophisti-
cated ancient works, such as the last book of Martianus Capellas De nuptiis
Philologiae et Mercurii and Boethiuss De institutione musicae. But first their
students had to learn the basics, and the most basic discipline of all was learn-
ing to read and write according to the rules of grammar.
An early medieval tract on education, De commendatione cleri, which is
preserved in the Vatican Library (Pal. lat. 1252), says that from the springtime
of his seventh year until the end of his fourteenth, when the light of reason
begins to shine, a boy should make grammar his chief object of study, with
music and arithmetic at its side. We know from Alcuins plan for the school
at Tours that it had one division for Bible study, a second for the liberal arts,
and a third devoted specifically to grammar. It thus comes as no surprise to
read what John Contreni has written about the place of grammar in Caro-
lingian education: For the sixty or so authors of the Carolingian world . . .
as well as several generations of unknown masters and their disciples, proper
use of language was paramount. To mispronounce a word in the liturgy or to
use the wrong case ending, as Gunzo of Novara learned, was to reveal oneself
as uneducated.
But one might well ask, what about the other artes, such as music? For-
tunately, we are not without resources here. We know from ninth-century
library catalogues, such as those at Reichenau and St. Gall, that monasteries
had available to them handbooks on specific disciplines, such as Donatuss Ars
grammatica and Boethiuss Arithmetica and Musica, as well as encyclopedic
works, such as Cassiodoruss Institutiones divinarum et humanarum lectionum,
Isidore of Sevilles Etymologiae, and Martianus Capellas De nuptiis Philologiae
et Mercurii. Theodulf of Orlans poem De libris quos legere solebam et quali-
ter fabulae poetarum a philosophis mystice pertractentur (ca. 800) provides an
excellent guide to the authors that were to be read in school, and Hrabanus
Mauruss De institutione clericorum (816819) is a fairly detailed handbook for
the training of clergy.
But how do we know what was actually taught in the schools? Our two
best sources of information here are first, the manuscripts that were scored
for reading aloud, as Leonard Boyle has pointed out, and secondand per-
haps most importantthose texts that received glosses or commentaries by
Carolingian schoolmasters. A third source for music would be those treatises,
such as the ninth-century Scolica enchiriadis and the early eleventh-century
 Some Thoughts on Music Pedagogy in the Carolingian Era 41

Text IV. Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, book III

(ed. Willis, p. 71):
26869: Hactenus de iuncturis; nunc de fastigio videamus. qui locus
apud Graecos PERI` PROSWDIWN appellatur. hic in tria discernitur: un-
aquaeque enim syllaba aut gravis est aut acuta aut circumflexa; et ut
nulla vox sine vocali est, ita sine accentu nulla. et est accentus, ut quidam
putaverunt, anima vocis et seminarium musices, quod omnis modula-
tio ex fastigiis vocum gravitateque componitur, ideoque accentus quasi
adcantus dictus est. omnis igitur vox Latina simplex sive composita ha-
bet unum sonum aut acutum aut circumflexum; duos autem acutos aut
inflexos habere numquam potest, graves vero saepe.

Dialogus de musica of Pseudo-Odo, that present the fundamentals of music

progressively ordered in dialogue form.
To provide some idea of what the ninth-century schoolboy might actu-
ally have heard from the Magister scholarum, I should like to discuss three
sets of glosses: two on Martianus Capella, one of which treats grammar and
one that treats harmonic theory, and one on Boethius, treating the modes.
I have chosen to present them in this order, in keeping with the chronol-
ogy presented by Marie Elizabeth Duchez. In a series of articles published
during the 1970s and 1980s, Duchez posited three stages in the reception
of ancient texts and their assimilation into musical discourse by scholars
in the Carolingian era. The first of these stages begins in the later eighth
century, with the reception of and commentary upon texts on grammar (e.g.,
Donatus, Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville); the second stage is ushered
in by commentaries on book IX (De harmonia) of Martianus Capellas De
nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii; and a third is represented by the reception of
Boethiuss De institutione musica. Mariken Teeuwen has pointed out that
the tradition of glossing the texts on harmonic theory in Martianuss and
Boethiuss works seems to begin at about the same time, but the general
progression outlined by Duchez still holds up in its broad outlines. (See
text IV.)
The first text appears in book III of De nuptiis, the introduction to Mar-
tianuss treatment of prosodic accents, de fastigio. Upon introducing this topic,
Martianus says that it is called in Greek PERI` PROSW DIWN (i.e., De prosodia),
and that it is divided into three aspects. He continues, saying:
42 Charles M. Atkinson

Every single syllable is either grave, acute, or circumflex; and just as there
is no utterance [vox, here meaning syllable] without a vowel, so too there
is none without an accent. As some assert, accent is the soul of utterance
and the seedbed of music (seminarium musices), because every melody is
composed of elevation or depression of the voice. Thus accentus is called
ad-cantus, so to speak [i.e., for the purpose of song].

As one might expect of a passage that has at least one phrase of Greek,
along with several Latin words and phrases whose meanings were not entirely
obvious, this passage inspired a lively response on the part of medieval com-
mentators. Its musical implications are underscored particularly forcefully
by a passage from Leiden F. 48, a commentary that was formerly attributed
to Martin of Laon. (See gloss I. In the glosses here: the base text appears in
normal type, interlinear glosses in italics within angle brackets, and marginal
glosses in italics within square brackets.)

Gloss I. Leiden, UB, Voss. lat. F. 48 (s. IX, ca. 850), fol. 22v:
(268) Hactenus de iuncturis; nunc de fastigio videamus. qui locus apud
Graecos peri prosodion <id est de accentibus> appellatur. hic <locus> in
tria discernitur: unaquaeque enim syllaba aut gravis est aut acuta aut
circumflexa; et ut nulla vox sine vocali est, ita sine accentu nulla. et est ac-
centus, ut quidam putaverunt, anima <pulcritudo> vocis et seminarium
musices <matheries musices: id est, musicae artis>.
[Tonus id est cantus id est emissio vocis. accentus autem exaltatio vel depositio
eius unde accentus quasi ad cantus dicitur.]

In the sentence beginning et est accentus . . . , the anonymous commenta-

tor glosses the word anima (soul) with pulcritudo (pulchritude or beauty); and
seminarium musices becomes for him the matheries musices, id est musicae artis:
the very stu or substance of music, that is, of the musical art. He concludes
with a marginal commentary on the theory of accent introduced by the term,
tonus: Tonus, that is cantus, which is the projection of the voice. Accent is its
elevation or deposition; whence accent is called ad cantus [for the purpose of
song], so to speak. In this passage it is hard to tell whether music or gram-
mar is the primary referent, so complete is the interweaving of elements from
the two disciplines.
Let us now move into the domain of music as a harmonic discipline and
examine two examples of the treatment it received in the hands of Carolingian
 Some Thoughts on Music Pedagogy in the Carolingian Era 43

commentators, starting with book IX, De Harmonia, of Martianus Capellas

De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Two of the core manuscripts for the com-
mentary connected to Martin of Laon (Leiden F 48 and Besanon 594), both
dating from the ninth century, have a rather extensive marginal comment
opposite sections 932 to 935 of Martianuss text. The text itself reads as in
gloss II.

Gloss II. Besanon, Bibliothque Municipale, 594 (s. IX, 3rd quarter);
fol. 78:
[Primo <facis> materiam in animo simul cum gravitate aut etiam cum acu-
mine. Ergo si libet tibi, ut ex gravioribus tropis alterum formes, praeparandum
est opus aut fistula aut fidibus et caetera, aut etiam voce, similiter fide acutis.]

First [you compose] the (melodic) material in your mind, with both depth
and height together. Thus, if you wish to form another (melody?) from
the lower tropesif the work has to be prepared for an organ or stringed
instrument, etc., or even for the voiceyou must likewise form it for the
stringed instrument from the higher tropes.

What the glossator seems to say in this reading is that if one adapts a melody
to instruments or composes a new melody, one must employ both low and
high pitches. This would support Martianuss words in section 932, which
one sees in text V(a):

Text V(a). Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, book IX

(ed. Meibom, Antiquae musicae auctores septem Graece et Latine [Amster-
dam, 1652], II: 180):
932: Hi sunt igitur soni, qui modulationem apt & cum ratione com-
ponunt. Constat autem omnis modulatio ex grauitate soni uel acumine.
Grauitas dicitur quae modi quadam emissione mollescit; Acumen uer,
quod in aciem tenuatam gracilis et erectae modulationis extenditur.

These, therefore, are the sounds with which melody [modulatio] is aptly and
rationally composed. Every melody consists of depth or height of sound.
That which is called depth soothes by a certain relaxation of the mode;
height is that which is projected in the sharp compression of a high, thin
melody.
44 Charles M. Atkinson

This reading is supported, or at least not contradicted, by the glosses of

both John Scottus and Remigius on section 932. John simply explains the words
mollescit (= dulcescit, sweetens), acumen (= altitude, height), in atiem (= in
acumen vocis, in the sharpness of the voice), and erectae (= acute, high).
Remigius glosses the sentences of section 932 as follows (see gloss III):

Gloss III. Commentary of Remigius of Auxerre from Lutz, ed., Remigii

Autissiodorensis Commentum in Martianum Capellam, II: 332:
CONSTAT AUTEM OMNIS MODULATIO EX GRAUITATE SONI id est ex inae-
qualibus, UEL ACUMINE. Omnis modulatio ex inaequalibus constat. Si
enim aliter fuerit, iam non erit modulatio. GRAUITAS DICITUR QUAE
MODI id est soni QUADAM EMISSIONE id est descensione, remissione vel
productione MOLLESCIT dulcescit, remittitur.

EVERY MELODY CONSISTS OF DEPTH OR HEIGHT OF SOUND that is, of un-

equal [varying] sounds. If it were not so, it would not be a melody. DEPTH
SOOTHES sweetens, lowers, BY A CERTAIN RELAXATION i.e., descent, lower-
ing or stretching out OF THE MODE i.e., of the sound.

Remigius interprets the word modus in the lemma as sound, not trope,
and makes no reference to a melodic adaptation or new composition such as
that found in the Anonymous commentary.
But there is yet another passage in Martianus with which this gloss can
be associated. It is section 935 of De nuptiis, in which Martianus sets out the
fifteen tropes or transposition scales for the first time. This section appears
in text V(b).

Text V(b). Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, book IX

(ed. Meibom, Antiquae musicae auctores septem Graece et Latine [Amster-
dam, 1652], II: 184):
935: Tropi vero sunt XV, sed principales quinque, quibus bini tropi
cohaerent. id est, Lydius, qui cohaerent 50/,5$)/3 et 50%2,5$)/3.
Secundus Iastius, cui sociatur 50/)!34)/3 et 50%2)!34)/3 . Item Aeo-
lius, cum 50/!)/,)7 et 50%2!)/,)7 . Quartus Phrygius cum duobus
50/&25')7 et 50%2&25')7 . Quintus Dorius cum 50/$72)7 et
50%2$72)7 .
 Some Thoughts on Music Pedagogy in the Carolingian Era 45

There are fifteen tropi: five principal ones, and a pair of tropi attached to each
of them. There is the Lydian, with which the hypolydian and the hyperlydian
are conjoined; the Ionian, with which the hypoionian and the hyperionian
are conjoined; the Aeolian, and with it the hypoaeolian and the hyperaeolian;
the Phrygian, and with it the hypophrygian and the hyperphrygian; and the
Dorian, with the hypodorian and the hyperdorian.

In her book Harmony and the Music of the Spheres, Mariken Teeuwen
relates gloss II to the theory of the fifteen tropes, translating the commentary
as follows:

First [you compose] the (melodic) material in your mind, at the same time
for both the high region and the low region. Thus, if it pleases you to form a
dierent (melody) out of the lower modesthe work has to be adapted for
a flute or stringed instrument et cetera, or even for the human voicethen
[you can make] the same (melody) for a high string.

If Teeuwens interpretation and translation are correct, this comment might

possibly be one of the earliest references to two-part parallel organum. My
translation results from my assumption that the comment is upon section 932,
and that modus in Martianuss text (as given here) is taken as an alternate for
sonusrather than tropuswhich is how it appears in the Paris manuscript
(BNF, lat. 8671) of the same commentary. Unfortunately, there is no cue in
either Leiden F 48 or Besanon 594 to indicate the section of the main text to
which this comment pertains. Moreover, nothing like it appears in the com-
mentaries of John Scottus and Remigius of Auxerre for either section 932
or 935. For the present, the comment must remain a tantalizing mystery
perhaps the medieval equivalent of The Lady or the Tiger.
This example is a reminder that discovering what was taught about music
in Carolingian schools is not a simple matter, and it has other implications as
well. The case of gloss II is one in which our own knowledge does not extend
as far as that of the students to whom this passage was taught. Inasmuch as
their teacher (the glossator) would have presented it to them as he intended,
for them the proper referent of the gloss in question was undoubtedly not
a mystery. And if it was, in fact, being used as a note of instruction on the
composition of two-part organum, it shows us that in certain instances the
glosses could go beyond explicating the classical text and into the realm of
contemporaneous practice.
The interface between classical text and contemporaneous musical prac-
tice is further emphasized in our last example, from the glosses on Boethius,
46 Charles M. Atkinson

De institutione musica, book IV. This is a gloss appearing in the ninth-century

manuscript clm 14523 of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, a source from the
monastery of St. Emmeram, reproduced as gloss IV.

Gloss IV. Commentary in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm.

14523 (s. IX, St. Emmeram), on Boethiuss wing diagram illustrating
Modi, quos eosdem tropos vel tonos nominant, ed. Bernhard and
Bower, Glossa maior III, appendix I, 365:
Diagram in Friedlein, ed., Anicii Manlii Torquati Severini Boetii De insti-
tutione musica libri quinque [Leipzig, 1867], 343, descriptio II (fig. D21 in
Bower, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius: Fundamentals of Music [New
Haven: Yale University Press], 156):
HYPERMIXOLYDIUS. . . . (D21): Autenti proti primitus incipit in parhypate
meson genere diatoni diapente proportione. Deinde in hypate meson
descendit transito semitonio. Deinde in lychanos hypaton tono transit,
post hoc iterum redit tono in hypate meson. Deinde remigrat iterum
in lychanos hypaton per tonum et inde se deflectit in proslambanome-
nos duobus tonis et dimidio. Plagis proti incipit ubi autenti desinit, i. in
proslambanomenos, et inde cadit tono inferius. Ex hinc iterum surgit in
proslambanomenos et vadit inde in lychanos hypaton chromatico genere.
Post hoc transit in proximum hemitonium ad hypate meson a lychanos
hypaton eiusdem generis, i. chromatici, tono distans, et exinde redit ite-
rum ad lychanos hypaton chromatice, et inde flectens in proslambano-
menos desinit. [My stresses in the preceding. Translated into pitches (but
ignoring the chromatic genus), this becomes:
Protus autentus: F E D E D A
Plagis proti: A G A D E D A]

Commenting on Boethiuss wing diagram of the modes or tones in book

IV, chapter 16, this author states that: The beginning of the Autentus protus
starts on the parhypate meson in the diatonic genus in the diapente propor-
tion. He continues his description by saying that it then descends by semi-
tone to the hypate meson, then by tone to the lychanos hypaton, following which
it returns to the hypate meson. It moves back to the lychanos hypaton by tone,
and then descends to the proslambanomenos by two tones and a semitone.
Following this the glossator gives a similar description of the plagis proti. I
 Some Thoughts on Music Pedagogy in the Carolingian Era 47

have rendered his descriptions of both in Pseudo-Odos letter notation at the

bottom of gloss IV.
Clearly, this gloss has nothing to do with the ancient Greek tonoi as de-
scribed in Boethius. It is important nevertheless: first, because of the termi-
nology it employsAutentus proti and plagis protiand second, because it
describes these by means of melodic incipits. Both are important components
of a new theory of tonus in the Carolingian era, that of the so-called church
tones or modes. The theory and practice of these would become one of the
most important preoccupations of Carolingian schoolmasters and choirmas-
ters in the years to come.
What I hope to have shown in this essay is that both grammatical and
musical texts of antiquity, as exemplified here in the works of Martianus
Capella and Boethius, did indeed become objects of study in Carolingian
schools. Starting with manuscripts from the first part of the ninth century,
we see that Carolingian schoolmasters such as Martin of Laon and Remigius
of Auxerre, made concentrated attempts to understand and explain concepts
such as accentus, seminarium musices, sonus, tropus, etc., on their own terms, as
they had been understood in antiquity. At the same time, their commentaries
could not help but reflectand in turn influencethe milieu in which they
were written and the directions in which musical thought was heading. As
these glosses show, I believe, the study of grammar and the study of music
in Carolingian schools were closely intertwined. Both informed each other
and both were to prove important ingredients in the musical ferment of the
Carolingian period and beyond.

NOTES
This chapter is based on my presentation at the Baltimore conference, Reading and
Writing the Pedagogies of the Renaissance: The Student, the Study Materials, and the Teacher
of Music, 14701650, at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, 24 June
2005. It is expanded in my book, The Critical Nexus: Tone-System, Mode, and Notation in
Early Medieval Music, American Musicological Society Studies in Music 6 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
1. Alfred Boretius, ed., Admonitio generalis (789), MGH, Leges II, vol. I: Capitularia
Regum Francorum, no. 22, 5262. On Alcuins possible role in its conception, see Hartmut
Mller, Institutionen, Musikleben, Musiktheorie, in Neues Handbuch der Musikwissen-
schaft 2, ed. Hartmut Mller and Rudolf Stephan (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1991), 13640.
2. There is a problem with the text at this point in the document. Strictly translated,
the beginning of the second sentence of the text should read: Emend well the psalms, notes,
chants, calculation, grammar through the individual monasteries or bishoprics and catholic
booksa reading that has troubled several scholars, myself included. John Contreni, The
48 Charles M. Atkinson

Carolingian Renaissance: Education and Literary Culture, The New Cambridge Medieval
History, vol. II (ca. 700ca. 900), ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 70957, makes a tacit emendation of his own, combining the first two
sentences (see 726). In his translation, the first part reads: Let there be schools for boys,
teaching the reading of Psalms, Tironian notes, chant, reckoning and grammar, which has
the advantage of capturing the broader sense of the Latin verb legolegilectum. Although it
has been taken as early evidence for musical notation (for example, in Kenneth Levy, Char-
lemagnes Archetype of Gregorian Chant, Journal of the American Musicological Society 40
(1987): 130; see esp. 1112; and Levy, From Aural to Notational: The Gregorian Antipho-
nale Missarum, Etudes grgoriennes 28 (2000): 519; see esp. 13), or as a reference to Tiro-
nian notes, as in Contrenis translation above, the word notas in the principal manuscript
of the Admonitio is qualified by a gloss connecting it with the notarius, a secretary, implying
that the boys should also be taught how to write (cf. David Hiley, Western Plainchant: A
Handbook [Oxford: Clarendon, 1993], 364). For a somewhat dierent reading of this pas-
sage see James Grier, Admar de Chabannes, Carolingian Musical Practices, and the Nota
Romana, Journal of the American Musicological Society 56 (2003): 4398, see esp. 6365.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this essay are my own.
3. This reference to emended books may be an allusion to the Institutiones of Cas-
siodorus. In section 2 of the preface, Cassiodorus says that the recruits of Christ, after
they have learned the Psalms, should study the divine text in corrected books [in codicibus
emendatis]. He continues: The books should be corrected to prevent scribal errors from
being fixed in untrained minds. Later he devotes an entire chapter (bk. I, chap. 15) to the
care with which the emendation of the scriptures should be made, saying that this type of
correction, in my opinion, is the most beautiful and glorious task of learned men (istud enim
genus emendationis, ut arbitror, valde pulcherrimum est et doctissimorum hominum negotium
gloriosum). The Latin text, with my emphasis, is from R. A. B. Mynors, Cassiodori Senatoris
Institutiones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937), 4, 42; the translation is by James W. Halporn, Cas-
siodorus: Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2004): 106, 139.
4. The translations into English here are from Franois Louis Ganshof, Alcuins Revi-
sion of the Bible, in The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, trans. Janet Sondheimer
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 2840, here 29.
5. Alfred Boretius, ed., Karoli epistola de litteris colendis (780800), MGH, Leges II,
vol. I: Capitularia Regum Francorum, no. 29, 7879. Cf. Leopold Wallach, Alcuin and Char-
lemagne: Studies in Carolingian History and Literature, Cornell Studies in Classical Philol-
ogy 32 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), 202204. Wallach thinks that it was written
ca. 794800, and that its chief author was Alcuin. Cf. also Donald Bullough, Europae
Pater: Charlemagne and his Achievement in the Light of Recent Scholarship, The English
Historical Review 85 (1970): 59105. The document was initially addressed to Baugulf, Ab-
bot of Fulda, but was later issued as a circular letter under the title De litteris colendis.
6. Translation from Leo Treitler, Reading and Singing: On the Genesis of Occidental
Music-writing, Early Music History 4 (1984): 135208; reprinted in With Voice and Pen:
Coming to Know Medieval Song and How it was Made (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 365428. The passage is on pages 135 and 365 respectively.
7. On this document see in particular Gnther Glauche, Schullektre im Mittelalter,
Mnchener Beitrge zur Medivistik und Renaissance-Forschung 5 (Munich: Arbeo Ge-
sellschaft, 1970), 17; and Contreni, The Carolingian Renaissance, 726. Glauche feels that
this passage is a call not just for the study of literature (litterae), but of the liberal arts
altogether.
8. Citt del Vaticano, Pal. lat. 1252, quoted from Lynn Thorndike, Elementary and
Secondary Education in the Middle Ages, Speculum 13 (1940): 405.
 Some Thoughts on Music Pedagogy in the Carolingian Era 49

9. Franz Brunhlzl, Der Bildungsauftrag der Hofschule, Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk
und Nachleben, vol. 2: Das geistige Leben, ed. Bernhard Bischo (Dsseldorf: L. Schwann,
1965), 2841, see esp. 30. In a letter to Charlemagne from late 796 or early 797 (Alc. epist. 121
in MGH, Epist. Kar. Aevi, IV: 17677), Alcuin states: Ego vero Flaccus vester secundum
exhortationem et bonam voluntatem vestram aliis per tecta sancti Martini sanctarum mella
scripturarum ministrare satago; alios vetere antiquarum disciplinarum mero inaebriare
studeo; alios grammaticae subtilitatis enutrire pomis incipiam; . . . In another letter, an
unknown bishop (Arno?) tells Alcuin that he should oversee instruction, and names gram-
mar, reading, and study of the Bible as subjects (Alc. epist. 161 in MGH, Epist. Kar. Aevi, IV:
260, ll. 13.). In Brunhlzls view, such witnesses tell us that Alcuins poem 26 also depicts
the court school itself.
10. Contreni, The Carolingian Renaissance, 726. Gunzo made a visit to St. Gall in
965 in the company of Otto I. He was derided by a young monk (possibly Ekkehard II) for
using the accusative instead of the ablative case at one point in his conversation. He took his
revenge in a letter to the monks at Reichenau, belittling his St. Gall critic and demonstrat-
ing his own learnedness. On this see Max Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur
des Mittelalters, vol. 1: Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 9, sec. 2, pt. 1
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1911): 53136; the letter is summarized on pp. 53334.
11. See the entries for these libraries in Paul Lehmann, Mittelalterliche Bibliothekska-
taloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1918), vol. 1.
12. MGH Poet, I: 54344; cf. Glauche, Schullektre, 1112.
13. Detlev Zimpel, ed., De institutione clericorum libri tres, Freiburger Beitrge zur
mittelalterlichen Geschichte 7 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996).
14. Leonard Boyle, O.P., Vox paginae: An Oral Dimension of Texts, Unione Interna-
zionale degli Istituti di Archeologia, Storia e Storia dellArte in Roma Conferenze 16 (Rome,
1999); Boyle, Tonic Accent, Codicology, and Literacy, in The Centre and its Compass: Stu-
dies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle, ed. Robert A. Taylor et al.
(Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1993), 110; Boyle, The Friars and Reading in
Public, in Le vocabulaire des coles des Mendiants au moyen ge, ed. Maria Candida Pacheco.
CIVICIMA: Etudes sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du moyen ge IX (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999),
815.
15. On the Scolica enchiriadis as a pedagogical text, see Max Haas, Die Musica enchiri-
adis und ihr Umfeld: Elementare Musiklehre als Propaedeutik zur Philosophie, Musik und
die Geschichte der Philosophie und Naturwissenschaften im Mittelalter, ed. Frank Hentschel,
Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 62 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 20726.
16.
6. Marie Elizabeth Duchez, La reprsentation spatio-verticale du caractre musi-
cal grave-aigu et llaboration de la notion de hauteur de son dans la conscience musicale
occidentale, Acta Musicologica 51 (1979): 5473; Duchez, La reprsentation de la musi-
que: Information daction et expression structurelle dans la reprsentation de la musique
occidentale traditionnelle, Actes du XVIIIe Congrs des Socits de Philosophie de langue
franaise, Strasbourg, Juillet 1980 (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1980), 17782; and Duchez, Description
grammaticale et description arithmtique des phnomnes musicaux: le tournant du IXe
sicle, Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittelalter: Akten des VI. Internationalen Kongresses fr
mittelalterliche Philosophie (Bonn, 1977), Miscellanea Mediaevalia 13, no. 2 (Berlin: Walter
De Gruyter, 1981): 56179.
17. In her dissertation on the ars musica in ninth-century commentaries on Martianus
Capella (Harmony and the Music of the Spheres, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 30
[Leiden: Brill, 2002], 16283, esp. 18283), Teeuwen notes that the oldest layer of glosses to
both Martianus Capellas De nuptiis and Boethiuss De musica can be dated to the second
third of the ninth century. As pointed out by Louis Holtz (Donat et la tradition de lenseigne-
ment grammatical, Etude sur lArs Donati et sa diusion [IVeIXe sicle] et dition critique:
50 Charles M. Atkinson

Documents, Etudes et Repertoires publis par lInstitut de Recherche et dHistoire des

Textes [Paris: C.N.R.S., 1981], 32026), the transmission and glossing of Donatuss Ars
grammatica begins even earlier in the century.
18. On this passage see Matthias Bielitz, Die Neumen in Otfrids Evangelien-Harmonie:
Zum Verhltnis von geistlicher und weltlicher Musik des frhen Mittelalters, sowie zur Entste-
hung der raumanalogen Notenschrift, Heidelberger Bibliotheksschriften 39 ([Heidelberg]:
Universittsbibliothek Heidelberg, 1989), 100103.
19. Description and bibliography in Claudio Leonardi, I Codici di Marziano Capella,
Aevum 34 (1960): 6768; and in Teeuwen, Harmony, 8898, and pl. 1.
20. Cf. Leonardi, I Codici, 1314; Cora Lutz, Martinus Laudunensis, Catalogus
translationum et commentariorum [hereafter CTC]: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin
Translations and Commentaries. Annotated Lists and Guides, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller,
F. E. Cranz, et al. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1971), 37071;
John Contreni, Addenda to CTC 3 (1975), 45152; Jean Praux, Le commentaire de Mar-
tin de Laon sur loeuvre de Martianus Capella, Latomus 12 (1953): 43759; and Teeuwen,
Harmony, 3341 and 14850, but 8898 for description and bibliography of Leiden, Univer-
siteitsbibliotheek, Voss. Lat. F. 48. Both Contreni and Teeuwen express strong reservations
as to the putative authorship of Martin. Teeuwen hypothesizes that the commentary, which
she refers to as anonymous, may have been the product of a group of scholars collected
at the courts of Louis the Pious (reg. 813/14840) and Charles the Bald (reg. 840877); see
Teeuwen, Harmony, 14850. I refer here to the earlier attribution to Martin of Laon primar-
ily because Leonardifollowing Praux (Le commentaire de Martin de Laon), Lutz, and
othersemploys that designation in his manuscript descriptions.
21. Cf. Leonardi, I Codici, 1314; Lutz, Martinus Laudunensis, CTC 2 (1971),
37071; Contreni, Addenda to CTC 3 (1975), 45152; and Teeuwen, Harmony, 8898, for
description and bibliography of the Leiden manuscript, and 98103 for description and
bibliography of the Besanon manuscript. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Voss. Lat. F.
48 was written ca. 850, probably in Auxerre, according to the sources listed in Teeuwen
(Harmony, 8889). Besanon, Bibliothque Municipale, MS 594, dates to the third quarter
of the ninth century, and was apparently copied at the abbey of Saint-Claude in Saint Oyan
(Teeuwen, Harmony, 9899).
22. Cf. Teeuwen (Harmony, 304305, and 315). My translation results from my as-
sumption that the comment is upon section 932, and that modus in Martianuss text (see
text V(a) here) is taken as an alternate for sonusrather than tropusas it appears in the
Paris manuscript (BNF, lat. 8671) of the same commentary. Unfortunately, there is no cue
in either Leiden F 48 or in Besanon 594 to indicate the section of the main text to which
this comment pertains.
23. Martianus Capella, ed. Marcus Meibom, Antiquae musicae auctores septem Graece et
Latine (Amsterdam: Apud Ludovicus Elzevirium, 1652), II: 180. I use Meibom here because
his text for this section of the treatise is the same as that found in the two manuscripts.
Related to this and the following discussion, consider the gloss on Boethius, De institutione
musica I,8, which presents the definition of sonus, as it appears in the eleventh-century
manuscript Paris, BNF lat. 16201:

SONUS CASUS VOCIS dicitur, i. exitus vel emissio vel processio de gravi in acutum, vel
de acuta in gravem, vel talis vocis terminatio, que sit apta melo (Michael Bernhard
and Calvin Bower, ed., Glossa maior in institutionem musicam Boethii, Verentlich-
ungen der Musikhistorischen Kommission 911 [Munich: Bayerische Akademie
der Wissenschaften, 19931996], I: 164, gloss I,8,3).
24. William Stahl, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, 2 vols. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1971/1977), 2: 361, translates the last two sentences as follows:
 Some Thoughts on Music Pedagogy in the Carolingian Era 51

Moreover, all musical movement (modulatio) consists of lower- or higher-pitched tones. A

low pitch has a soothing eect because of the slackening of its sound; a high pitch, on the
other hand, is due to the tightening and raising of the music to a thin and shrill sound.
25. Cora Lutz, ed., Iohannis Scotti Annotationes in Marcianum (Cambridge, Mass.: Me-
dieval Academy of America, 1939), 206. I have emended her reading of MOLLESCAT dulces-
cat to MOLLESCIT dulcescit following the readings of both Dick and Willis, as well as her
own of Remigius.
26. On equal and unequal sounds as necessary components of melody, cf. the gloss
on Boethius, De institutione musica I,3 that appears in two tenth-century manuscripts
from Einsiedeln (MSS 298 and 358). For the lemma QUOCIRCA SONI QUOQUE PARTIM SUNT
AEQUALES, PARTIM VERO SUNT INAEQUALITATE DISTANTES (Therefore, some sounds are
also equal, while others stand at an interval from each other by virtue of an inequality),
they oer the following gloss (see Bernhard/Bower, Glossa maior I,125, gloss I,3,150):
equales soni inequales
__
_____________ __
__
Astiterunt reges terre et
(Antiphona I ad Matutinum in Feria VI in Parasceve; Corpus antiphonalium Ocii 3,
1506. Astiterunt is recited on G, terre et on b-flat, G, and F).
27. Teeuwen, Harmony, 304305, and 315.
28. The same text appears in the upper margin of fol. 178 in the manuscript Munich,
Bay. Staatsbibl., clm 14272, as a gloss to the Alia musica. Cf. Chailley, Alia musica, 21011.
 4
Medieval Musical Education
as Seen through Sources Outside
the Realm of Music Theory%
SUSAN BOYNTON

As Dolores Pesces and Charles Atkinsons contributions to this volume dem-

onstrate, treatises on music theory and the other liberal arts, along with their
commentary traditions, can tell us a great deal about the character of musical
learning in the Middle Ages. For the most part, however, these texts do not
oer much insight into the social context and institutional setting of practi-
cal musical training, the roles and responsibilities of teachers, the practical
organization of instruction or the times and places in which it took place. For
such pragmatic aspects of medieval musical education one must often turn to
materials outside the corpus of music theory, such as customaries and glossed
hymnaries, that oer insight into our pedagogical past.
Monastic customaries constitute the single most important source for
reconstructing the process by which students in the central Middle Ages
learned to read and sing. Varied in length and scope, these texts contain
a wealth of information on all aspects of life in a monastery, including in-
numerable details on the performance of the liturgy. Customaries are not
snapshots of monastic life, in that they may oer recommendations for the
 Medieval Musical Education Outside Music Theory 53

organization of a monastery rather than recording the reality of any single

institution. Nevertheless, the account of monastic communities in many cus-
tomaries is so detailed as to appear to be descriptive as well as prescriptive.
For the present purpose of studying medieval musical education, customaries
reflect teaching methods that seem to have been common to a great number
of dierent institutions, as is suggested by a comparison with didactic texts
of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Monastic customaries show that the musical education of child oblates
was an integral part of their larger monastic formation, which consisted of
learning appropriate behavior by imitating the older monks. The divine oce,
which occupied most of the hours of each day, aorded oblates and novices
the opportunity to learn not only how to sing and to read, but also how to
hold themselves, as well as how to bow and to process. Another aspect of the
liturgy that had to be learned was the order in which monks sang and read,
which was based on a hierarchy determined by the date of entry into the
monastery. Moreover, performing in the liturgy required so much study and
rehearsal that it formed the core of monastic education.
Customaries oer extensive information on monastic teaching schedules,
the pedagogical methods employed, and the roles of monastic ocers responsi-
ble for training children to perform in the liturgy. Teachers worked closely with
the child oblates in several daily sessions during which the chant was learned
by ear, first by listening and then by repeating after their teachers, as is stated
in a Cluniac customary written by Ulrich of Zell in the late 1070s: the boys sit
in chapter, and learn the chant from someone singing it before them. Read-
ing and singing were taught by the same person, frequently the armarius, or
librarian. The armarius corrected the liturgical books, looked after the library,
and was ultimately responsible for the education of oblates as well as for the
organization of the liturgy. However, the armarius was too busy to administer
all of the requisite teaching, so child oblates were trained first by an assistant
before the armarius listened to their chants and readings. It is apparently for
this reason that the early eleventh-century customary from Fleury refers to a
librarian who is also the teacher (armarius qui et scolae praeceptor vel librarius),
but it was actually the assistant to the cantor who taught the chant:
For assistance [the precentor] is given a brother of demonstrable talent who
is called the succentor. For the master of the school is the guardian of the
children. Careful in every study of chants and in daily practice, he arranges
the definitions of the tones and dierentiae of the psalms, and is accustomed
to propel to the chapter those who treat the divine oce negligently.
54 Susan Boynton

TABLE 4.1. Manuscript sigla of eleventh-century continental hymnaries

with Latin glosses.

F1 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Chigi C.VI.177 (10501060,

Farfa)
F2 Farfa, Biblioteca del Monumento Nazionale, MS A.209 (end of the eleventh
century, Farfa)
N Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 7172 (ca. 1050, Narni)
Su Montecassino, Archivio dellAbbazia, MS 420 (second half of the eleventh
century, Subiaco)
B Brescia, Biblioteca Queriniana, MS H.VI.21 (first half of the eleventh century,
Santa Giulia of Brescia)
M1 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Rossi 205 (10641080,
Moissac)
M2 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS DOrville 45 (last quarter of the eleventh century,
Moissac)
D Paris, Bibliothque Nationale de France, MS lat. 103 (ca. 1050, St. Denis)
G Paris, Bibliothque Nationale de France, MS lat. 11550 (10301060, St. Germain-
des-Prs)
C Amiens, Bibliothque Centrale Louis Aragon, MS 131 (ca. 10401050, Corbie)
H Huesca, Archivo de la Catedral, MS 1 (third quarter of the eleventh century,
Languedoc or Aquitaine)
Si London, British Library, MS Add. 30851 (ca. 1050, Silos)

As Margot Fassler has shown, in the Liber tramitis (which reflects customs
at the abbey of Cluny between 1027 and 1048), the role of the armarius is
expanded to absorb functions previously fulfilled by the cantor. Thereafter,
as far as one can tell from customaries, the duties of the armarius and cantor
appear to have been combined.
The close connection between librarians and teachers may account for
the annotation of liturgical hymnaries with glosses to help students under-
stand and memorize hymn texts as they learned the melodies. Elementary
education consisted of learning to read and sing the psalms and hymns. An
early prescription for this first phase of training appears in the Murbach Stat-
utes of 816, preliminary acts to the synod of Aachen that described the school
reforms of Abbot Atto of Reichenau. These statutes stipulated that students
should begin with the psalms, hymns, and canticles, proceed to the Benedic-
tine rule, and from there to the scriptures and patristic writings. Study of the
liberal arts (including the theory of music) could begin only after mastery of
these fundamental texts had been achieved.
The hymns role in monastic education is reflected in the variety of
glosses on the hymns that were transmitted in manuscripts of the eleventh
 Medieval Musical Education Outside Music Theory 55

century and later (see table 4.1). Glosses on the psalms and canticles in this
period seem to have fulfilled a pedagogical function as well, but they tend to
be lengthier texts derived from patristic psalm-commentaries, and do not
reflect the same diversity of approaches as the hymn glosses, nor do they vary
as much by geography as the hymn glosses.
The glosses in the twelve manuscripts listed here can be grouped into sev-
eral general categories pertaining to lexicon, grammar, syntax, encyclopedic
knowledge, scriptural references, meter, textual criticism, style, doctrine, and li-
turgical theology. F1, F2, N, and Su contain substantially the same set of lexical
glosses along with some grammatical ones. The northern Italian manuscript B
transmits a distinctive set of glosses that are primarily lexical, with a few gram-
matical and theological glosses. The two hymnaries of Iberian provenance (H
and Si) are distinct from the other manuscripts, each containing a unique set of
lexical and grammatical glosses. The two hymnaries from Moissac (M1 and M2)
transmit essentially the same lexical and grammatical glosses as well as a few
longer encyclopedic glosses. DGC contain the most complex tradition, includ-
ing all gloss types and some categories not found in the other manuscripts.
As the first Latin poetry that monks learned, hymns presented new chal-
lenges of vocabulary, syntax, and word order, and glossators found diverse
means by which to meet these challenges. (See appendix: Glosses on Primo
dierum omnium.) A synoptic transcription of glosses on just the first two stro-
phes of Primo dierum omnium, the hymn for the oce of Matins on Sundays
in winter, furnishes examples of almost all the types of commentary used to
explain hymn texts in eleventh-century manuscripts. The first gloss precedes
the text of the hymn proper, acting as an introduction to the rhetorical con-
struction of the hymn, attributing it to Ambrose of Milan and identifying
the underlying symbolism of Sunday as the Lords Day, which allegorically
signifies the Resurrection. The glosses on primo and quo are all grammatical
in nature, identifying the use of the ablative and the implied superlative in the
word primus. Lexical glosses provide more common equivalents for relatively
unusual words. Here, the lexical glosses on words such as extat, conditus, con-
ditor, pulsis, procul, torporibus, and otius constitute a basic vocabulary lesson
and also manifest the tendency to exploit common words for the purpose of
introducing synonyms. For instance, the word pulsis is glossed variously with
fugatis, eiectis, preiectis, abiectis, and expulsis, in some cases with two dierent
terms in the same gloss.
A more complex type of linguistic gloss is known as a syntactical gloss be-
cause it points to or explicates an aspect of a texts syntax. Syntactical glosses
56 Susan Boynton

are represented here by a passage that points out the link between the first two
strophes of the hymn (because the first strophe in its entirety is a dependent
clause) and rephrases it in prose by recasting the word order: This versicle is
joined to those above. For such is its sense, but the order of words is: On the
first of all days on which the world was made, or on which Christ arose, and
liberated us from death, let us all rise, having driven torpors far away, that is,
having repelled laziness and sleepiness from us. This kind of syntactical gloss
is found only in the three Northern French manuscripts D, G, and C.
Another type of commentary found only in these three manuscripts is
the theological gloss, which includes interpretations of the kind applied to
biblical exegesis. A tropological or moral interpretation of the hymns mean-
ing gives rise to the gloss all the faithful on the personal pronoun nos. The
passage beginning One who hastens to the Divine Oce about to be cel-
ebrated can be seen as a form of liturgical theology, associating the meaning
of the hymn with act of performing the night oce. The subsequent gloss,
found only in C, refers both to the allegorical association of Sunday with
the Resurrection and to its eschatological sense as a weekly prefiguration of
the Last Judgment. Similarly, the gloss on the word prophet is exegetical
in character, citing several psalm verses in allusion to King David, who was
thought in the Middle Ages to be the author of the entire book of Psalms.
Interpreting the psalmody of the oce typologically, as a nocturnal quest for
God following the example of David, the gloss cites psalm 118 in an echo of
the Rule of Benedict. The variety of purposes and genres represented within
this small sample of glosses shows the complexity of the various manuscript
traditions and suggests that the hymns were subject to commentary on vari-
ous levels of study.
While glossed manuscripts of Latin school texts have traditionally been
considered direct witnesses to medieval teaching methods, their pedagogical
function has been called into question. Some scholars, particularly specialists
in the glossed manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon England such as Michael Lapidge,
have challenged the assumption of a close connection between glossed manu-
scripts and the actual practice of teaching. Others, such as Gernot Wieland,
maintain that the glosses were references for teachers. Liturgical manu-
scripts are fundamentally dierent from the literary manuscripts that have
been the focus of this debate, and therefore the distinctions between the
categories of classbook and library book developed by Lapidge and Wieland
do not apply to chant-books such as hymnaries with Latin glosses. Hymnaries
were a record of a monasterys hymn repertoire for the use of the monas-
 Medieval Musical Education Outside Music Theory 57

tic ocial in charge of chant. The fact that the armarius/cantor directed the
scriptorium as well as teaching singing supports the theory that the glosses
in hymnaries served a pedagogical purpose or at least reflect the methods
used by teachers.
Glossed hymnaries could have been used by students for individual study
as well. Prescriptions for liturgical training in monastic customaries from
the eleventh and early twelfth centuries indicate some use of hymnaries and
other books in private study. A Cluniac customary from the 1080s, and an
early twelfth-century one from Fruttuaria, both provide for silent reading
practice, or the memorization of psalms and hymns, during the celebration of
Mass. The latter text also mentions the use of books by some oblates during
their lesson: no one looks at the book there, except a boy who is so old that
he cannot learn otherwise; and if there are two of them, they take a board,
put it between them, and place the book on top of it. Novices, who could
arrive at the monastery with literacy skills, could make even more extensive
use of books. The Fruttuaria customary notes that novices were lent a psalter
and hymnary which they could keep for up to a year, presumably to facilitate
their memorization of the psalms and hymns.
After memorization during the initial stages of liturgical training, the
hymns also formed a component of more advanced grammatical education.
The various didactic functions of the hymns are reflected by the presence of a
wide range of glosses in eleventh-century liturgical manuscripts, attesting to
the central role of language and literacy training in liturgical education, and
the important place of liturgical texts in the study of grammar.

APPENDIX
GLOSSES ON THE FIRST TWO STROPHES OF PRIMO DIERUM
OMNIUM, FROM H, M 2 , SU, F 1, F 2 , B, D, G, AND C.
Primo dierum omnium [1 On the first of all days
quo mundus extat conditus [2 on which the created world exists
uel quo resurgens conditor [3 and on which the creator, rising again,
nos morte uicta liberat [4 liberates us, death having been vanquished,
pulsis procul torporibus [5 and by night let us seek the holy one
surgamus omnes ocius [6 with torpors driven far away,
et nocte queramus pium [7 let us all quickly rise
sicut prophetam nouimus. [8 just as we know the prophet (did).

In hoc hymno quem sanctus Ambrosius In this hymn, which St. Ambrose
pulchra satis serie composuit, in prima sui composed in quite beautiful wording, in its
58 Susan Boynton
parte exortationem habet, non petition-
em. Est autem de die resurrectionis Do-
mini compositus, quem diem dominicum
uocamus, quia in ipso Dominus diabolum
destructa morte triumphauit, atque suum
releuauit atro de funere corpus. Hortatur
autem nos in hac die resurrectionis Do-
mini, ltis animis et expeditis gressibus
occurrere, et ad laudem Dei surgere
{DGC}
1] PRIMO: scilicet die {B}; Primus su-
perlatiui gradus est et ideo hic
iungitur genitiuo {G D}
2] QUO: die {H}; in {B}; id est in quo
{DGC}
EXTAT: est {B}; id est omnis machina
rerum {DG}
CONDITUS: creatus {B}; factus
{DGCM2}
QUO: id est in quo {DCG}
3] CONDITOR: factor {H}; creator {B};
id est Christus per quem facta sunt omnia
{DGC}
4] NOS: omnes fideles {H}
MORTE: id est eripit a dominio diaboli, qui
ad mortem captiuum tenebat genus
humanum uicta [id est superata {DC}]
{G}; in diabolo principe mortis qui mors et
inferus appellatur {DGC}
5] PULSIS: fugatis, eiectis {H}; preiectis
{M2}; abiectis {Su}; eiectis id est abiectis
{FB}; id est expulsis {DCG}
PROCUL: longe {M2B}; a longe {HDGC}
Hic uersiculus ad superiora coniungitur. Est
enim talis sensus, sed uerborum ordinatio:
Primo omnium dierum quo mundus est
factus uel in quo Christus surrexit, et nos a
morte liberauit, surgamus omnes procul
pulsis torporibus id est pigriciis et
somnolentia a nobis repulsis {C}
first part there is an exhortation, not a
petition. And it is composed about the
Resurrection, which we call the day of the
Lord, since on that very day the Lord
triumphed over the Devil, death having
been destroyed, and unveiled his body
from black death. And he exhorts us on
this day of the Resurrection of the Lord
to hasten with cheerful minds and ready
steps and rise to the praise of God.
1] THE FIRST: That is, day; Primus is a
superlative and therefore here
it is joined to the genitive
2] WHICH: day; on [the day]; that is, on
which
EXISTS: is; that is, every engine of things
CREATED: created; made
WHICH: that is, on which
3] CREATOR: maker; creator; that is,
Christ, by whom all things have been
made
4] US: all the faithful
DEATH: that is, having conquered
[death], he wrested us from the dominion
of the Devil, who was holding the human
race captive in death; in the Devil, the
prince of death, who is called death and
infernal
5] DRIVEN OUT: put to flight, ejected;
thrown out; ejected, that is thrown out;
that is, expelled
FAR AWAY: far; from afar
This versicle is joined to those above. For
such is its sense, but the order of words is:
On the first of all days on which the
world was made, or on which Christ
arose, and liberated us from death, let us
all rise, having driven torpors far away,
that is, having repelled laziness and
sleepiness from us
 Medieval Musical Education Outside Music Theory
TORPORIBUS: pigriciis {HB}; pigritia
{M2}; id est pigritia {F}; in pigritia {Su};
fastidiis {DG}; fastidiis, tediis {C}
6] SURGAMUS: Qui ad celebrandum
diuinum otium uel obsequium festinat,
necesse est ut a se omnem somnolentiam et
torporem repellat. Aliter Dominum quem
querit, inuenire non poterit {GD};
Dominicus dies plenus sacramentis est
enim in conditione rerum primus om-
nium dierum, quia in illo factus est, et
sicut doctores dicunt mundus finietur in
ipso. Octauum enim est in ordine dierum
in quo Christus a mortuis significat
autem illius diei gaudium qui non habet
finem in quo omnes resurgemus. Unde
vi. psalmus pro octaua scribitur: Domine
ne, quia totus de illa ultima generali res-
urrectione cantatur. Qui ad celebrandum
diuinum obsequium surgere festinat
necesse est ut a se omnem somnolentiam
et torporem repellat. Aliter Deum quem
querit inuenire non poterit {C}
OCIUS: uel otius {M2}; id est citius
{FSu}; citius {B}; celerius {DG}; celerius,
uelocius {C}
7] NOCTE: in uigiliis noctis {GD}
QUERAMUS: id est per orando {H};
inuestigemus {GD}
PIUM: Deum {M2B}; Dominum {HGD};
scilicet Dominum {C}
8] SICUT: dixisse {H}
PROPHETAM: Dauid: Media nocte
surgebam {H}; id est Dauid {GDC};
Dauid sanctus propheta ubique maxime
introducitur Dominum in nocte qusisse,
sicut ipse dicit, Memor fui nocte nomi-
nis tui Domine, et item, Media nocte
surgebam. {GD}; Dauid sanctus ubique
introducitur maxime Dominum in nocte
59
TORPORS: laziness; aversions; aversions
and weariness
6] LET US ARISE: One who hastens
to the Divine Oce about to be cel-
ebrated or to obedience, must cast out all
somnolence and slowness from himself.
Otherwise the Lord whom he seeks, he
will not be able to find; Sunday is full of
sacraments, for it is in the foundation of
things, the first of all days, since it is on
that day that the world was made, and
similarly the learned say that the world
will end on that same [day]. For [the fact
that] it is the eighth in the order of days
on which Christ [rose] from the dead
signifies the joy of that day which has
no end, on which we shall all rise again.
Whence the sixth psalm is written in
place of the eighth: Lord, lest you, since
it is entirely sung concerning that last
general resurrection. One who hastens
to the Divine Oce about to be cel-
ebrated must cast out all somnolence and
slowness from himself. Otherwise the
Lord whom he seeks, he will not be able
to find
QUICKLY: that is, rather rapidly; rather
speedily; rapidly, speedily
7] BY NIGHT: in the vigils of the night
LET US SEEK: that is, through praying;
let us search out
HOLY: God; the Lord; that is, the Lord
8] JUST AS: he is said to have said
PROPHET: David: I arose in the
middle of the night; that is, David; The
holy prophet David is said everywhere
to have sought the Lord at night, just he
himself says, Lord, I was mindful of your
name at night,1 and also, I was rising in
the middle of the night2; holy David is
said everywhere to have sought the Lord
60 Susan Boynton

quesisse sicut ipse dicit: Memor fui in
nocte nominis tui, et item Media nocte
surgebam, et inuocat Extollite manus
uestras in sanctam, et item Memor fui
tui super stratum meum, unde et
beati Gregorii de quodam legimus qui
postquam aliquantulo sopore corpus
reficisset circa mediam pene noctem
surgebat, et uigilans orabat. Qui tandiu
hoc fecit donec facta est uox a Deum
dicens quid peccatum suum ei Dominus
dimisset {C}
NOVIMUS: fecisse {M2}; scimus {GD};
quesisse {B}; scilicet quesisse {C}
at night, just as he himself says: I was
mindful of your name at night, and again,
I was rising in the middle of the night,
and he invokes Raise your hands to the
holy,3 and again I remembered you
on my bed,4 whence we also read of St.
Gregory about a certain person who, after
he had refreshed his body with sleep for a
little while, arose around the middle of the
night and, keeping vigil, was praying. He
did this so long that a voice was heard from
God saying that the Lord released him
from his sin
WE KNOW: [him] to have done; we
know; to have sought; that is, to have
sought

Notes to Appendix
1. Psalm 118.55.
2. Psalm 118.62.
3. Psalm 132.2.
4. Psalm 62.7.

NOTES
1. The most recent overview of the customaries as a genre is Isabelle Cochelin, Evo-
lution des coutumiers monastiques dessine partir de ltude de Bernard, in From Dead
of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Cluniac Customs, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle
Cochelin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 2966.
2. See Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin, The Sociomusical Role of Child Oblates
at the Abbey of Cluny in the Eleventh Century, in Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of
Youth, ed. Susan Boynton and Roe-Min Kok (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 2006), 324. On the hierarchical structure of monastic communities, see Isabelle
Cochelin, tude sur les hirarchies monastiques: le prestige de lanciennet et son clipse
Cluny au XIe sicle, Revue Mabillon n.s. 11 (2000): 537.
3. See Susan Boynton, Training for the Liturgy as a Form of Monastic Education,
in Medieval Monastic Education, ed. Carolyn Muessig and George Ferzoco (Leicester: Leic-
ester University Press, 2000), 720.
4. Pueri sedent in capitulo, et per aliquem praecinentem cantum addiscunt (Patro-
logiae, ed. J.-P. Migne [Paris: Migne, 1853], 149: 687).
5. Anselme Davril and Lin Donnat, ed., Consuetudines Floriacenses Antiquiores (Sieg-
burg: Schmitt, 1984), 17.
6. Ibid., 15: Huic frater probabilis ingenii solatio datur qui succentor nuncupatur.
Nam scole magister est acceptor infantum. In omni studio cantilenarum et cotidiana cura
tonorum dinitiones et psalmorum distinctiones providus disponit et divinum ocium
negligenter tractantes propellare in capitulo solet.
7. Margot Fassler, The Oce of the Cantor in Early Western Monastic Rules and
Customaries: A Preliminary Investigation, Early Music History 5 (1985): 2951; Peter
Dinter, Liber tramitis aevi Odilonis abbatis (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1980), 23839.
 Medieval Musical Education Outside Music Theory 61

8. Actuum praeliminarium synodi primae aquisgranensis commentationes sive Statuta

Murbacensia (816), in Consuetudines Saeculi Octavi et Noni, ed. Josef Semmler (Siegburg:
Schmitt, 1963), 442: [. . .] ut scolastici, postquam psalmi, cantica et hymni memoriae com-
mendata fuerint, regula, post regulae textum liber comitis, interim uero historiam diuinae
auctoritatis et expositores eius necnon et conlationes patrum et uitas eorum legendo magi-
stris eorum audientibus percurrant. Postquam uero in istis probabiliter educati fuerint, ad
artem litteraturae et spirituales se transferant flores.
9. See Susan Boynton, The Didactic Function and Context of Eleventh-Century
Glossed Hymnaries, in Der lateinische Hymnus im Mittelalter: berlieferung-sthetik-
Ausstrahlung, ed. Andreas Haug, Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi: Subsidia IV (Kassel:
Brenreiter, 2004), 30129.
10.
0. For a complete account of the typology, see Susan Boynton, Glosses on the Of-
fice Hymns in Eleventh-Century Continental Hymnaries, The Journal of Medieval Latin
11 (2001): 126. The categories are loosely based on Gernot Wieland, The Latin Glosses on
Arator and Prudentius in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.5.35, Studies and Texts 61
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 16189.
11. F1 and F2 , both from the abbey of Farfa, are more closely related to each other than
to N and Su, but the four central Italian manuscripts can be characterized as a distinctive
textual tradition.
12. For complete descriptions of the manuscripts, see Susan Boynton, Eleventh-Cen-
tury Continental Hymnaries Containing Latin Glosses, Scriptorium 53 (1999): 20051;
Susan Boynton and Martina Pantarotto, Ricerche sul breviario di Santa Giulia (Brescia,
Biblioteca Queriniana, MS H VI 21), Studi medievali 42 (2001): 30118.
13. The medieval attribution of all the Psalms to David is a venerable tradition estab-
lished already in Judaism: see, for instance, Esther M. Menn, Sweet Singer of Israel: David
and the Psalms in Early Judaism, in Psalms in Community: Jewish and Christian Textual,
Liturgical, and Artistic Traditions, ed. Harold W. Attridge and Margot E. Fassler (Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 6174. Most Christian commentators on the Psalms also
associated the figure of David with the entire book of Psalms, an assumption that is attested
in the third century, when the psalms were taking on increased importance in Christian
worship, a role that was greatly enhanced by the influence of desert monasticism. For a brief
discussion of this development, see James McKinnon, The Book of Psalms, Monasticism,
and the Western Liturgy, in The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle
Ages, ed. Nancy van Deusen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 4358.
14. The gloss combines psalm 118.62 as found in Regula Benedicti XVI.4 with psalm
118.55, which is not cited in the Rule.
15. A. G. Rigg and Gernot Wieland, A Canterbury Classbook of the Mid-Eleventh
Century (the Cambridge Songs Manuscript), Anglo-Saxon England 4 (1975): 11330; Mar-
tha Bayless, Beatus quid est and the Study of Grammar in Late Anglo-Saxon England, in
History of Linguistic Thought in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Vivien Law (Amsterdam: Ben-
jamins, 1993), 67110.
16. Michael Lapidge, The Study of Latin Texts in late Anglo-Saxon England: the Evi-
dence of Latin Glosses, in Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain,
ed. Nicholas Brooks (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 99140.
17. Gernot Wieland, The Glossed Manuscript: Classbook or Library Book? Anglo-
Saxon England 14 (1985): 15374.
18. Ordo Cluniacensis per Bernardum scriptorem saeculi XI, in Vetus Disciplina
Monastica, ed. Marquard Herrgott (Paris: Osmont, 1726), 204: Solis pueris conceditur in
choro legere ad missam, cum in crastino debent esse duodecim lectiones, aut cum praevi-
dent aliquam lectionem collationis, vel huiusmodi; aut si aliquis eorum est novitius, poterit
psalmos suos firmare ad utramque missam, dum tacet conventus (Boys alone are allowed
62 Susan Boynton

to read in choir at mass when there are going to be twelve lessons the next day, or when
they prepare some lesson for the collation, or something of this kind; or if an of them is a
novice, he shall be able to study his psalms at both masses, while the community is silent).
Consuetudines fructuarienses, 1: 21: Infans qui in refectorio legit non debet cum aliis in
scolis canere causa prouidendae lectionis, et ad missam potest legere, quod nulli aliorum
tunc licet nisi pueris nouiter psalmos uel ymnos discentibus (The child who reads in the
refectory must not sing with the others in choir on account of the reading to be prepared,
and he can read at mass, which is not permitted to any of the others at that time except for
boys learning psalms or hymns for the first time).
19. Consuetudines fructuarienses, 2: 15051: Nullus ibi aspicit in librum, nisi tam mag-
nus puer sit, qui aliter discere non possit, et si duo sunt, apprehendunt tabulam et inter se
ponunt et librum desuper mittunt.
20. Consuetudines fructuarienses, 2: 265.
21. See Boynton, The Didactic Function, and Glossed Hymns in Eleventh-Century
Continental Hymnaries (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1997).
 Part Two

Renaissance Places
of Learning"
 5
Sang Schwylls and Music
Schools: Music Education
in Scotland, 15601650
GORDON MUNRO

In August 1560 the Scottish Parliament abolished the Mass and adopted
a Calvinist confession of faith. Reformation ideals had been circulating in
parts of the kingdom since the fifteenth century, but heretics were dealt with
swiftly. It was not until 1559 that the Reformers eorts were galvanized with
the return to Scotland of the formidable Calvinist, John Knox. In the midst of
political turmoil, his fiery preaching at Perth and St. Andrews led to rioting
and, within months, the Scottish Reformation was concluded. Cathedrals,
abbeys, and parish churches alike were purged of all things that were deemed
to be merely delightful and decorative, including artwork, stained glass,
organs, and polyphonic music. The eects of the Reformation were immedi-
ate and, for music and music education, disastrous: with no further need for
choristers and organists, song schools were made redundant. Of an estimated
fifty-eight pre-Reformation song schools, only two continued functioning
in the aftermath of the Act of 1560: one in Edinburgh and the other in St.
Andrews. The survival of these schools, in towns that had been primary cen-
ters of Reformation activity, suggests that it had never been the Reformers
66 Gordon Munro

intention to do away with song schools altogether, though that is in fact what
happened in the rest of the kingdom.
The Reformers education policy was outlined in their first Book of Dis-
cipline (1560), but it made no specific provision for the teaching of music.
Indeed, Reformed attitudes toward music were ambivalent. James Melville,
nephew of the leading Reformer Andrew Melville, enjoyed taking part in
musical activities at St. Leonards College, St. Andrews, in the 1570s, but later
wrote that it was the grait mercie of my God that keipit me from anie grait
progress in singing and playing on instruments; for, gi I haid atteined to
anie reasonable missure thairin, I haid never don guid utherwayes. One of
the Reformers main objectives was greater access to education. Many parish
schools, writing, Latin, and grammar schools survived the Reformation
and, in the twenty years after 1560, there was a proliferation of new schools.
Yet in the same period, only six song schools opened (including that at the
Chapel Royal). The Reformation had dealt a body-blow to music education
in Scotland.
The new Protestant regime required for its music nothing more than
simple metrical psalm tunes, and the obligatory participation of a largely il-
literate congregation necessitated a precentor to lead the singing. In those few
towns with song schools, the precentor and master of the school were one and
the same, and always male. The precentor/song school master also carried
out other church and burgh duties, including reading the scriptures before the
sermon, acting as clerk to the kirk session, and keeping the registers of births,
deaths, marriages, and of the poor. Some even acted as bailis, collecting fines
imposed by the kirk session on local sinners, including thieves and fornica-
tors. Accordingly, the appointment of a song school master was normally
carried out by the burgh council, and ratified by the kirk session. This marks
a significant shift in governance from the exclusively ecclesiastical institutions
of the pre-Reformation period. Masters might be censured by either civic or
kirk authority if the need arose. Kirk sessions were naturally concerned that
masters should live godly lives; burgh councils were more interested in their
talents as musicians and teachers. The two qualities did not always go hand
in hand: kirk sessions frequently rebuked song school masters/precentors for
their negligence or, indeed, scandalous behavior.
The leading of the congregational psalmody was the principal duty of
all precentors, and of their charges, the song school pupils. Most precentors
(especially in rural or remote areas) were unlikely to have been able to do
anything more than lead the congregation in simple unison, but singing the
 Sang Schwylls and Music Schools 67

psalms in four-part harmony was not unknown and seems to have been en-
couraged in urban parishes where the song school pupils formed what were,
in all but name, choirs. In Ayr, in 1583, the song school master and his pupils
were required to sing in the Kirk the fo[u]r partis of music. Choirs also
existed in Glasgow, Aberdeen, St. Andrews, and Stirling; other large towns
very likely followed suit. In some cases, choir stallsdowbill sett (double
seat) or commodious seattiswere specially constructed to accommodate
the singers beneath the pulpit. This evidence suggests that, despite the Re-
formers antipathy toward ornate music, they were not against choral music
in itself.
Nevertheless, the nations musical accomplishment declined to a de-
plorable level in the years after the Reformation: in the words of an act of
Parliament of 1579, the art of musik & singing . . . is almaist decayit and
sall schortly decay without tymous remeid be prouidit. This so-called act
of tymous remeid, one of the first of James VIs personal rule, legislated
for urgent action to reverse the deterioration. It required all councils of the
maist speciall burrowis of this realme . . . And . . . patronis and prouestis of
the collegis . . . To erect and sett vp ane sang scuill with ane maister sucient
and able for instructioun of the yowth in the said science of musik. The act
initiated a process of reform which was to last well into the seventeenth cen-
tury: five new song schools opened within four years of the 1579 act; and by
1633, at least twenty-five song schools (or music schools, as they later became
known) had been established. Most, if not all, burghs without a song school
made provision for music education in their grammar schools. King James
continued his policy of promoting music by making sizeable gifts toward
the maintenance of song schools in Elgin and Musselburgh; and his consort,
Queen Anne, supported the music school in Dunfermline, an ancient seat of
royal residence.
Each new song school was run by a master and, depending on its size, one
or two assistant teachers, called doctors. We have no accurate records of the
number of pupils attending song schools, but an isolated reference from 1582
to the school in the Fife town of Kirkcaldy mentions twenty pupils. While
most grammar schools educated boys only, some song and music schools also
taught girls.
In addition to their teaching salaries (paid by the burgh council; fees
for such duties as precenting were paid by the church), masters and doc-
tors were entitled to charge their pupils quarterly fees, called schollage. The
level of schollage was set by the council and varied according to the subjects
TABLE 5.1. Quarterly schollage for tuition at song/music schools in Scotland, 15931700.
Singing, Music or Singing &
Reading & Reading & unnamed Music & Instrumental Instrumental
Date Place Reading Writing Singing Discanting Writing subject Writing Music Music
a
1593 Edinburgh 6s 8d 10s 13s 4d * 20s
1597 Ayrb 6s 8d 13s 4d (spinet)
1600 Glasgowc 5s (master)
20d (doctor)
1609 Dundeed 6s 8d 13s 4d 26s 8d
1615 Lanark e **
1618 Paisleyf 6s 8d
1620 Stirling g 6s 8d
1623 Dunfermlineh 6s 8d
1626 Stirlingi **
1626 Glasgowj 10s (master)
40d (doctor)
1627 Dunfermlinek 10s
1636 Old Aberdeenl 13s 4d 20s 26s 8d
1639 Linlithgowm 10s (20s)
1641 Old Aberdeenn 6s 8d 13s 4d 20s 26s 8d 26s 8d
1646 Old Aberdeeno 6s 8d 13s 4d 20s 26s 8d 26s 8d
1646 Glasgowp 30s 40s
1647 Dundeeq 16s 8d 30s 46s 8d
1656 Elginr 6s 8d 12s
13s 4d
1662 Stirling s **
1675 New Aberdeent 30s
1680 Banu 6s 8d crown (+
arithmetic)
1694 Dundeev 14s (+
arithmetic)
1700 Stirlingw **
Notes:
No information is extant before 1593. The common unit of account in Scotland was the merk (= 13s 4d). To aid comparison, sums of merks have been
converted into pounds, shillings, and pence.
* For reading, writing, singing, and sett[ing] (= writing?) music, schollage to be set at the masters discretion.
** Schollage to be set at the masters discretion.
Higher schollage to be charged for pupils who are not the children of burgesses.
Schollage for children who live outside of the town (landward bairnes).
a M. Wood and R. K. Hannay, eds, Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh 15891603 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, for the Corporation of
the City of Edinburgh, 1927), 106.
b J. H. Pagan, Annals of Ayr in the Olden Time 15601692 (Ayr: Alex. Fergusson, 1897), 75.
c J. D. Marwick, Charters and Other Documents Relating to the City of Glasgow AD 11751649 (Glasgow: printed for the Corporation of Glasgow, 1894), 1: cxciii.
d A. Maxwell, The History of Old Dundee Narrated out of the Town Council Register with Additions from Contemporary Annals (Edinburgh: David Douglas;
and Dundee: William Kidd, 1884), 337.
e R. Renwick, ed., Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Lanark with Charters and Documents Relating to the Burgh AD 11501722 (Glasgow:
Carson & Nicol, 1893), 122.
f R. Brown, The History of the Paisley Grammar School (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1875), 43.
g R. Renwick, Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling AD 15191666 (Glasgow: Publications of the Glasgow Stirlingshire and Sons of
the Rock Society, 1887), 153.
h A. Shearer, ed., Extracts from the Burgh Records of Dunfermline in 16th and 17th Centuries ([Dunfermline]: Carnegie Dunfermline Trust, 1951), 140.
i Renwick, Stirling Burgh Records, 15191666, 160.
j J. D. Marwick, ed., Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow AD 15731642 (Glasgow: Publications of the Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1876), 354.
k Shearer, Dunfermline Burgh Records, 157.
l A. M. Munro, ed., Records of Old Aberdeen (Aberdeen: Publications of the New Spalding Club, 1899), 1: 6465.
m J. Ferguson, Ecclesia Antiqua, or, The History of an Ancient Church (St Michaels, Linlithgow) (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1905), 251.
n Munro, Records of Old Aberdeen, 2: 1516.
o C. S. Terry, The Music School of Old Machar: From the Manuscripts of Professor C. Sanford Terry edited with an introduction by Harry M. Willsher, in The
Miscellany of the Third Spalding Club (Aberdeen: Publications of the Third Spalding Club, 1940), 2: 233.
p J. D. Marwick, ed., Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow AD 16301662 (Glasgow: Publications of the Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1881), 96.
q Maxwell, History of Old Dundee, 339.
r W. Cramond, comp., and S. Ree, ed., The Records of Elgin 12341800 (Aberdeen: Publications of the New Spalding Club, 1908), 2: 368.
s Renwick, Stirling Records, 241.
t J. Stuart, ed., Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 16431747 (Edinburgh: Publications of the Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1872), 293.
u W. Cramond, comp., The Annals of Ban (Aberdeen: Publications of the New Spalding Club, 1893), 2: 174.
v E. Smart, History of Perth Academy (Perth: Milne, Tannahill & Methven, 1932), 134.
w A. F. Hutchison, History of the High School of Stirling (Stirling: Eneas MacKay, 1904), 246
70 Gordon Munro

studied at the school, and from one school to another. Table 5.1 summarizes
schollage rates and subjects taught during the seventeenth century. Reading
was probably taught in all Scottish schools, even if not specifically listed in
indenturesthe promotion of literacy (with, of course, the ultimate goal of
reading the scriptures) was the single greatest educational advance of the
post-Reformation era. Other subjects taught at song and music schools were
writing, arithmetic (in some places), singing, music, and instrumental mu-
sic. Children of the landed gentry (landward bairnes) were required to pay
higher fees, often twice as much as burgh children. Therefore schollage, de-
pendent on the number and social status of pupils, could greatly enhance a
music teachers salary; non-payment was rectified swiftly by the council.
There are few extant references to the actual school buildings, but those
in Old Aberdeen may have been typical: the three Rs (reading, writing, and
arithmetic) were taught in the downstairs room of the school; the upper room
was reserved for those learning vocal and instrumental music. Many song
school buildings were situated in churchyards.
The school day lasted eight or nine hours, beginning at 6 or 7 AM and
ending at 6 PM with breaks of one hour in the morning (910 AM) and two
hours at lunchtime (122 PM). Stipulated daily activities included the saying of
prayers and the catechism, Bible reading, and the singing of psalms. Metri-
cal versions of psalms, spiritual songs, and the xii Articles of the Christian
Fayth formed an important part of the curriculum in post-Reformation song
schools, not least because of their eectiveness as a means of disseminating
scripture and doctrine. Simple four-part psalm and canticle harmonizations
by David Peebles (fl. 15301576, d. before 1592), Andrew Kemp (fl. 15601570),
and others circulated in manuscript form from the 1560s onward. Peebless
106 settings were collected by Thomas Wood (fl. 15601592) in two sets of
partbooks that are now scattered among various libraries. Kemps forty-
four settings are recorded in Duncan Burnetts Music Book. Settings by
John Angus, John Black, Alexander Smith, Sharp, Andrew Blackhall, and
John Buchan also survive. Significantly, most of these composers (with the
exception of Peebles, Angus, and Sharp) are known to have been connected
with song schools during the latter part of the sixteenth century. They would
certainly have used their own psalm-settings in the churches where they pre-
cented, and in the schools where they taught.
More ambitious polyphonic music would have been taught and sung
in the larger song schools, especially those attached to former collegiate
churches, and at the Chapel Royal. Ten imitative psalms in reports
 Sang Schwylls and Music Schools 71

(mostly anonymous), and three five-voice anthems by Andrew Blackhall (b.

1535/6, d. 1609) are extant. These pieces are likely to have been performed
in the churches where the composers worked, and almost certainly in the
attached song schools.
In a diary entry for 1574, James Melville (nephew of the leading reformer
Andrew Melville) records that around the age of eighteen he was being taught
by one Alexander Smith, wha haid been treaned upe amangis the mounks in
[St. Andrews] Abbay. I lerned of him the gam, plean-song, and monie of the
treables of the Psalmes [i.e., as well as the tunes of the psalms, which were
the tenor part of four-part harmonizations]. The gam refers, of course, to
the rudiments of music; but it is also interesting that Smith was still teach-
ing plainchant fourteen years after the Reformation. This is not an isolated
reference to an apparently anachronistic subject. The following extract from
a poem by John Burel describes the festivities upon the triumphal entry of
Jamess consort, Anne of Denmark, to Edinburgh in May 1590.

Ye might haif hard on euerie streit

Trim melodie and musick sweit.
19 Thocht Philamon his braith had blawin,
For musick quho wes countit king,
His trumpal tune had not bene knawin,
Sic sugrit voycis thair did sing,
For thair the descant did abound harmony
With the sweit diapason sound. the interval of an octave
20 Tennour, and trebill with sweit sence,
Ilkane with pairts gaif nots agane, each one; possibly a
description of imitation
Fabourdoun fell with decadence, counterpoint improvised
on chant
With priksang, and the singing plane: mensural music; plainchant
Thair enfants sang and barnelie brudis, broods of children (i.e.
song school pupils)
Quho had bot new begun the mudis. who had only just begun
the moods (i.e. modes) of
mensural notation
21 Musiciners thair pairts expond,
And als for joy the bells wer rung,
72 Gordon Munro

The instruments did corrospond

Vnto the musick quhilk wes sung: which
All sorts of instruments wer thair,
As sindry can the same declair.
22 Organs and Regals* thair did carpe,
With thair gay goldin glittring strings,
Thair wes the Hautbois and the Harpe,
Playing maist sweit and pleasant springs: lively dance tunes
And sum on lutis did play and sing,
Of Instruments the onely King.
23 Viols and Virginals were heir,
With Girthorns maist iucundious, gitterns; joyous
Trumpets and Timbrels maid gret beir, drums; din
With Instruments melodious:
The Seistar and the Sumphion, cittern
With Clarch Pipe and Clarion. Clar[sa]ch? (i.e. harp);
trumpet
24 Thir notes seemd heuinly sweit and hie,
And not like tunes terrestriall,
Appollo thair appeird to be,
Thair sound wes so celestiall:
O Pan amang sick pleasant plais,
Thy rustik pipe can haue na prais.

* Regals . . . with . . . strings infers a clavichord-like instrument, rather than an

organ.
Sumphion is a Scots rendering of symphonia, which can denote several dierent
types of instruments, including drums, bagpipes, as well as hurdy-gurdy and other
string keyboard instruments.

Stanzas 19 and 20 mention descant, faburden, pricksong, and plainchant.

These subjects, along with figuration and countering, were taught to pre-
Reformation choristers in both England and Scotland. Although parts of
this poem are modeled on an earlier work by Gavin Douglas, The Palice of
Honour (ca. 1501, which also mentions descant, diapason, faburden and prick-
song), and allowing for some poetic licence (evident in the frequent use of
alliteration), Burel seems to be familiar with his musical terminology, and
 Sang Schwylls and Music Schools 73

the poem suggests these subjects were still being taught in 1590. All of them
require the singing and study of plainchantclearly, this was not anathema
in the new Calvinist Scotland, provided the chants were sung outside church
and, presumably, without their Latin texts.
These skills are also discussed in an anonymous Scottish manuscript
treatise, The Art of Music, which was compiled during the late 1570s, pos-
sibly coeval with the 1579 act of tymous remeid. It contains three sections
(mensural music, counterpoint, and proportional music) modeled closely on
the last three books of Gauriuss Practica musice (Milan, 1496), with borrow-
ings from other authors. Most of the copious musical examples are anony-
mous, some of Scottish authorship; many are based on plainchant, and even
the eight traditional psalm tones are discussed, although the author admits
that they have not been used in the reallm of Scottland send [= since] the
yeir of god ane thowsand fyvehundret fyvftie and aucht yeiris [1558]. This
passage (fol. 102v) continues, Thairfoir to draw tham heir [i.e. to discuss the
eight psalm tones] at mair len[g]th It is nocht expedient becauss thay ar not
vsit, which implies that although the eight psalm tones were no longer being
used after 1558, nevertheless the techniques described in the treatise were still
in use around the time of its compilation.
Several seventeenth-century Scottish manuscripts, compiled by song/
music school masters or children of the nobility, also contain sections on the
rudiments of music. Andrew Melville, doctor and, later, master of the music
school in Aberdeen (16171640), compiled a commonplace-book into which
he copied William Bathes singing primer A Brief Introduction to the True Art
of Musicke (1584), of which no copies are now extant. His manuscript also
contains sections of Ravenscrofts A Briefe Discourse (1614). The music books
belonging to Lady Anne Ker (ca. 16051667) and John Squyer (compiled ca.
16961701), and Robert Edwards commonplace-book (begun ca. 1635) include
tables of time-values, rests, and other musical symbols, a great sta with clefs
and note names, and The Gam-Vt, or Scale of Musick, as well as practical
advice on performance. (Lady Anne Kers music-book instructs the reader
to remember that in signeing [sic] the more notes ye singe with one breath the
better.) Robert Edward also copied into his commonplace-book diagrams of
the subdivision of the larg (i.e., maxima) and even examples of ligatures, as
well as part of a Latin music treatise, De music elementis primis (fols. 55r
51r, entered upside-down in relation to the rest of the manuscript). This is, in
fact, an incomplete copy of the music instruction section of the Pdagogus by
J. T. Freigius (Basel, 1582), which he adapted from a (now lost) De musica by
74 Gordon Munro

Conrad Stuber. Other Scottish manuscripts which contain sections on the

rudiments of music include the seventeenth-century additions to the quin-
tus volume of Thomas Woods partbooks, and the music books compiled by
Edward Millar (fl. 16241643, music teacher in Edinburgh, and master of the
choristers at the Chapel Royal) and the weill expert Louis de France (fl.
16751691, music teacher in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Glasgow).
The title page of the first book of secular music printed in Scotland, Songs
and Fancies, published by John Forbes in Aberdeen (1662), proudly announces
that it contains a briefe Introduction of Musick, As is taught in the Musick-
Schole of Aberdene by T.D. Mr. of Music. The briefe Introduction, with
Exposition of the Gamme is in fact an almost verbatim (but unacknowl-
edged) transcription of Thomas Morleys A Plaine and Easie Introduction to
Practicall Musicke (1597; 2nd edition, 1608), preceded by an illustration of the
Guidonian hand. T. D. became Thomas Davidson in the second edition
(1666). Davidson succeeded Andrew Melville (his brother-in-law) as master of
the music school in New Aberdeen (1640ca. 1674). If the didactic elements
of this book were used in the music school, no doubt the songs were too,
themselves a retrospective collection of sixteenth-century Scots partsongs
and early seventeenth-century English lute songs. Furthermore, to judge from
the books apparent popularity (it went through a second edition in 1666 and
a third in 1682), we may infer that it was widely used in other Scottish music
schools, alongside the pedagogical publications of Bathe, Morley, and Ravens-
croft, to name but three English instructional books which had made their
way north of the border.
The earliest reference to the term music school (as opposed to song
school) occurs in 1575 in Aberdeen. For a time the terms were interchange-
able: the transition from song to music school, like the establishment of
the schools themselves following the act of tymous remeid, was a gradual
process. Music school became the more prevalent term around the 1630s.
A central purpose of song/music schools was the training of youngsters to
assist in leading church psalmody; but the gradual change of name is sig-
nificant and reflects a steady shift in the curriculum to include the teach-
ing of instrumental music. John Black, who taught at the Aberdeen school
(15461587) when it was described as a music school, wrote consort music
which he would doubtless have used in his teaching. His compositions in-
clude a lesson upon the tune of psalm 50, and two further instrumental
lessons upon psalm tunes (both found in The Art of Music) have been
attributed to him.
 Sang Schwylls and Music Schools 75

The few surviving indentures of instrumental tuition in music schools

mention only keyboard and plucked string instruments (spinet, virginals,
lute, and cittern); wind and bowed string instruments are conspicuous by
their absence. Yet, if we are to believe John Burel, Anne of Denmark was
greeted by musicians playing a very varied assortment of instruments in 1590.
Tuition on organ, viol, and possibly shawm and flute, is likely to have been
available in those towns with prestigious music schools (including Aberdeen,
Glasgow, and Edinburgh) from the mid to late sixteenth century onwards.
David Cuming was master of the music school in Edinburgh (15861593) and
would have taken a leading role in the extravagant musical arrangements to
welcome Anne of Denmark to the city, as described in John Burels poem
(see above). The keyboard composer Duncan Burnett (fl. 16141652) was
master of the music school in Glasgow (in 1614, and from 1638). The contents
of his music bookkeyboard pieces by William Kinloch (fl. ?15681582),
William Byrd, and Burnett himself, consort music, and psalm-settings by
Andrew Kempwould have formed a significant part of Burnetts teaching
material.
During the seventeenth century, music secured its place in what was per-
ceived to be a rounded education for the children of upper-class families, and
many employed private music teachers. (Duncan Burnett, himself related
to the aristocratic family of the Burnets of Leys in Aberdeenshire, was for a
time employed by Sir John Maxwell of Pollok, and possibly taught music to
the children of James, First Earl of Abercorn.) However, the children of the
gentry patronized the local music school and this served to raise the prestige
of the burgh. It is recorded that the lack of a public music teacher in Stirling
(in 1699) hinders many of the gentrie from sending their childring to be
here educat, to the noe smal prejudice of this burgh. Some burghs went to
considerable expense to attract the sons of wealthy landowners: Ayrs burgh
accounts record a payment of 18 for lodging Robert Dalyells two sons on
their visit anent [= concerning] the Music School.
The lack of a functioning music school in Glasgow in 1638 was shamefully
reported as a grait discredit [to] this citie. Following the act of tymous
remeid, which entrusted the promotion of music education to the maist
speciall burghs of the realm, the establishment and support of a music school
had clearly become an object of civic pride. Under the terms of the act, it be-
came incumbent upon burghs to secure the services of well-qualified music
teachers and, on at least two occasions (in 1593 and 1631), musicians of the
Chapel Royal were employed to examine potential music school masters.
76 Gordon Munro

In the late sixteenth century there was a dearth of skilled music teachers.
The best of them are therefore found moving from one town to another on
the promise of better terms of employment. Some councils even resorted
to head-hunting, as in Stirling, where the bailies layed out for intelligence
in the most parts of the Kingdom for fitt persones to exerce that oce. As
a result, pay and conditions gradually improved across most of the kingdom
(see below). An important factor in a masters decision to move to another
burgh seems to have been the councils willingness to limit, or suppress, ri-
val music teaching. Private teachers could seriously reduce a public music
teachers income (through lost schollage), and contemporary records provide
many examples of councils keen to retain their music teacher (or attract a new
one) by guaranteeing his monopoly in the town.
After their appointment, masters were subject to continuing inspections
(visitations) by ministers and members of the kirk session or presbytery.
Schools in Aberdeen were visited quarterly. Visitations could be anxious
times for schoolmasters as they had to justify their continued employment,
not only through the merits of their teaching, but also with regard to their
doctrine and disciplineteachers were not simply required to teach music,
but also meaners, and wertew. One council even seems to have tried brib-
ing the music school pupils: in return for their cooperation and good behavior
during a visitation, they were oered four pounds of plumdemus (damson
plums).
But sometimes bribery did not work. School pupils (then as now) were
capable of gross indiscipline and even violence. In December 1612, pupils of
the music school in New Aberdeen seized the school with hagbuttis, pistol-
lis, swords and lang wapynnis and caused great deidis of oppressioune and
ryottis. The culprits were expelled and fined; the teachers were condemned
for their lack of discipline. The council deplored the fact that the school is
taken almost yearly. The cause of the annual mutiny was a council edict
dating back to 1574, which banned school holidays in the dayes dedicated
to superstitioun in Papistrie. Minor indiscipline continued and the coun-
cil eventually relented, granting several days play in lieu of the traditional
Christmas holiday. Music school pupils were also known to disrupt church
services and even funeral wakes. Due to the great insolencie of scholars
at wakes (which were often large and riotous events in any case), Aberdeen
council set limits on the number of pupils attending; but even this failed
to curb their disorderly behavior, and eventually their presence was banned
altogether.
 Sang Schwylls and Music Schools 77

350

300

250

200

Scots
per annum

150

100

50

0
1560

1570

1580

1590

1600

1610

1620

1630

1640

1650
FIGURE 5.1. Song/music school masters basic wages, 15601650.

This ban seriously aected the Aberdeen music school masters income,
since funeral wakes were very lucrative. Income from additional work such as
wakes and civic entertainments varied considerably from town to town, and
this may have been another factor contributing to the propensity of music
school masters to move from one area to another. In addition to their wages
and outside income, some school masters also received perquisites, includ-
ing free house rent and victual. Masters wages varied from place to place.
Figure 5.1 charts the rise and fall of basic salaries from 1560 to 1650. Allowing
for the eects of inflation, the chart describes a general increase in salaries
toward the end of the sixteenth centuryevidence of song/music school
masters recently acquired professional status (following the act of tymous
remeid). By now, most music school masters were earning a basic salary at
least equal to that of a skilled craftsman, and these earnings would have
been substantially augmented by schollage and other additional income. The
chart shows that basic wages continued to rise (dramatically in some cases)
during the first thirty to forty years of the seventeenth century, but tailed o
during the 1640s, the period of civil war. Significantly, wage highpoints are
contemporary with important historical events, suggesting that each in turn
stirred up the nations musical life. James VI and I returned to Scotland in
78 Gordon Munro

1617; the publication of the first harmonized psalters in Scotland (between

1625 and 1635) involved music school masters; and, in the early 1630s, Charles
Is advocacy of episcopacy and his Scottish coronation in Edinburgh (1633) in-
spired a revitalization of the Chapel Royal. Each of these three events is likely
to have caused civic and ecclesiastical authorities to review the remuneration
rates of their musician employees, with the intention of improving the quality
of local musical activity.
Thus, the history of Scottish music education during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries is closely bound up with that of church and state. Pre-
Reformation sang schwylls were attached to churches: teachers were
mostly musicians in holy orders, and the schools existed solely for the culti-
vation of liturgical chant and polyphonic music. After a period of great insta-
bility following the Reformation, song schools were reopened and eectively
secularized by being brought under burgh control. But the schools retained
some ecclesiastical connections: masters and pupils were still required to sing
in church, albeit a very dierent kind of music; and church authorities main-
tained educational and doctrinal standards. Schools (of all types) existed for
the cultivation of godly citizens.
James VIs act of tymous remeid secured the future of music educa-
tion in Scotland. The masters of music schools (as they began to be called
more widely) attained professional status. By the middle of the seventeenth
century, music school masters were well-paid and highly regarded individu-
als within their communities. They were well educated: many had university
degrees, and some went on to become ministers. Some were even trained
abroad, like Patrick Davidson, master of the music school in New Aberdeen
(1601ca. 1634), who studied in Italy (but who, intriguingly, was forced to leave
that country upon the Account of a young Princess, who was much in love
with him). Almost all music school masters and doctors were made bur-
gesses of the towns where they worked, which indicates a recognition of their
important contribution to the fabric of burgh life in early modern Scotland.

NOTES
1. Thirty Ayrshire Lollards were remitted to James IV for punishment in 1494. Be-
tween 1528 and 1558, twenty-one Scots Lutheran martyrs were burned at the stake and many
more were exiled; Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Pimlico, 1991), 186.
2. The (conservative) estimate of fifty-eight schools assumes that song schools, how-
ever small, were attached to all twelve cathedrals and all forty-six collegiate churches in
Scotland, but does not take account of those attached to abbeys and other institutions;
 Sang Schwylls and Music Schools 79

see Donald Elmslie Robertson Watt, Ecclesiastical Organization about 1520 and Col-
legiate Churches, in Atlas of Scottish History to 1707, ed. Peter G. B. McNeill and Hector L.
MacQueen (Edinburgh: Scottish Medievalists and Department of Geography, University
of Edinburgh, 1996). Payments were made to the master of Edinburghs song school in 1560
and 1564; Robert Adam, ed., Edinburgh Records: The Burgh Accounts (Edinburgh: printed
for the Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council, 1899), 306, 481. Alexander Smith is de-
scribed as doctor of the Sang Scole in the Abbay [of St. Andrews] in May 1560; David H.
Fleming, ed., Register of the Minister[,] Elders and Deacons of the Christian Congregation of
St Andrews . . . 15591600 (Edinburgh: Publications of the Scottish History Society, 1889),
39. Andrew Kemp was master of the song school in St. Andrews shortly after the Reforma-
tion, according to Thomas Woods marginal note in the first copy of the altus volume of his
partbooks; GB-Lbl Add. MS 33933, p. 134.
3. James K. Cameron, ed., The First Book of Discipline (Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press,
1972).
4. Robert Pitcairn, ed., The Autobiography and Diary of Mr James Melvill, Minister
of Kilrenny, in Fife, and Professor of Theology in the University of St Andrews (Edinburgh:
Publications of the Wodrow Society, 1842), 29.
5. See John Durkan, Distribution of Lowland Schools before 1633, in Atlas of Scot-
tish History to 1707, ed. Peter G. B. McNeill and Hector L. MacQueen (Edinburgh: Scottish
Medievalists and Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh, 1996).
6. A statute of 1565 mentions the preceptor [= master] of the bairns of the Chapel
Royal; James Beveridge and Gordon Donaldson, eds., Registrum Secreti Sigilli Regum Sco-
torum (Edinburgh: Her Majestys Stationery Oce, 1957) vol. 5, pt. 2, 15 (no. 2528). (The
Chapel Royal operated in Stirling Castle until 1612 when it moved to Holyrood Palace,
Edinburgh.) The other song schools were located in New Aberdeen, Dundee, Old Aberdeen,
Glasgow, and Perth; Gordon Munro, Scottish Church Music and Musicians, 15001700
(Ph.D. diss., University of Glasgow, 1999), 81, 122, 80, 213, 123.
7. Women seldom feature in this history, except in documents relating to private mu-
sic tuition among the middle and upper classes. There is a unique reference to the temporary
appointment of a female precentor in Elgin in 1681, who served as maister of the music
school following the death of the previous incumbenther husband; William Cramond,
comp., and Stephen Ree, ed., The Records of Elgin 12341800 (Aberdeen: Publications of
the New Spalding Club, 1908), 2: 407. During the seventeenth century, women were oc-
casionally permitted to keep venture schools (for girls), and music was sometimes taught
by them as part of the curriculum, for example, Christian Cleland taught singing, playing,
dancing, sewing, embroidery, and French in Edinburgh in 1662; see Marguerite Wood, ed.,
Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh 16551665 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd,
1940), 220, 296.
8. This body is the lowest, parish level of Presbyterian church government, made up
of the minister and elected elders of the congregation.
9. For example in Ban, 1692, and Elgin, 1697; see William Cramond, comp., The An-
nals of Ban (Aberdeen: Publications of the New Spalding Club, 1891), 1: 165, and Cramond
and Ree, Records of Elgin, 1: 352.
10. Disputes between the two bodies over the appointment of a precentor were rare;
see Munro, Scottish Church Music, 13940, for one such instance.
11. See Munro, Scottish Church Music, 87, 12425, et pass.
12. Upon the famous return of the exiled minister John Durie to Edinburgh in 1582,
a 2,000-strong crowd is reported to have sung psalm 124 in harmony; Millar Patrick, Four
Centuries of Scottish Psalmody (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 61.
13. John H. Pagan, Annals of Ayr in the Olden Time 15601692 (Ayr: Alex. Fergusson,
1897), 75.
80 Gordon Munro

14. See Munro, Scottish Church Music, 83, 132, 16970, 213.
15. Thomas Thomson, ed., The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland (Edinburgh: H. M.
General Register House, 1814), 3: 174. Here and elsewhere in this essay, italicized letters
within words (in quotations from manuscript) indicate letters which are to be supplied by
contraction signs in the original document.
16. In Cupar, Kirkcaldy, Haddington, Leith, and Ayr; see Munro, Scottish Church
Music, 132, 49, 167, 216.
17. In 1594, James VI gifted lands and revenues to Elgin town council for the specific
support of a preceptor qualified to teach music; Cramond and Ree, Records of Elgin, 2:
447. In 1589, he granted 300 merks (= 200) to Andrew Blackhall in Musselburgh for the
upkeep of a music school. I am indebted to the late Dr. John Durkan for this information
from his book to be published by the Scottish History Society, Early Schools and School-
masters in Scotland, 15601633; see also Neil Livingston, The Scottish Metrical Psalter of AD
1635 (Glasgow: MacLure and MacDonald, 1864), 21. In 1610, Queen Anne mortified the large
sum of 2,000 for the support of Dunfermlines schoolmasters, both grammar and music;
Peter Chalmers, Historical and Statistical Account of Dunfermline (Edinburgh and London:
William Blackwood & Sons, 1859), 2: 417.
18. Lachlan Macbean, The Kirkcaldy Burgh Records with the Annals of Kirkcaldy, the
Towns Charter, Extracts from Original Documents and a Description of the Ancient Burgh
(Kirkcaldy: The Fifeshire Advertiser Oce, 1908), 7173.
19. Pagan, Annals of Ayr, 75.
20. John Stuart, ed., Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1570
1625 (Aberdeen: Publications of the Spalding Club, 1848), 359.
21. William Orem, A Description of the Chanonry, Cathedral, and Kings College of Old
Aberdeen in the years 1724 and 1725 (Aberdeen: J. Chalmers & Co., 1791), 111.
22. See Alexander MacDonald Munro, ed., Records of Old Aberdeen (Aberdeen: Pub-
lications of the New Spalding Club, 1899), 1: 6465; William Walker, ed., Extracts from the
Commonplace Book of Andrew Melvill, Doctor and Master in the Song School of Aberdeen,
16211640 (Aberdeen: John Rae Smith, 1899), xxxvi; John Stuart, ed., Extracts from the
Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 16431747 (Edinburgh: Publications of the Scot-
tish Burgh Records Society, 1872), 293; William Chambers, ed., Charters and Documents
Relating to the Burgh of Peebles with Extracts from the Records of the Burgh AD 11651710
(Edinburgh: Publications of the Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1872), 68, 386; and Robert
Renwick, ed., Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Peebles 16521714 (Glasgow: Publica-
tions of the Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1910), 30.
23. Cantus (first copy, TWC 1) GB-Eu MS La.III.483
Cantus (second copy, TWC2) GB-Eu MS Dk.5.14
Quintus (TWQ) EIRE-Dtc MS 412
Altus (first copy, TWA1) GB-Lbl Add. MS 33933
Altus (second copy, TWA 2) US-Wgu
Tenor (TWT) GB-Eu MS La.III.483
Bassus (first copy, TWB1) GB-Eu MS La.III.483
Bassus (second copy, TWB 2) GB-Eu MS Dk.5.15
The second copy of the Tenor partbook remains untraced. Only one copy of the Quintus
partbook has come to light: it may not have been duplicated.
24. GB-En MS 9447.
25. See MB 15, nos. 1327, ed. Kenneth Elliott.
26. For further information, see Gordon Munro, The Scottish Reformation and its
Consequences, in Our awin Scottis use: Music in the Scottish Church up to 1603, ed. Sally
Harper, Studies in the Music of Scotland 1 (Glasgow and Aberdeen: Universities of Glas-
gow and Aberdeen, 2000). The complete extant repertoire of Scottish psalmody will be
 Sang Schwylls and Music Schools 81

published in a forthcoming volume of the series Musica Scotica, ed. Kenneth Elliott and
Gordon Munro.
27. Psalm 21, sung according to the art of musique [= in polyphony], and a seven-part
setting of psalm 128 were performed at the baptism of James VIs first son, Prince Henry,
at the Chapel Royal in 1594; Charles Rogers, History of the Chapel Royal of Scotland (Edin-
burgh: Publications of the Grampian Club, 1882), lxxxiii, lxxxv.
28. See Kenneth Elliott, ed., Ten Psalms in Reports for Four & Five Voices, Musica
Scotica Miscellaneous Pieces Series (Glasgow: Musica Scotica, 2002) and MB 15, nos. 10 and
11. See also Jamie Reid-Baxter, Judge and Revenge my Cause: The Earl of Morton, Andro
Blackhall, Robert Sempill and the Fall of the House of Hamilton in 1579, in Older Scots
Literature, ed. S. Mapstone (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005).
29. Pitcairn, Diary of James Melvill, 29.
30. John Burel (fl. 15901601) was an Edinburgh merchant and poet. His The Discrip-
tion of the Queenis Maiesties Maist Honorable Entry into the Tovn of Edinbvrgh appears in
Papers Relative to the Marriage of King James the Sixth of Scotland, reproduced in J. T. Gibson
Craig, ed., Papers Relative to the Marriage of King James the Sixth of Scotland (Edinburgh:
Publications of the Bannatyne Club, 1828), vol. 1. I am indebted to Dr. Jamie Reid-Baxter for
information on Burel, and advice on this poem in particular; see his article Politics, Passion
and Poetry in the Circle of James VI: John Burel and his surviving works, in A Palace in the
Wild: Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scot-
land, ed. Luuk A. J. R. Houwen, Alasdair A. MacDonald, and Sally L. Mapstone (Leuven:
Peeters, 2000) and his forthcoming Complete Works of John Burel (Edinburgh: Scottish
Text Society). Given Burels apparent acquaintance with music, perhaps he himself had
at one time been one of the barnelie brudis, / Quho had bot new begun the mudis (see
stanza 20).
31. See Rigols and Clavicembalo in Graham Strahle, An Early Music Dictionary: Mu-
sical Terms from British Sources, 15001700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
32. See Howard Mayer Brown, Symphonia (ii) in The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, 2nd edition, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), 24: 801.
33. See Jane Flynn, The Education of Choristers in England During the Sixteenth
Century, in English Choral Practice, 14001650, ed. John Morehen, Cambridge Studies in
Performance Practice 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 182. These skills
are listed in Bishop William Elphinstones revised foundation statute for Kings College,
Aberdeen in 1505; Cosmo Innes, ed., Fasti Aberdonenses: Selections from the Records of the
University and Kings College of Aberdeen 14941854 (Aberdeen: Publications of the Spalding
Club, 1854), 60. Square-note (also cited by Flynn) is not listed as a skill to be learned in
pre-Reformation Scottish song schools. Pricksong refers to the study of mensural nota-
tion, and figuration to the rhythmic singing of chant as a basis for improvisation. Fabur-
den, descant, and countering are dierent methods of improvising upon a plainsong cantus
firmus.
34. See Priscilla Bawcutt, ed., The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas (Edinburgh: Scot-
tish Text Society, 1967; 2nd edition, 2003). The Palice of Honour was reprinted in Edinburgh
in 1579 (Edinburgh: John Ross)Burel may have worked from this edition.
35. GB-Lbl Add. MS 4911; see Kenneth Elliott, Music of Scotland 15001700 (Ph.D.
diss., University of Cambridge, 1959), 26573, and Judson Dana Maynard, An Anony-
mous Scottish Treatise on Music from the Sixteenth Century, British Museum, Additional
Manuscript 4911 (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1961).
36. See David McGuinness, Syncopation in English Music, 15301630: gentle daintie
sweet accentings and unreasonable odd Cratchets (Ph.D. diss., University of Glasgow,
1994), 38; and Helena Mennie Shire, Andro Melvills Music library: Aberdeen 1637, Edin-
burgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 4, no. 1 (1955).
82 Gordon Munro

37. Andrew Melvilles Commonplace-Book, GB-A MS 28; John Squyers Music-Book,

GB-Eu MS La.III.490; Lady Anne Kers Music-Book, GB-En MS 5448; Robert Edwards Com-
monplace-Book, GB-En MS 9450. See Elliott, Music of Scotland, for detailed accounts of
these and other sources of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Scottish music.
38. Johann Thomas Freigius (15431583), a pupil of Glarean, taught Stuber (ca. 1550ca.
1605) at Freiburg University in the early 1570s. See Anthony F. Carver, Stuber, Conrad in
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, ed. Stanley Sadie (London:
Macmillan, 2001), 24: 618. According to the entry for this manuscript in the National Li-
brary of Scotland Catalogue of Manuscripts Acquired Since 1925 (Edinburgh: Her Majestys
Stationery Oce, 1989), 7: 160, the music treatise is attributed to Conrad von Zabern,
but this is probably a misreading of Conradus stuberus which appears on fol. 54v. (I am
grateful to Miss Katy Cooper for drawing my attention to this manuscripts entry in the
Catalogue of Manuscripts.)
39. Thomas Woods Partbooks, quintus volume, EIRE-Dtc MS 412; Louis de Frances
Music-Book, GB-Eu MS La.III.491. For further information on Louis de France, see Munro,
Scottish Church Music, 104105, 18892, 23032. Edward Millars Music-Book (dated
1626, now lost) has been described by William Cowan in Bibliography of the Book of Com-
mon Order and psalm book of the Church of Scotland, 15561644, Papers of the Edinburgh
Bibliographical Society 10 (1913): 53100; Edward Millars Commonplace-Book (dated 1643,
also known as the McAlman Manuscript), GB-En MS 9477. Again, see Elliott, Music of
Scotland, for detailed accounts of these sources.
40. See Charles Sanford Terry, John Forbess Songs and Fancies, Musical Quarterly
22, no. 4 (1936): 40219. The sole surviving copy of the 1662 edition is housed in US-SM.
41. See Munro, Scottish Church Music, 100103.
42. William Meldrum is styled magister scole musice; John Maitland Thomson, ed.,
Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum (Edinburgh: H. M. General Register House, 1886),
4: 633 (no. 2360).
43. MB ix, no. 30; MB xv, nos. 81 and 82.
44. In 1675 an Edinburgh music school master taught, privately, the viola da gamba
described even then as a musical instrument not ordinar; Louise B. Taylor, ed., Aberdeen
Council Letters (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 5: 317. See W. Forbes
Gray and James H. Jamieson, A Short History of Haddington (facs. repr., Stevenage: SPA
Books, 1944), 130; Pagan, Annals of Ayr, 75; Cramond and Ree, Records of Elgin, 2: 398;
Wood, Edinburgh Records, 16551665, 220; David Robertson, comp., South Leith Records:
Compiled from the Parish Registers for the years 1588 to 1700; and from Other Original Sources
(Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1911), 11.
45. Munro, Scottish Church Music, 16263.
46. Duncan Burnetts Music-Book is discussed in Elliott, Music of Scotland. Music
by Burnett appears in Kenneth Elliott, ed., Early Scottish Keyboard Music . . . Together with
a Short Selection of Scots Airs for Cittern and for Violin (London: Stainer & Bell, 1958; 2nd
edition, 1966) and Kenneth Elliott, ed., Early Scottish Music for Keyboard (Glasgow: Musica
Scotica, forthcoming).
47. This fact is proven by the number of Scottish music manuscripts owned or compiled
by members of the nobility; see Elliott, Music of Scotland.
48. See Elliott, Music of Scotland, 352; and Munro, Scottish Church Music, 22122.
49. Quoted in Andrew Fleming Hutchison, History of the High School of Stirling (Stirling:
Eneas MacKay, 1904), 246.
50. George S. Pryde, ed., Ayr Burgh Accounts 15341624 (Edinburgh: Publications of
the Scottish History Society, 1937), 220.
51. James D. Marwick, ed., Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow AD 1573
1642 (Glasgow: Publications of the Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1876), 388; quoted in
Elliott, Music of Scotland, 352.
 Sang Schwylls and Music Schools 83

52. Munro, Scottish Church Music, 3738, 14445.

53. See Munro, Scottish Church Music, 195 et pass.
54. Hutchison, High School of Stirling, 246.
55. For example in Kirkcaldy (1582), Edinburgh (1618), Old Aberdeen (16651698), and
South Leith (1692); see Macbean, Kirkcaldy Burgh Records, 7172; Marguerite Wood, ed.,
Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh 16041626 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd,
for the Corporation of the City of Edinburgh, 1931), 16364; Munro, Records of Old Aber-
deen, 1: 123, 160, 164; 2: 62, 7980; and Robertson, South Leith Records, 181.
56. H. F. Morland Simpson, ed., Bon Record: Records and Reminiscences of Aberdeen
Grammar School (Edinburgh: Ballantyne Press, and Aberdeen: D. Wylie & Son, 1906), 79;
Munro, Records of Old Aberdeen, 2: 38.
57. John Stuart, ed., Extracts from the Council Register of Aberdeen 13981570 (Aberdeen:
Publications of the Spalding Club, 1844), 370. See also Shona Maclean Vance, Godly Citi-
zens and Civic Unrest: tensions in schooling in Aberdeen in the era of the Reformation,
European Review of History 7, no. 1 (2000): 12337.
58. Munro, Records of Old Aberdeen, 1: 217.
59. That is, harquebusan early kind of portable firearm; see the Oxford English
Dictionary, s.v. hackbut.
60. Simpson, Bon Record, 4142.
61. Stuart, Aberdeen Council Register, 15701625, 31314.
62. John Stuart, ed., Selections from the Records of the Kirk Session, Presbytery and Synod
of Aberdeen (Aberdeen: Publications of the Spalding Club, 1846), 16.
63. John Stuart, ed., Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1625
1642 (Edinburgh: Publications of the Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1871), 274.
64. Elgin kirk session requested the masters of the grammar and song schools to disci-
plin their disciples that trublit the kirk in November 1599; the following month the session
conceded ten days play to the scholars, and again in 1604; see Cramond and Ree, Records
of Elgin, 2: 75, 130.
65. Munro, Scottish Church Music, 9596.
66. Victual here refers to staple foods such as wheat, peas, beans, meal, etc.; Miscel-
lany of the Maitland Club, 2: 41.
67. See Munro, Scottish Church Music, 36973. This comparison is based on the
findings of Alex J. S. Gibson and Christopher Smout in Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland
15501780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 361.
68. This is a curious and, admittedly, rare spelling from a document of 1537 referring to
the song school in Aberdeen; Cosmo Innes, ed., Fasti Aberdonenses, 413.
69. See Vance, Godly Citizens, 125.
70. An example, albeit from the late sixteenth century, is William Struthers, a man
of some learning: he was music school master in Glasgow from 1577, and later became a
minister in Glasgow and Edinburgh; John Durkan, Early Song Schools in Scotland, in
Notis musycall: Essays on Music and Scottish Culture in Honour of Kenneth Elliott, ed. Gordon
Munro et al. (Glasgow: Musica Scotica, 2005), 129.
71. C. E. Guthrie Wright, Gideon Guthrie: A Monograph Written 1712 to 1730 (Edin-
burgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1900), 12223.
 6
A Proper Musical Education
for Antwerps Women$
KRISTINE K. FORNEY

In recent years, scholars have uncovered diverseand contradictoryevi-

dence about the social mores and attitudes that shaped womens values and
activities at various societal levels and geographic locales throughout Europe.
The Low Countries, and especially the commercial center of Antwerp, pro-
vide a rich case study with which to trace changing values throughout the
sixteenth century, from the onset of the Reformation through the Counter-
Reformation, toward a musical education for Antwerps women. Archival
and literary evidence, iconographic depictions, and extant musical sources
enhance our view of the music young women were encouraged to study, what
music they liked to perform, and the level of achievement they could meet. In
addition to solo music for voice, keyboard, and strings for entertainment
largely secular genresdevotional songs figured prominently in the musi-
cal training of northern girls, for whom some musical ability was generally
expected. Although Neoplatonic thought praised music along with feminine
beauty as valued attributes for young women, contradictions do arise.
Two instructional manuals for young women can be particularly associ-
ated with Antwerp. The first is De institutione feminae christianae (Antwerp,
1523) by the Spanish-born humanist Juan Luis Vives, who settled in Bruges
after teaching in England. This tract, written for the English queen Catherine
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 85

of Aragon while Vives was teaching at Oxford, was issued in more than forty
editions and was available to young schoolgirls in Dutch, French, Italian,
German, Spanish, and English. Vives believed that the sexes were funda-
mentally equal in their ability to learn and that an education was the key
to avoiding lust and evil pleasures. He followed earlier conservative writers,
however, in warning that dancing and music inflamed the passions; therefore,
women should not make a public display of either. As for singing, he suggests
only honest, serious, and decent songs. Giovanni Michele Bruto, a member
of the Italian community in Antwerp, also wrote an influential treatise on
education for women; in it, he quoted the legend of the sirens to warn against
the ravishing but dangerous combination of musical ability and beautyone
that might invite comparison to a whore. Bruto admits that most men are of
the opinion that to a gentlewoman of honor and reputation, it is a grace and
ornament if she becometh expert to sing and play upon divers instruments;
still, he promotes total abstinence from music for women, leaving the vice to
people who are riotous and idle. These warnings were sounded even louder
in Italy, where attitudes were generally more conservative: Pietro Aretino
declared in 1537 that the knowledge of playing instruments, of singing, and
of writing poetry, on the part of women, is the very key which opens the
doors to their modesty, and Cardinal Pietro Bembo admonished his young
daughter in 1541 that playing an instrument is a thing for vain and frivolous
women.
Despite these cautions, historian Ludovico Guicciardinis famous study
of the Low Countries reveals that music-making permeated Flemish burgher
life. He claimed that Belgians are indeed true masters . . . of music; they
have studied it to perfection, having men and women sing without learning,
but with a real instinct for tone and measure, they also use instruments of
all sorts which everyone understands and knows. In Antwerp, one can see
at almost every hour of the day weddings, dancing, and musical groups . . .
there is hardly a corner of the streets not filled with the joyous sounds of in-
strumental music and singing. Guicciardini provides a detailed and highly
opinionated assessment of the women of the Low Countries and especially
Antwerp (given in full as document 1 in appendix A), claiming that views
about them were very liberal and that these women were involved not only in
managing their houses, but also in their husbands businesses. He found the
women of Antwerp, however, too domineering for his tastes, suggesting that
the women governed everything and struck all bargains, which, coupled with
86 Kristine K. Forney

FIGURE 6.1. Cornelius de Zeeuw, Family Portrait (1564) (Mnster, Landesmuseum).

the natural desire that women have to rule, makes them too imperious and
troublesome. We will see that the spirit of Antwerps women was not easily
dampened by the admonitions of Vives and Brutoor even Erasmus, who
will be discussed later.
Guicciardinis gender-inclusive remarks about music-making are sup-
ported by rich evidence linking Antwerp women with the keyboard instru-
ments for which the city was so famous. Virginals appear in household inven-
tories, and one popular type of virginal built therethe so-called mother
and child, or double virginal, was clearly designed as a household teaching
instrument. I have discussed elsewhere several paintings that very realisti-
cally depict Antwerp-built virginals, with their peculiar hexagonal shape,
each played by a young girl or woman. These include portraits of well-known
bourgeois families in Antwerp: the Van Berchems, painted by Frans Floris in
1561, with a matriarchal figure at the virginal; the Moucheron family, depicted
by Cornelius de Zeeuw in 1563 with a young daughter at the keyboard; and
the Wedding of the Painter Joris Hoefnagel (ca. 1571), painted by Frans
Pourbus the Elder and showing a woman playing virginal accompanied by
a lute. Another little-known family portrait painted by de Zeeuw (figure
6.1) oers more evidence for our study: the family is identified by crests in
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 87

FIGURE 6.2. Detail of Cornelius de Zeeuw, Family Portrait (1564) (Mnster,

Landesmuseum).

the background as the merchant Hendrick van den Brouck with his wife
Catharina van Wesembeke, posing with his brother and three children.
In this painting, the youngest son holds a music book with a Dutch-texted
monophonic line, very probably a psalm (figure 6.2), while his ten-year-old
sister accompanies him on a hexagonal virginal in the style of those built by
Antwerps Joes Kareest. De Zeeuws care with details in this painting, includ-
ing the rich tapestry, clothing, the identifiable emblems on the instrument as
well as the music book, suggests a realistic setting. We shall return shortly to
the issue of what the young girl might be playing.
These paintings raise questions about a bourgeois girls opportunities for
musical studies, about the level of achievement she might have attained, and
about the repertoire she might perform. Some young girls from well-to-do
merchant families had the benefit of private tutoring. The Antwerp archives
preserve several such contracts. For example, in 1560 the Genoese merchant
Antonius Picquenoti Salvago hired Jan de Nackere (alias van Rumst), organ-
ist of St. Andrews Church, to instruct his two daughters, Cornelia and Marie,
in music, presumably on the spinet and lute. Another contract, given as
88 Kristine K. Forney

document 2 in appendix A, confirms that schoolmaster Jan van den Bossche

was hired in 1577 by the Milanese merchant Gian Battista Compostin to
tutor his daughter in reading, writing, rhetoric, arithmetic, and in playing
the harpsichord. This contract further specifies that young Franchoise was
to learn a repertoire of dances including allemandes, galliards, passemezzi,
rondes, and branles. These basic skills enabled a merchant-class girl to assist
her future husband in the daily workings of his business and to entertain his
clients with her musical talents (see appendix A, document 2).
Already in the late Middle Ages, Netherlandish merchants had recog-
nized the importance of universal elementary-level reading and writing skills
for their children; they developed two school systemsone communal, the
other independentwhich provided a basic primary education to the citys
boys and girls. In 1522, with the Reform quickly taking hold across northern
Europe, the Antwerp school teachersmen and women alikeformed the
guild of St. Ambrose, which was carefully governed by local church authori-
ties. Guicciardini praised the citys teachers guild for providing an excellent
education, noting there are enough schools . . . to teach the youth bonnes lettres
. . . there are also here . . . various schools in which one teaches the French
language to girls as well as to boys. Teachers gave instruction in reading,
writing, arithmetic, Dutch, and French, while some specialists taught Span-
ish, Italian, and music. For example, Franois Werneix, an organist living
near the English Bourse, was certified in 1577 to teach Dutch, French, reading
and writing, as well as singing and playing. Other musician-guild members
included Symoen Moens, a sixty-year-old teacher of various subjects who
also joined the St. Lucas guild of harpsichord builders in 1552; Hans van
den Bossche, the harpsichord tutor previously mentioned who also authored
an arithmetic book; and Jacomyna van Aerde, a schoolmistress who taught
Dutch, reading, writing, and singing. We will see shortly that other teach-
ers in Antwerp were influential in shaping the attitudes of Antwerps youth
toward music.
The records of the schoolteachers Guild of St. Ambrose confirm that its
members regularly held elaborate musical services at its altar in the Church
of Our Lady; the guild generally employed the choir master, organist, bell
ringer, carilloneur, choirboys, and between eleven and sixteen singers for
performance of a polyphonic mass on the feasts of St. Ambrose (4 April)
and St. Martha (24 July). Figure 6.3 reproduces a typical pay-record from
the guild, this one from 15371538, noting seventeen singers for the mass as
well as payments to the organist and to Heer Christophel for celebrating the
FIGURE 6.3. Pay record (15371538), Rekenboeck van de gulde de schoolmeesters,
Guild of St. Ambrose, Antwerp (Antwerp, Kathedraalarchief).
FIGURE 6.4. Een bequaem Maniere om Ionghers soetelijck by sanck te leeren (Antwerp,
1571), title page (Rare book collection, Brussels, Bibliothque royale de Belgique).
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 91

mass. Payments are noted as well for festivities on St. Ambrose day and for
St. Thomass eve. From at least 1570 on, the guild celebrated a yearly requiem
on the feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury (29 December) with at least sixteen
singers, and also adopted a new patron, St. Cassionus, whose feast day (13
August) was celebrated with the city wind band and a bass instrument. There
was apparently a harpsichord at their altar, which was repaired and tuned on
several occasions, and organ was used regularly as well. The membership of
the guild, from 1575 on, was nearly equal in numbers of men and women,
each specializing in particular subjects and in the instruction of either boys or
girls. Table 6.1 in appendix B summarizes the extensive musical celebrations
of the schoolteachers guild from 15221600.
With this level of music patronage by Antwerps teachers, how then did
music figure into the basic curriculum of Antwerps communal schools? An
ordinance of 1560, given as document 3 in appendix A, specifies the goals of
the guild, noting that the children, boys and girls alike, shall learn to read
and write, to speak various languages including Dutch or French, Spanish
or Italian, English, High German, Latin, Greek, and arithmetic; the girls to
learn to sew, the boys to play on instruments. Despite this sexist division
of studies, girls too were encouraged to learn vocal and instrumental music,
especially dances.
Throughout northern Europe, the strengthening Reform movement
gave rise to new forms of devotional music. In Antwerp, both the commu-
nal schools and the special Sunday schools, established in 1546 by Emperor
Charles V to educate the citys orphans and poorboys and girls alikewere
required to teach the catechism, and they apparently did so through music.
A booklet issued in 1571 by Franciscus Sonnius, Bishop of Antwerp, reflects
a Counter-Reformation attempt to compete with the widely disseminated
teachings of Calvin and Luther. Titled A suitable manner for youth to learn
sweetly through song (Een bequaem Maniere om Ionghers soetelijck by sanck
te leeren, figure 6.4), this one-gathering booklet included metric, monophonic
settings of the Lords Prayer (TGhebet des Heeren, figure 6.5), the Ave Maria
(Die Enghelsche groete, figure 6.6), the Credo (Het Gheloove, figure 6.7), and the
Ten Commandments (Die thien gheboden, figures 6.811), all in the vernacular.
(See table 6.2 in appendix B.) Through this small book, Antwerps youth eas-
ily committed to memory the basic Christian doctrine, and possibly acquired
some musical literacy while doing so. Sonnius had been a participant at the
Council of Trent from 1546 to 1551, and worked zealously to combat Calvinism
through a number of pedagogical publications. As Bishop of Antwerp, Son-
FIGURE 6.5. TGhebet des Heeren, opening, from Een bequaem Maniere (Antwerp, 1571)
(Rare book collection, Brussels, Bibliothque royale de Belgique).
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 93

FIGURE 6.6. Die Enghelsche groete, opening, from Een bequaem Maniere (Antwerp, 1571)
(Rare book collection, Brussels, Bibliothque royale de Belgique).

nius had a list compiled of heretical books in Latin, French, and Dutchthe
Index expurgatorius, issued by Christopher Plantin, the newly appointed arch-
typographer to Emperor Philip. Sonnius further convened in 1571 the Coun-
cil of Mechelin: this body decreed that each parish must establish a school that
used textbooks in dialogue formalterum teutonice, alterum latineand stu-
dents were required to learn the Lords Prayer, the Credo, and the Ten Com-
mandments, sung in the vernacularin other words, the core contents of Een
FIGURE 6.7. Het Gheloove, opening, from Een bequaem Maniere (Antwerp, 1571)
(Rare book collection, Brussels, Bibliothque royale de Belgique).
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 95

FIGURE 6.8. Die thien gheboden (ierste, tweede), from Een bequaem Maniere (Antwerp,
1571) (Rare book collection, Brussels, Bibliothque royale de Belgique).

bequaem maniere. Another edict allowed priests to give a short sermon in the
vernacular before the Holy Sacrament. This was in keeping with the Council
of Trents proclamation that, while the mass shall not be said in the vernacular,
the mysteries of the sacrifice should be explained to congregants.
Both Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine included musical settings of these
basic religious texts. A setting of the Ten Commandments appeared in 1526
in a Strasbourg cantique composed by Wolfgang Dachstein; this formed the
melodic basis for Calvins setting, Oyons la Loy que de sa voix. Antoine Sau-
FIGURE 6.9. Die thien gheboden (derde, vierde, vijfde), from Een bequaem Maniere
(Antwerp, 1571) (Rare book collection, Brussels, Bibliothque royale de Belgique).
FIGURE 6.10. Die thien gheboden (seste, sevenste, achtste), from Een bequaem Maniere
(Antwerp, 1571) (Rare book collection, Brussels, Bibliothque royale de Belgique).
FIGURE 6.11. Die thien gheboden (negenste, thienste), from Een bequaem Maniere
(Antwerp, 1571) (Rare book collection, Brussels, Bibliothque royale de Belgique).
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 99

nier, a Swiss pastor who became the principal of schools in Geneva, set his
spiritual song (chanson spirituelle), Adore un Dieu, le pere tout-puissant, to
the timbre of Claudin Sermisys Au boys de dueil; this contrafactum was first
published in 1533 and was widely distributed in France, Switzerland, and the
Low Countries well into the seventeenth century. Clment Marots metri-
cal version of the Ten Commandments, Leve le cueur, ouvre laureille, was first
printed in 1545, but rather than replacing, it joined Sauniers Adore un Dieu in
Huguenot chansonniers. Luther published two settingsa long and short
versionof the Commandments; each expressed in four textual lines and set
to the same four musical phrases. Although the Ten Commandments were
essential to the education of children, whether Protestant or Catholic, singing
them in a rhymed, metrical setting seems to have been first associated with
the Reform, and in one case in 1561, with the image-breaking in Montauban,
in southwestern France. The Ten Commandments are set in the metrical
rhymed couplets to a two-part melodic formula in a lilting, dance-like triple
meter. Since the Flemish text lines are not the same length, there are several
slightly melismatic passages.
There were certainly precedents for singing other liturgical texts in the
vernacular to popular tunes. From the earliest publication of Flemish psalm-
settings (Souterliedekens) by Symon Cock in 1540, psalms were sung to well-
known secular melodies, including Dutch folk songs, French chansons, and
dance tunes. A group of songs of praise, mostly canticles, appears in the
last book of the polyphonic Souterliedekens by Clemens non Papa, issued in
1557 by Tielman Susato. These additional texts that follow the last psalms
include Flemish versions of the Pater noster, Ave Maria, two versions of the
Credo, and all the canticles, mostly sung to secular tunes, many from the
1544 Antwerp Liedboek (see table 6.3). Indeed, the Pater noster, Ave Maria, and
two Credos were all to be sung to the same tune: Het ghinghen drie ghespeel-
kens, a story of three young musicians who wandered barefoot into the forest
amidst the sleet and snow. Scholars agree that the Souterliedekens, or Flem-
ish psalm-settings, served both Catholics and Protestants alike. Erasmus
confirms that the psalms and other prayers were sung in Flemish before the
Reform, as early as 1480 in the houses of the lay sisterhoods, or Beguines.
And while the Ten Commandments setting by Saunier and a French setting
of the Pater noster were banned by the Council of Toulouse in 1540 as heresy,
the Souterliedeken publications never suered this fate. The tunes in Son-
niuss songbook, required instruction for all Antwerp students and teachers,
100 Kristine K. Forney

seem not to have been drawn from these earlier models, but may well have
a secular musical basis. The Flemish texts in Een bequam vary from the Cle-
mens publication and therefore do not fit the timbres suggested there. The
Ave Maria (or Enghelsche groet) from Sonniuss book, however, evokes the
melodic contour of Marots Salutation anglique, with similar phrase-openings
and cadential formulas.
The religious climate changed after the brief Calvinist rule of Antwerp
between 15811585; a new ordinance of 1588 stipulated that all students were
to learn the Pater noster, Benedicite, and Confiteor in Latin, and each morning,
should kneel and sing or read the Veni sancte spiritus with a versicle and col-
lect, and each evening as they leave, sing a song in praise of the Virgin (Laudes
diva virginum) or the hymn Christus qui lux es et dies in Latin (document 4
in appendix A).
Schoolchildren certainly knew songs for the Virgin from the popular
Marian Salve or lof service that was held nightly in the Antwerp Cathedral.
The Advent hymn Christe qui lux es et dies was sung polyphonically from 1530
on in Antwerp, and used also as a timbre for the Te Deum text in the Clem-
enss Souterliedeken collection previously cited (see table 6.3); no music was
provided for the tune in the print, suggesting it was known to all. Students
were also expected to sing the Pentecost sequence Veni sancte spiritus, which
they had undoubtedly heard in monophonic and polyphonic settings.
The publication of the small religious tract Een bequam maniere gave
way to more elaborate pedagogical books: one in particular from 1591 pro-
vides four-part musical settings of the same and additional texts, as shown
on table 6.2 in appendix B. Die Christelycke Leeringhe was issued in several
versionswith and without musicby Rutgeert Velpius in Brussels. His
preface made clear that this book was a memorization aid for the catechism;
he explained that the songs should replace the harmful ones heard in shops,
on the streets, and from the bell towers. He noted that the main tune is in the
Superius, and students should first read, then sing the Pater noster and Ave
Maria, followed by one of the other six prayers. He suggested that when this
was done six times a week, children and families would learn, through sweet
song, to be good, Christian, God-fearing people.
One of the key figures in setting a music curriculum for Antwerps chil-
dren was Franciscus Donckers, a canon at the cathedral and scholaster of the
citys schools. Donckers was described in the Antwerpsch Chronykje as a big-
oted and cruel man who had no tolerance for Protestants among the teach-
ers. He ordered that persons who died without confession and taking of
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 101

Communion should be hung on gallows as food for ravens. Ironically, he

himself died suddenly on 4 February 1572 without last rites, and some fa-
vored this fate for him. The inventory of Donckers goods notes many music
books among his possessions. (See table 6.4 for a list of his music books.)
These include six volumes bound together of Clemenss masses (from those
issued individually by the Phalse press); a chant-book (Liber musicus scriptus
antiquus); four volumes of Musyck boexken in four parts (almost certainly the
four volumes of Souterliedekens by Clemenss disciple Gherardus Mes, pub-
lished by Susato in 1552), and a print of three-part music by Grard de Turn-
hout, choirmaster at the Antwerp cathedral from 15621571. Given his musi-
cal interests, it seems likely that Donckers, with supreme authority over the
Antwerp schools and a music collector himself, and Turnhout, as a composer
and head of the Cathedral musical establishment, may have masterminded
this musical publication of sacred monophonic songs.
Grard de Turnhouts Sacrarum ac aliarum cantionum trium vocum (Leu-
ven, 1569) is of particular interest here, for it is a pedagogical volume including
twenty Latin motets, two chansons spirituelles, and eighteen chansons, which,
according to Turnhouts preface, he wrote in the time he could snatch from
. . . daily tasks as choirmaster at the Antwerp Cathedral. The three-voice
motets may well have served the Antwerp Cathedral just after the 1566 plun-
dering of its library; indeed, the archives of the Cathedrals Confraternity
of Our Lady note regular payments for the evening lof service to a duo or trio
from the 1540s on. While few works from Turnhouts collection have a specific
liturgical function, this repertoire could have served for a variety of services
sponsored by the confraternities, as well as for home devotions. Indeed, the
dedication of this collection to Antwerp merchant and city notary Adrian
Dyck praises the recipients knowledge and love of music, and suggests: May
you find it [this book] a solace to your home, and that a most urbane one.
The collection includes table blessings and hymns of thanksgiving as well as
a setting of the very popular chanson spirituelle, Susann un jour, to be discussed
later in this study. The voicing in the Turnhout collection varies, but most
pieces include soprano- and alto-range voices, possibly suggesting the involve-
ment of women or boys. It is commonly accepted that publications of bicinia
and tricinia were intended for teaching purposes, and this volume provides
for both upright Christian training and musical instruction.
More evidence that bicinia and tricinia were meant as pedagogical works
for young women is found in an Antwerp music book by Jean de Castro:
Sonets avec une chanson . . . a deux parties (Antwerp: Phalse, 1592; repr. 1610).
102 Kristine K. Forney

Castro dedicated this collection to Marguerite and Beatrice Hooftmans,

daughters of a prominent Antwerp merchant. In the dedication he claimed
that the two-part music was a proper and appropriate gift to refresh your
spirits, worn and fatigued from your private and domestic duties, taking up
at times the lute, at times the spinet . . . deigning to lend your sweet voices
to these songs, so that you will be rightly called (by those of your station)
Marguerite and Beatrice in music unsurpassable. (The complete text and
translation of the dedication appears as document 5 in appendix A.) It is
notable as well that these two accomplished women had skills on lute and
keyboard as well as singing.
The musical education of Antwerps youth was surely influenced by
Adrian Scholiers, succentor of the Antwerp Cathedral, headmaster of its
Latin school, and master of the schoolteachers guild in 15561557. Scholiers,
like Donckers, was an avid collector of music books: one volume he owned
included twenty-one music titles of polyphony (only the Bassus part books
are extant) dating from 1551 to 1560. The original binding in brown calfskin
is stamped in gold on the front SUCCENTOR, and on the back ADRIANI.
SCOLASTICI. Among the notes on the flyleaf is one that reinforces the view
that music was not an idle pastime but one that served God.

SUCCENTOR
Musica non lasciviae: sed laudando Deo
Ad excitandis ad virtutem Ingenijs
Mitgandesques curarum molestijs
coelitus donate est.
Music is not given for idle pleasures but to the praise of God, by kindling
virtue, the wits, and lessening the cares of sorrows.

While this inscription clearly specifies music that is not lascivious, most
of the titles are chanson collections for three or four voices, published variously
by LeRoy and Ballard, du Chemin, and Fezandatall of ParisGranjon of
Lyons, and Susato in Antwerp. Only the last few titles in the volume support
the inscription: these include Pseaulmes LXXXIII de David (Beringen, 1554),
with four-voice settings of many prayers, including the Ten Commandments,
by Louis Bourgeois; and Proverbes de Salomon (Le Roy and Ballard, 1558), four-
voice chansons. Also bound in the volume are the only known publications
a book of motets and one of chansonsby the elusive composer Barthlemy
Beaulaigue, who reportedly was a fifteen-year-old choirboy at the Cathedral
of Marseilles. While Scholiers may have been taken in by the excitement sur-
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 103

rounding this child prodigy and aspiring church musician, modern scholars
now believe the claims to be a hoax created by publisher Robert Granjon and
Guillaume Guroult of Lyons.
Beyond a basic religious education through music, controlled by the
church authorities and the schoolteachers guild, the young women of suc-
cessful merchant families were expected to have social skills in singing and
playing instruments for family music-making and to entertain their husbands
clients. I have written previously about the extant records from Antwerps
School of the Laurel Tree, headed by schoolmaster Peter Heyns. These
registers demonstrate that young women, aged thirteen to sixteen from diver-
gent social and economic backgrounds, studied reading, writing, arithmetic,
French, Dutch, classical and modern literature, the domestic arts of sewing,
knitting, and lace-making, as well as music. The pay records from the 1580s
list all extra fees, including textbooks, singing lessons, and harpsichord-tun-
ing services. Records show that at least sixteen young womenthe daugh-
ters of merchants of leather, wool, nails, wine, fish, as well as sugar bakers,
studied music at the Laurel Tree. Students had their harpsichords tuned at
least twice a year, and in one case, four times, at a cost of three stuivers per
tuning. The fees for singing lessons were substantially higher: Maeyken
Scheppers, daughter of a merchant from Bruges, paid eighteen stuivers for
each half month of lessons.
Among the textbooks listed in student records is the Tragdie dAbraham,
which undoubtedly refers to the neoclassical play LAbraham sacrifiant, by
Thodore de Bze. The introduction to this popular play alludes to musical
performances of the choruses throughout. Although no tunes are provided,
the text structures match those found in the French metrical psalter on which
Bze collaborated with Marot, and the songs themselves are reminiscent of
psalm texts, suggesting they might have been intended to be sung to the well-
known psalm tunes. For example, the first chorus, The Song of Abraham and
Sara, derives from psalms 8, 135, and 136.
Another text cited frequently in the Laurel Tree records was La guirlande
des jeunes filles, by schoolmaster Gabriel Meurier; this book was first pub-
lished in 1580 and reprinted many times. Its two-column format, in Dutch and
French, was meant to instruct in languages, but, as noted earlier, the dialogue
and multiple-language format was required for all textbooks in Antwerp from
1571 on. In the dialogue on amusements, reproduced as document 6 in appen-
dix A, eight girls discuss some technical aspects of keyboard playing. Lucie
asks if anyone can do divisions and finger them properly. They note that the
104 Kristine K. Forney

instrument is out of tune and missing strings, after which they turn their at-
tention to the clavichord and proceed to tune it, loosening one string by a half
step and raising another by the same interval. The dialogue continues with a
discussion of which kind of chanson they should sing: one student cautions
against lascivious songs, but she admits she likes rustic chansons.
Their dialogue presumes some reasonably advanced knowledge of key-
board improvisation and of instrument care. This text also promotes good
Christian values in the discussion about singing a chanson. Franoise admon-
ishes the group to guard against singing a lascivious or worldly chanson, and
Lucie suggests a pious song. But Franoise, who also suggested a pretty song,
says she prefers a rustic song and they soon tire of the game. The dialogue
implies that the girls knew both worldly and pious songs; indeed, the writ-
ings of Erasmus, some years earlier, point to the growing problem of young
girls and music:

It is customary now among some nations to compose every year new songs
which young girls study assiduously. The subject matter of the songs is usu-
ally the following: a husband deceived by his wife, or a daughter guarded
in vain by her parents; or a clandestine aair of lovers. These things are
presented as if they were wholesome deeds, and a successful act of profli-
gacy is applauded. Added to pernicious subject matter are such obscene
innuendoes, expressed in metaphors and allegories, that no manner of
depravity could be depicted more vilely. Many earn a livelihood in this oc-
cupation, especially among the Flemish. If laws were enforced, composers
of such common ditties would be flogged for singing these doleful songs to
the licentious. Men who publicly corrupt youth are making a living from
crime, yet parents are found who think it a mark of good breeding if their
daughters know such songs.

La guirlande is but one of many pedagogical dialogue books from the

era; although their primary purpose was to teach languages, with French
and Dutch texts set side by side, the topics of the conversation books of-
ten turned to entertainment, music, and upright values. Henri Vanhulst
has recently shown a similar topic under discussion in La montaigne des pu-
celles/Den Maeghden-Bergh, a 1599 publication by the Leiden schoolmistress
Magdaleine Valry. In it, the Maistresse cautions her student, Emerence,
against playing dances on the keyboard, claiming they are too worldly and
not in praise of God. She suggests instead playing devotional songs (quelque
Canticque/Pseaume ou honneste Chanson/eenighe Lofsanck, Psalm oft eerlicke
Liedeken), noting that one hears daily the Psalms of David on organ. A dis-
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 105

cussion ensues of music in the Old Testament and particularly the psalms,
after which the teacher proclaims that music is a powerful force that can
move hearts to praise God. Later in the text, Philippe notes that because his
daughter willingly sings chansons spirituelles, he will send a spinet for her to
practice them on.
It seems clear that young girls were encouraged to play devotional music,
rather than secular songs and dances, on their keyboard instruments. Lyons
poet-musician Eustorg de Beaulieu (ca. 14951552) confirms that pious songs
were not only meant to be sung, but also to be played. A letter of 1543 invites
Clment Marot to visit Beaulieu, where he played sacred songs and psalms
in Marots translation:
I still have my clavichord
On which I play the sacred songs crystallized by you:
Which in my opinion were your finest achievement.
Often too I take my harp from its hook,
And I hang it around my neck
To play Psalms and Chansons on it
To the tunes that God taught me . . .

Beaulieu confesses to the errors of his youth in the preface to his Chrestienne
resjouyssance, claiming he too often sang abominable [worldly] songs. . . .
And I even studied them with too great an interest and played them on many
musical instruments, even though it greatly dishonored God and the said art
which is so honest and praiseworthy. Some echoed the Platonist ideal of the
power of music ennobling the spirit, including the Calvinist music publisher
Tielman Susato. In the preface to Susatos Dutch-texted Musyck boexken
(1551), which included settings of the Souterliedekens by Clemens non Papa,
Susato claims to have left out those songs whose unfair words encourage
vice, continuing:
Avoid all unfair and indecent words, which put this noble art to shame
and which could tarnish and corrupt the young . . . because music is an
exceptional heavenly gift, created by God and given to humanity, not in-
tended for dishonest or rash misuse, but mainly to praise Him thankfully,
to eschew melancholy, to dispel trouble, to alleviate heavy minds, and to
gladden worried hearts.

The secular songs in this collection do include a number of courtly love songs
mostly lovers lamentsbut also many zotte liedeken, or songs drawn from
the Flemish folklore that ridicule human folly, which can be read, Timothy
106 Kristine K. Forney

McTaggart claims, as an attack on dissolute ways or an incitement to join

in. While Susatos own songs are fairly inoensive, other, more lewd texts
did find their way into this collection.
What repertoire then did Antwerps young girls perform on their key-
board instruments? Did they learn the indecent French and Flemish songs
that filled the publications from the citys presses? Or did they rise to the
challenge of playing uplifting, pious music? We have little evidence to an-
swer these questions, as there was no keyboard music published in the region
until after 1600. I have shown elsewhere that young musicians (or their tu-
tors) might have followed the guidelines for preparing keyboard intabulations
laid out in the widely disseminated treatise Musica getutscht by Sebastian
Virdung. This instruction book, which demonstrates how to intabulate a
vocal work into French lute and German keyboard tablature, was published
in Antwerp in French (1529) and two Flemish editions (1554, 1568). These
Antwerp editions substitute the secular Flemish song Een vrolic wesen by
local composer Jacques Barbireau for Virdungs own sacred Lied based on
three Marian responsories. The resulting intabulation of Een vrolic wesen is
considerably more idiomatic to keyboard than was the Virdung original.
Rather than encouraging readers to play his own intabulation from the trea-
tise, they are invited to transcribe another composition into the tablature
using Virdungs work as a model.
There is, however, one source that reinforces the repertoires and values we
have discussed: the Susanne von Soldt manuscript (GBLbm Add. MS 29485)
is a collection of thirty-three keyboard pieces copied by a Flemish scribe and
signed by the twelve-year-old Susanne von Soldt in 1599. Susanne was born
in England to Flemish merchant-class parents who fled Antwerp after the
Spanish fury of 1576. Alan Curtis believes this manuscript was copied on the
continent, since the dances included were very popular there in the 1570s and
1580s, including the Pavane dAnvers. It is notable that this repertoire (listed in
table 6.5) fits nicely the dance types mentioned in the contract discussed ear-
lier for the young girl who studied allemandes, galliards, passemezzi, rondes,
and branles. One of the most widely circulated dances is the Galliarde qu
passa, which underwent many intabulations for lute and cittern as well as key-
board, all of them based on Filippo Azzaiolos four-voice romantic serenade,
Chi passa per questa strada. Two dances can be associated with England,
however, where young Susanne lived: Pavana Bassano and Galliarde Bassani
are likely arrangements of dances by wind-player Augustine Bassano, active
in England.
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 107

The manuscript further presents ten psalm-settingsamong the earliest

keyboard arrangements of the psalms and the oldest known from the Dutch
psalter. The melodies used stem from the Genevan psalter and are clearly
audible, set unadorned in the top voice. They are simple, four-part, block-
chord settings with an all-too-frequent cadential clichindeed, the style is
more appropriate to accompany singing the psalms than as solo instrumental
music. Curtis notes that some of these settings are of high musical valuein
particular Psalm 130, Wt de diepte o Heere, with its familiar dropping-fifth
opening, includes elaborate figurations. Some of the Genevan melodies
derive from Gregorian chant; for example, Susanne would have heard the
well-known Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes while playing her ver-
sion of Psalm 80, Ghij herder Israels wylt hooren. This melodic basis was surely
preferable for our pious girl than the tune more frequently associated with
this psalm in the Souterliedeken repertoire: Den lustelijcken Mey, included in
the 1544 Antwerp songbook. H. Colin Slim has shown one other keyboard
intabulation of this psalm using the tune Den lustelijcken mey, in a very secular
painting of Apollo and the Muses, redacted circa 15551560 by Maarten van
Heemskerck.
In addition to the psalm-settings, several selections in the manuscript
provide a moralizing theme that is appropriate for our young Susanne. The
Almande de la Nonette sets one of the most popular tunes of the era: the story
of a young girl who does not wish to become a nun. By the time our pious
Susanne was playing this dance, however, she surely knew it as well by one or
more of the religious contrafacta the tune had spawned, including a Geuzen
song of the rebellious Flemish and Dutch noblemen who fought to preserve
religious rights during the Eighty Years War (15681648). She could also
have known the tune through its many intabulations for lute and cittern,
most published by Phalse in Leuven. Another dance tune that circulated
in Susannes time as a Geuzen song was the Almande Brun Smeedelyn; based
on a well-known Flemish song (Bruynsme delijn ghy zijt seer hups en fijn), it was
intabulated for cittern and issued in several four-part consort arrangements.
But considering that Susannes family fled the Low Countries during the war
against the Spanish, she might well have known this tune as well by its rebel-
lious contrafactum.
Susannes manuscript also included an arrangement of the Dutch tune
Tobyas om sterven gheneghen, the text of which draws on the biblical story of
Tobit or Tobias, who prayed for death rather than believe he had broken a
commandment by stealing a young goat. Part of the Protestant Apocrypha,
108 Kristine K. Forney

&b C

&b C b b

Vb C .

Vb C

?b C b

& b C . # b b
i
b b
? C b
b

&b

&b .


. .
Vb J

. #
V b . J J J J j

?
b

b
& b # I
J
I I I I

? . #

b

FIGURE 6.12. Comparison of Lassos Susanne un jour and keyboard arrangement

(British Library, Add. MS 29485).

this story underscores the value of prayer in daily life as well as parental re-
spect and the reward of good work, all of which are valued principles for the
young.
The longest and most elaborate work in Susannes manuscript is a set-
ting of Orlando di Lassos well-known chanson spirituelle of feminine chastity,
Susanne ung jour, based on the story of Susanna and the Elderslikewise
considered to be apocryphal by the Protestantsa work celebrating our Su-
sannes namesake. This chanson was in wide circulation by the time it was
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 109

copied into Susannes manuscript, but its first publication was not only in
Paris (LeRoy and Ballard, 1560) but simultaneously in Antwerp, where it
was a unique addition to the 1560 edition of Le quatroisiesme livre, issued by
Susato. In this keyboard arrangement, the familiar cantus firmus is buried
in the inner parts, as it is in the original five-part chanson, but the voicings
of the vocal model are largely preserved, as running scalar passages decorate
the melodic lines throughout and written-out trills elaborate each cadence.
Figure 6.12 compares the first seven measures of the vocal model with the
keyboard arrangement; giving us a sense of the level of musical achievement
that a young Renaissance girl such as Susanne von Soldt might have attained
in her keyboard studies.
Throughout this study, we have seen how music served as a pedagogical
tool to shape the values and principles of young northern women, through
both singing and playing instruments, a perspective that is strongly supported
by iconographic evidence. We have also noted, however, that the prevailing
attitudes toward women and learning in the Low Countries were considerably
more liberal than in other parts of Europe, notably Italy. While the onset of
the Reformation brought a renewed expectation of propriety and piety for
girlsProtestant and Catholic alikethe social forces around them pre-
sented contradictory influences. Guicciardini viewed the young women of
Antwerp as strong-minded and willful, and they certainly were significant
consumers of the newest music that appeared in print. Whether the music
they studied consisted of devotional chansons spirituelles or bawdy Flemish
songs, merchant-class women were apparently musically literate and even ca-
pable of making arrangements, performing divisions, and improvising. More
than this, the teachers of Antwerp were significant consumers of polyphonic
music, and most had at least basic music training through which they could
impart their lessons. We should wish for so much from our students and
schools today.

APPENDIX A: LIST OF DOCUMENTS

DOCUMENT 1

Louis Guicciardini, La description de tous les Pais-Bas (Antwerp: Plantin,

1582):
pp. 5152: Les Belges sont aussi les vrais Maistres & restaurateurs de la
Musique: ce sont eux qui lont remise sus, & reduite sa perfection: Layans
110 Kristine K. Forney

si proper & naturelle, que homes & femmes y chantent comme leur instinct
par mesure; cecy avecq grand grace & melodie: tellement quayans depuis
conjoing lart ce naturel il sont telle prevue, & par la voix, & par instrumentz
de toutes sortes, que chacun voit & sait . . .
pp. 5354: Quant aux femmes de ce pays outr ce quelles sont (comme
jay dict) belles, & propres, & bien avenantes, sont encore fort gentils, cour-
toises, & gracieuses en leur actions: veu que commenans ds leur enfance
converser (selon la coustume du Pays) librement avec chacun, par ceste fre-
quentation elles deviennent plus hardies en praticquant les compaignies, &
promptes parler & en toute chose; mais avecq ceste si grande libert &
license, elles gardent severement le devoir de leurs honnestetez, allans non
seullement par ville pour le mesnagement, & aaires de leur maisons; ains
encore aux champs, avec peu de suite, sans pour cela encourir blasme, ny en
donner occasion de soupcon. Elles sont sobres, & et fort actives & soigneuses,
se meslans non tant seulement des aaires domestiques (desquels les hommes
par dea ne sempeschent, & soucient pas beaucoup) ains vont aussi achepter
& vendre & merchandises & biens; & se mectent & a la main & la langue s
aaires propres aux hommes: & cecy avec telle dexterity, esprit, & diligence,
quen pluseiurs endroictz (si comme en Hollande & Zeelande), y joint le desir,
& convoitise que les femmes ont de commander, les rend sans doubte part
trop inperieuses, & maistrisantes, & souventesfois excessivement fieres, &
desdaigneuses.
p. 165: Les femmes ont en Anvers plus de privilege quen autre part de ce
pays: entant que par toutes les autres contres, & villes, les femmes sont obli-
ges aux debtes de leurs marys, comme les marys ceux de leurs femmes. . . .
Mais en ceste ville dAnvers, si la femme ne fait trafic de merchandise, ainsi que
sont plusieurs part dea, elle nest tenu aux debtes de son mary. . . . Il est vray
que la femme ne peut sobliger, si elle nest autorise de son mary, saulf celles
qui exercent librement le trafic de merchandise, & qui achepent, & vendent
hors de leur boutique.

DOCUMENT 2

Tutorial contract between Jan van der Bossche and Gian Battista Compostin,
2 January 1577 (Antwerp, Stadsarchief, Notarissen 525, fol. 27):
Sr. Jehan Baptista Compostin, geboren tot Milanan . . . ende Jan van
der Bossche, schoolmeester. . . . Den voirscreven Jan van den Bossche . . . sal
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 111

wesen Franoise Compostin te leerene lesene, scryven ter redelickiewys . . .

oick te leeren den nomberen van cyeren ende opde clavicimable spleen vyf
of sesse vierscheyden allemanden, dry oft vier vierscheyden galliarden ended
rye passeneden, dry oft vier ronden oft branden . . .

DOCUMENT 3

1560 Ordinance of the Guild of St. Ambrose (Antwerp, Archief van de OLV-
Kathedraal, Scholastria 25, fol. 75):
. . . de kinderen oft yonghers zoo wel knechtkens als meyskens instituc-
eren ende leeren lesen ende schryvan alderhande tale ende sprake die sy kun-
nen oft weten het zy duyts oft wals spaensch oft italiaens Enghels hoochduyts
latyn gricx ende alle andere hoedanich syn sullen moghen oock rekenen ende
cyferen de meyskens te leeren naeyen de yonghers spelen op instrumenten
ende in alle cyville manieren ende doctrinen ynstrueeren . . .

DOCUMENT 4

1588 Ordinance of the Guild of St. Ambrose (Antwerp, Archief van de OLV-
Kathedraal, Scholastria 25, fol. 25v):
Item oock smorgens inder scolen gecomen voesende singen oft lessen
Veni sancte spiritus op haere knien met een versikel ende a collecte . . . ende
dergelycks tsavonts al eer sy uytgaen Laudes Diva virginum ofte Christus
qui lux es et dies int latyn oft eenen Pater noster ende Ave maria voor de
ongeleerde.

DOCUMENT 5

Sonets avec une chanson, contenant neuf parties lune suivant lautre . . . a deux
parties (Antwerp: Phalse & Bellre, 1592):
A VERTEUSE ET DISCRETTES JEUNES DAMOYSELLES, MARGUERITE ET
BEATRICE HOOFTMANS SEURS GERMAINS.
Ne pouvant (verteusses & discrettes Damoyselles) pour autre meilleur
moyen que par lindustrie de lestant au quell il a pleu ce bon Dieu map-
peller vous faire paroir le grand desir que jay tousjours eu & aurai ma vie
durante vous faire quelque service aggreable, a faict que me suis aventur
vous consacrer ce mien labeur (qui de soy ne marmite beaucoup cause de sa
112 Kristine K. Forney

petitesse vous estre oert) qui sont Chansons, Stanses, Sonets, Epigrammes
deux parties tant seulement par moy mis en Musicque, lesquelles mont
semblbien propres & convenables vous presenter, pour avecque icelles la
fois recreer voz Esprits lass & recreuz de voz aaires prives & domestique,
vous priant tantost prenant le Luth, tantost lEspinette en voz blanches, polies
& delicates mains, deigner marier voz doucettes voiz lharmonie dicelles,
ce que causera & bon droit quon vous appellera Marguerite & Beatrice (je
parle de celles de vostre qualit) en la Musicque les non pareilles. Au surplus
fin deviter la notte dimportunit feray fin ceste vous priant que cestuy
mien petit ouvrage soit defendu de lombre de voz bon graces, celle fin quil
puis voler asseurement par les perilleux destroits de ce present siecle, priant le
Souverain vous donner en sant, longue & heureuse vie. De oz bonnes grace
humble Serviteur, Jean de Castro.
TO THE VIRTUOUS AND GENTLE YOUNG MAIDENS, MARGUERITE AND BEA-
TRICE HOOFTMANS, COUSINS GERMAN.
Unable (virtuous and gentle maidens) by any better means than by exer-
cising the profession to which it has pleased God to call me, to show you the
great desire I have always had and will have forever to render you a pleasant
service, I have therefore ventured to dedicate to you this little work (which in
itself is so small as to be unworthy to be oered to you). These are Chansons,
Stanzas, Sonnets, and Epigrams that I have set to music for only two parts,
which seemed to me proper and appropriate to present to you. With them you
may refresh your spirits, worn and fatigued from your private and domestic
duties, taking up at times the lute, at times the spinet in your white, polished
and delicate hands, deigning to lend your sweet voices to these songs, so that
you will be rightly called (by those of your station) Marguerite and Beatrice
in music unsurpassable. In order not to seem importunate, I conclude this
address, praying you to keep my little work in your good graces, so that it can
confidently fly through the perilous straits of our era, and praying to God
to give you long, happy and healthy lives. Your good graces humble servant,
Jean de Castro.
(Translation by Jeanice Brooks.)

DOCUMENT 6

Gabriel Meurier, La guirlande des jeunes filles en franois & flamens. Het Krans-
ken der jonghe Docters in Fransoys ende Duytsch (Antwerp: J. van Waesberghe,
1580):
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 113

CHAPTER XVI: DIVERSE JEUX

CORNEILLE: Allons jouer sur lepinette.
Laet ons op de klaversimable gaen spelen.
Let us play on the spinet.
LUCIE: Scavez vous fredoner & passager des doits?
Cont ghy crillen ende loopkens metter vingheren doen?
Do you know how to do divisions and move the fingers?
ALISON: Linstrument est discord, & ny a corde ni cordon.
Tinstrument is ontstelt, ende daer en is snare noch snaerken op.
The instrument is out of tune, and there are no strings.
FRANOISE: Jouons donc sur le manicordion.
Laet ons dan op de klavecoorde spelt.
Lets play then on the clavichord.
CORNEILLE: Lentez ceste corde demi ton.
Leeght dese snare eenen halven toon.
Loosen this string a half tone.
EMERENCE: Retendez cete autre un ton.
Stelt dese andere eenen toon hoogher.
Tighten this one a tone higher.
LUCIE: Qui chantera une chanson?
Wie salder een liedeken singen?
Who will sing a chanson?
CORNEILLE: Moi, si me voulex preter loreille.
Ick, wildy my ghehoor gheven.
Me, if you wish to lend me an ear.
FRANOISE: Gardez vous bien de chanter chansons lascives & mondaines.
Wache u wel oncuyssche, ende wereltsche liedekens te singhen.
Guard against singing a lascivious or worldly chanson.
SIMONETTE: Que chanterons nous puis?
What sullen wy dan singhen?
What can we sing then?
FRANOISE: Une belle chanson.
Een fraey Liedeken.
A pretty song.
LUCIE: Chantons quelque cantique spirituel.
Laet ons eenich geestelijc liedeken singen.
Lets sing a spiritual song.
FRANOISE: Le chant rural me plait mieux.
Den boeren sanck behalt my best.
A rustic song pleases me more.
CORNEILLE: Jen suis laste, batons nous quelque autre jeu.
Ick bens moede. Laet ons met eenich ander spel vermaken.
Im tired of this. Lets amuse ourselves with another game.
114 Kristine K. Forney

APPENDIX B: TABLES
TABLE 6.1. Music patronage by the St. Martha and St. Ambrose Guild, 15221600.

x = payment made to singers, but amount is not specified

? = no payment noted for this year
+ = musicians in addition to the numerical total
[ ] = total derived from context in documents

YEAR FEAST SINGERS

1522 St. Lazarus 16
St. Ambrose 14
Requiem 14
1523 St. Ambrose 16 (Zielmisse)
St. Martha [16]
1524 St. Martha 17
1525 St. Martha 11
1526 St. Martha 13
1527 St. Martha 16
1528 St. Martha 14
1529 St. Martha 14
1530 St. Ambrose 14
St. Martha 14
1531 St. Ambrose x
St. Martha 16
1532 St. Ambrose x
St. Martha x
1533 St. Ambrose x
St. Martha x
1534 St. Ambrose x
St. Martha 13
1535 St. Ambrose x
St. Martha 13
1536 St. Ambrose ?
St. Martha 14
1537 St. Ambrose x
St. Martha 17 (+ choirboys)
1538 St. Ambrose 17
St. Martha 16 (+ choirboys)
1539 St. Ambrose 17
St. Martha 18
1540 St. Ambrose 17
St. Martha 16
1541 St. Ambrose 16
St. Martha 15
15421547 [Records lacking for St. Martha]
1542 St. Ambrose 13
1543 St. Ambrose [20?]
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 115

YEAR FEAST SINGERS

1544 St. Ambrose 14
1545 St. Ambrose 18
1546 St. Ambrose 16
1547 St. Ambrose [21]
1548 St. Ambrose [23]
St. Martha 17
1549 St. Ambrose [22]
St. Martha 19
1550 St. Ambrose 20
St. Martha 19
1551 St. Ambrose 19
St. Martha 21
1552 St. Ambrose 19
St. Martha 22
1553 St. Ambrose ?
St. Martha 19
1554 St. Ambrose 22
St. Martha 21 (+ choirboys)
1555 St. Ambrose 20
St. Martha 21 (+ choirboys)
1556 St. Ambrose 20
St. Martha 17 (+ choirboys)
1557 St. Ambrose 21
1558 St. Ambrose 21
1559 St. Ambrose 18
St. Martha 18
1560 St. Ambrose 18
St. Martha 17
1561 St. Ambrose 21 (+ choirmaster)
St. Martha 21 (+ choirmaster)
1562 St. Ambrose 21
St. Martha 18
1563 St. Ambrose 20
St. Martha 18
1564 St. Ambrose 22
St. Martha 22
1565 St. Ambrose 21
St. Martha 22
1566 St. Ambrose 20
St. Martha 19
1567 St. Ambrose 20
St. Martha 18
1568 [Records lacking]
1569 St. Ambrose 16 (+ Grard de Turnhout
and choirboys)
(continued on next page)
116 Kristine K. Forney

TABLE 6.1. (continued)

YEAR FEAST SINGERS

1570 St. Ambrose 21 (+ Grard de Turnhout
and choirboys)
St. Martha 21
St. Thomas 21
1571 [Records lacking]
1572 St. Ambrose 19 (+ Grard de Turnhout
and choirboys)
1573 St. Ambrose x
St. Thomas x
1574 St. Ambrose 18
St. Thomas 16
1575 St. Ambrose 17
St. Thomas 15
1576 St. Ambrose [17]
1577 St. Ambrose [15]
1578 St. Ambrose 12
St. Thomas 14
1579 St. Ambrose 18
St. Thomas 18
1580 St. Ambrose 12
St. Thomas 13
15811585 [No music payments recorded]
1586 St. Ambrose x
1587 St. Ambrose [11]
St. Thomas [12]
St. Cassianus x
1588 St. Ambrose [10] (+ bass player; motet
with organ)
St. Cassianus x
1589 St. Ambrose 10 (motet with organ)
St. Cassianus 12 (motet with organ)
1590 St. Cassianus 15 (motet with organ)
1591 St. Ambrose 12
St. Cassianus 15 (choirboys with organ)
1592 St. Ambrose 12 (choirboys with organ)
St. Cassianus 13 (choirboys with organ)
1593 St. Thomas x
St. Cassianus 9
1594 St. Ambrose 11
St. Cassianus 9 (motet with organ)
1595 St. Ambrose [10]
St. Cassianus 12
1596 St. Ambrose [10]
St. Cassianus 10
1597 St. Ambrose [10]
St. Cassianus 10
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 117

YEAR FEAST SINGERS

St. Thomas x
1598 St. Ambrose 12
St. Cassianus 12
1599 St. Ambrose ?
St. Cassianus 11
1600 St. Ambrose 12
St. Cassianus 6

TABLE 6.2. Musical catechisms from Antwerp.

Een bequaem Maniere om Ionghers soetelijck by sanck te leeren, tghene dat alle kersten
menschen moeten weten (Antwerp: Weduwe van Ameet Tavernier, tot behoef ende cost
van Antoni Thielens, 1571).

Contents:
TGhebet des Heeren (Our Father)
Die Enghelsche groet (Hail Mary)
Het Gheloove (Creed)
Die thien gheboden (Ten Commandments)

Text of Die thien geboden in rhyme:

Boven al bemindt eenen Godt,
By zynen name niet en sweert ijdelijc noch en spot,
Viert die heylighe daghen alle gader,
Eert vader ende moeder,
Met wille oft met wercken enslaet niemant doot;
En steelt oock niet al zijdy bloot,
Schout overspel en alle oncuyscheyt,
En gheest gheen getuych der valsheyt,
En begheert ooch niemants bedde ghenoot,
Noch niemants goet tzyn cleyn oft groot.

Die Christelycke Leeringhe in zoete ende lichte Muzycke met vier partyen (Brussels:
Rutgeert Velpius, 1591). Superius.

Contents:
Het Ghebet des Heeren (Our Father)
Die Engelsche groete (Hail Mary)
Het Gheloove (Creed)
Die thien Gheboden (Ten Commandments)
Die acht Salicheden (Eight Beatitudes)
Die Gheboden in ryme (Ten Commandments in rhyme)
Die Seven Sacramenten (Seven Sacraments)
Van de Duechden (On the Virtues)
Van den Sonden (On the Sins)
118 Kristine K. Forney

TABLE 6.3. Canticles, other texts, and timbres from Souterliedekens III
(Susato, 1557).

Den lofsanck Esaye (Isaiah 12, for Monday Lauds)

Timbre: Het was een clercxken ghinc ter scholen
Ezechias lofsanck (Isaiah 38.1020, for Tuesday Lauds)
Timbre: Ghi lustighe amoureuse geesten
Den lofsanc van Anna (1 Samuel 2.110, for Wednesday Lauds)
Timbre: Alle myn ghepeyns doet mi soe wee (Antwerp Liedboek, no. 3)
Moyses ende der kinderen van Israel sanck (Exodus 15.119, for Thursday Lauds)
Timbre: Die mey staet vrolyck in sinen tyt met loouerkens ombehangen
Des prophete Abracucx ghebet (Habakkuk 3.219, for Friday Lauds)
Timbre (dance tune): Het quam een ruyterken wt boschayen (Antwerp Liedboek,
no. 30)
Moyses lofsanck (Deuteronomy 32)
Timbre: O bloeyende iuecht
Den lofsanc der drie kinderen: Anania, Azaria, and Mizael (Daniel 3.57)
Timbre (dance tune): Const ic die Maneschyn bedecken
Den lofsanc Zacharie (Luke 1.6879, Benedictus)
Timbre: Een oudt man sprack een tonck meysken aen (Antwerp Liedboek, no. 19)
Den lofsanc der glorioser maget ende moeder ons Heeren (Luke 1.4655, Magnificat)
Timbre: Conditor alme siderum
Symoens lofsanck (Luke 2.2932, Nunc dimittis)
Timbre: Iesu salvator seculi
Den lofsanck Augustini ende Ambrosij (Te Deum)
Timbre: Christe qui lux (tune not given)

OTHER TEXTS: (all sung to the timbre: Het ghinghen drie ghespeelkens goet, in Antwerp
Liedboek, no. 39)
Den Pater noster (Vader ons die bist in hemelryck)
Den Ave Maria (Maria vol van gracien)
Die articulen des kersten gheloofs
Credo in Deum (Ick gheloof im God vader almachtich)
Credo in spiritum (Ick gheloof in God den heylighen ghest)
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 119

TABLE 6.4. Books belonging to Franciscus Doncker, scholaster

in Antwerp (d. 1572).

Sex thomi missarum clementis non papa in uns volumine

[= mass-volumes by Clemens non Papa from these:]
Missa Virtute magna, 4vv (Leuven, 1557, 1558)
Missa En espoir, 5vv (Leuven, 1557, 1558)
Missa Ecce quam bonum, 5vv (Leuven, 1557, 1558)
Missa Gaude lux donatiane, 5vv (Leuven, 1557, 1559)
Missa Caro mea, 5vv (Leuven, 1557, 1559)
Missa Languir my fault, 5vv (Leuven, 1557, 1558, 1560)
Missa Misericorde, 4vv (Leuven, 1556, 1557, 1563)
Missa Pastores quidnam vidistis, 5vv (Leuven, 1559)
Missa A la fontaine du prez, 6vv (Leuven, 1559)
Missa Quam pulcra es, 4vv (Leuven, 1559)

Liber musicus scriptus antiquus

[= unspecified chant-book]

Libri musicus trium vocum M. Gerardi a Turnhout

[= Sacrarum ac aliarum cantionum trium vocum (Leuven, 1569)]

Vier musyckboeken met vieren

[= Het eerste, tveeste, derde Musyck Boexken met vier (Antwerp, 1551) OR
Souterliedekens VVIII, Musyck Boecken 811 met vier by Gherardus Mes
(Antwerp, 1561), incomplete]
120 Kristine K. Forney

TABLE 6.5. British Library Add. MS 29485 (Susanne van Soldt MS).

Dances
Pavana Bassano
Pavane dan Vers [dAnvers]
De quadre pavanne
Pavane Prymera
De frans galliard
Galliarde qu passe [based on Azzaiolos Chi passa per questa strada]
Galliarde Bassani
De quadre galliard
Almande de symmerman
Almande de La nonette
Almande Brun Smeedelyn
Almande prynce
Almande de amour
Almande trycottee
Almande
Allemande Loreyne
Brande Chanpanje
Brabanschen ronden dans ofte Brand

Psalm Settings
Psalm 9: Heer ich Wil U Wts Herten gront
Psalm 16: Bewaert mij Heer Weest
Psalm 23: Myn God Voet mij myh Herder ghepressen
Psalm 36: Des boosdoenders Wille seer quaet (and Psalm 68: Staet op Heer toont U
onversacht)
Psalm 42: Als een Hert gejaecht
Psalm 50: Godt die der goden Heer is sprechen sal
Psalm 51: Ontfarmt U over jij arme Sondaer (and Psalm 69: Ich bydde U Helpt mij o God)
Psalm 80: Ghij Herder Israels Wylt hooren
Psalm 100: Ghij Volcheren des aertrijcx
Psalm 103: Myn siele Wylt den Herre met Lof
Psalm 130: Wy di diepte o Heere

Other
Susanna Vung Jour (based on Lassos Susanne un jour, a5)
Tobyas om sterven gheneghen
Preludium
One untitled work
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 121

NOTES
This chapter elaborates on ideas presented in my earlier study of music and women,
Nymphes gayes en abry du Laurier: Music Instruction for the Bourgeois Woman, Musica
discliplina 49 (1995): 23167.
1. In particular, Vives seems to follow Paolo Cortese, De cardinalatu libri tres (1510);
see especially the chapter De vitandis passionibus deque musica adhibenda post epulas
(How passions should be avoided, and music used after meals). On this treatise, see Nino
Pirrotta, Music and Cultural Tendencies in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Journal of the Ameri-
can Musicological Society 19 (1966): 12761.
2. Juan Luis Vives, De institutione feminae christianae, bk. 1, chap. 10: Selle chant,
que ce soit doulcement, & chansons honnestes, graves & decentes.
3. Bruto, La institutione di una fanciulla nata nobilmente (Antwerp: Plantin, 1555), also
published in French and in an unauthorized English version which is generally attributed
to Thomas Salter, A mirrhor mete for all mothers, matrons and maidens (London: Edward
White, 1579). Bruto wrote this as an epistolary address for the daughter of Sylvester Cat-
taneo, an Italian merchant in the north.
4. Pietro Aretino, Lettere, 1: 105; cited in Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 1: 94.
5. Delle lettere di M. Pietro Bembo; cited in William F. Prizer, Cardinals and Cour-
tesans: Secular Music in Rome, 15001520, in Italy and the European Powers: The Impact of
War, 15001530, ed. Christine Shaw (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 25354.
6. Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (Antwerp, 1567); this quote
cited from a London edition, The Description of the Low Countries (London, 1593), 14243.
7. For example, the estate of Jour. Heylwige Bachgrach, widow of Jooris Kesseler,
included a virginal (Antwerp, Stadsarchief, Notarissen 465, 1576, fol. 205).
8. For images of several double virginals from Antwerp, made by Martinus van der
Biest (1580) and Hans Ruckers (1581), see Jeremy Montagu, The World of Medieval and
Renaissance Instruments (London: David & Charles, 1976), 12527; the Ruckers virginal is
in the Metrropolitan Museum of Art, image available at www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/
renk/ho_29.90.htm (accessed 11 June 2008).
9. Edwin Ripin has been able to link these instruments to Antwerp through their
decorations and mottoes in Joes Kareests Virginal and the Flemish Tradition, in Key-
board Instruments: Studies in Keyboard Organology, 15001800, ed. Edwin Ripin (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1971; repr. New York: Dover, 1977), 6775.
10. I have discussed these, with images provided, in my Nymphes gayes, esp. 156
60.
11. This identification is confirmed by Angelika Lorenz, in an article formerly posted
at www.lwl.org/LWL/Kultur?landesmuseum/kdm/1819jahrhundert/1998_2001/2000_04/
index2_htm (accessed 12 October 2007). The painting is now held in the Mnster Landes-
museum; the museum purchased this artwork from the private collection of Jack Gold,
Surrey, in a Sotheby sale of 12 July 1972.
12. While the music appears faked in this book, the text seems to begin Den Heer.
I have not been able to identify which psalm text this might be.
13. This is noted in an inventory of the Salvago house, which had a spinet (espinette
dict clavisymbele) and a lute; given in Lon de Burbure, Uittreksels uit de Archieven der
Stad en der Kerken van Antwerpen, 11001796 (MS, Antwerp, n.d.), 3: 3, drawn from the
Notarissen 465 collection of inventories.
14. Guicciardini, Descrittione, 16768.
15. Antwerp, Archief van de OLV-Kathedral (AKA), Capsa 14, Dominorum 26 (Scho-
lastria 15401629), fol. 11v: Franois Werneix poortere geboren van Voerme in Vlanderen
122 Kristine K. Forney

oudt Lij jaren woenende by dEngels huys sal leeren duyts, franois, lessen ende scryven,
singen ende spleen . . . geadmitteert penul. May anno Lxxij.
16. Ibid., fol. 10: Symon moons oudt Lx jaren gheboren van tsavonteyloo by Brues-
sele en poortere deser stadt, woonende inde coppen ganck, leerende duytsch, wals, lessen,
schryven, rekenen ende cyeren. Moens is registered as a clavicembalemaker, as noted in
P. Rombauts and T. Van Lerius, Liggeren . . . der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, 2 vols. (An-
twerp: Bagerman, 18461876), 1: 179.
17. Hans van den Bosche oudt xviij jaren gheboren poortere, woonende met syn
ouders inde Coepoortestrate . . . leerende alleene rekenen, schryven, cyeren, ende boeck-
houden, in AKA, Capsa 14, Dominorum 26, fol. 9.
18. Ibid, fol. 45r: Jacomyna van aerde . . . duyts, lessen, scryven, ende singhen.
19. AKA, Rekenboeck van de gulde de schoolmeesters, 15701600. Payments are noted
in 1591 to the city players (fol. 167r), in 1587 for singing the motet with the organ (fol. 132r),
and in 1598 for a double motet (fol. 263r).
20. In 1576, for example, there were eighty-eight schoolmasters and seventy school-
mistresses (ibid.).
21. The first was in Socratic dialogue, issued while a canon at Utrecht in 1554.
22. Index expurgatorius libroum (Antwerp: Plantin, 1571).
23. Carlo de Clercq, Kerkelijk Leven, in Antwerpen in de XVIde eeuw (Antwerp:
Mercurius, 1976), 5763.
24. Chapter VII: The virtue of the Sacraments, in The canons and decrees of the sacred
and oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. James Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848),
available at http://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/trentall.html (accessed 11 June 2008).
25. Melody in Johannes Zahn, Die Melodien der deutschen evangelischen Kirchenlieder
(Hildescheim: Olms, 1963).
26. See Dorothy Packer, Au boys de dueil and the Grief-Decalogue Relationship in
Sixteenth-Century Chansons, Journal of Musicology 3 (1984): 21, 23.
27. Sensuyvent plusieurs belles & bonnes chansons que les chrestiens peuvent chanter en
grande aection de cueur. Adore un Dieu was the first piece in the volume; see Packer, Au
boys de dueil, 1954.
28. Calvins settings, Oyons la Loy que sa voix and Nous a donne le createur, and his
Creed, Je croy en Dieu le Pere, were printed in Aulcuns pseaulmes et cantiques mys en chant
(Strasbourg, 1539). Both borrow their music, the song of the commandments from a Stras-
bourg cantique, probably composed by Wolfgang Dachstein and published by Kopphel in
1526, and the Credo from a melody by Matthaus Greitter in Teutsch Kirchenampt (1525).
29. Packer, Au boys de dueil, 42. According to Packer and Samuel F. Pogue ( Jacques
Moderne: Lyons music printer of the sixteenth century, Travaux dhumanisme et Renaissance
101 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1969), 23839), Moderne issued a small book in octavo and of
only four folios entitled Chanson nouvelle. Composee sur les dix commandements de Dieu
extraicte de la saincte scripture (ca. 15301540).
30. Souter liedekens ghemaect ter eeren Gods, op all die Psalmen van David (Antwerp:
Symon Cock, 1540).
31. Het Antwerps Liedboek. 87 melodieen op teksten uit Een Schoon Liedekens-Boeck
van 1544, 2 vols., ed. K. Vellekoop et al. (Amsterdam: Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziek-
geschiedenis, 1975), no. 39. No music is given in the Souterliedekens print for this tune,
suggesting that it was well known.
32. Pierre Bayle, Oeuvres diverses I (The Hague, 1727); quoted in Bernet Kempers,
Die Souterliedekens des Jacobus Clemens non Papa. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des nie-
derlndischen Volksliedes und zur Vorgeschichte des protestantischen Kirchengesanges.
Literaturverzeichnis, Tijdschrift der Vereeniging voor Noord-Nederlands Muziekgeschiede-
nis 12, no. 4 (1928): 26466.
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 123

33.
3. See Henri Vanhulst, Les Les ditions de musique polyphoniques et les traits musi-
caux mentions dans les inventaires dresss en 1569 dans les Pays-Bas espagnols sur ordre
du duc dAlbe, Revue belge de musicologie 31 (1977): 6071.
34. Packer, Au boys de dueil, 4243 notes a Catholic collection of cantique spirituelle
from 1700, destined for les missions et les catechisms, which included a version of Sau-
niers Adore un Dieu.
35. See my Music, Ritual and Patronage at the Church of Our Lady, Antwerp, Early
Music History 7 (1987): 157.
36. Het sevenste Musyck Boexken (Souterliedekens IV) (Antwerp: Susato, 1557).
37. Antwerpsch Chronykje (p. 237), cited in Caroline Bouland, The Guild of St. Am-
brose, or Schoolmasters Guild of Antwerp, 15291579, Smith College Studies in History 36
(Northampton, Mass.: Smith College, 1951), 38.
38. Lon de Burbure, 2: 330. Antwerp Stadarchief, Inventaire de mobilier et livres
delaisss par le chanoine, escolatre et scelleve de lveque, Francois Doncker. In addition to the
music books described, Doncker had a copy of De Imitatione Christi, attributed to Gerson,
and also works of Clment Marot.
39. The booklet was produced at the expense of Antonis Thielens, who had served
previously as editor for a music book issued by Christopher Plantin: Valentini Gre Enger
Pannonii, Harmoniarum musicarum . . . prima pars (Antwerp, 1569).
40. For a modern edition of this collection, see Grard de Turnhout, Sacred and Secu-
lar Songs for Three Voices, ed. Lavern Wagner, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renais-
sance 910 (Madison: A-R Editions, 1970).
41. On the rebuilding of the Cathedrals music collection after 1566, see Forney, Mu-
sic, Ritual, and Patronage, 3240.
42. Of the Latin works, four are based on the Canticle of Canticles; five are drawn
from various liturgical texts, and others are devotional in nature, including several table
blessings and the all-time favorite chanson spirituelle, Susann un jour.
43. The dedication is translated in the preface by Lavern Wagner to Turnhout, Sacred
and Secular Songs, 10.
44. These include settings of the two well-known Clment Marot texts: O souverain
pasteur (prire avant le repas) and Per eternal (prire aprs le repas), set as well as Clemens
non Papa and Tielman Susato, among others.
45. See Peter Bergquist, ed., Orlando di Lasso: The Complete Motets. XI: Liber motettar-
um trium vocum (Munich, 1575); Novae aliquot, ad duasv oces cantiones (Munich, 1577), Recent
Researches in the Music of the Renaissance 103 (Madison: A-R Editions, 1995); and Lawrence
Bernstein, French Duos in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century, in Studies in Musicology
in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. John W. Hill (Kassel: Brenreiter, 1980), 4387.
46. This print is edited by Ignace Bossuyt as part of the Jeann de Castro Opera omnia
(Leuven: University Press, 1993). I would like to thank Jeanice Brooks for providing me with
her translation of this dedication.
47. The volume is in the British Library, with the shelfmark K.8.1.4.
48. The inscription is not grammatically correct, suggesting that perhaps one of the
Latin students added it to the volume, rather than Scholiers himself. I would like to thank
Alejandro E. Planchart for his assistance with this text.
49. Mottetz nouvellement mis en musique a 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 parties (Paris: Granjon, 1559);
Chanson nouvelles . . . a4 (Paris: Granjon, 1559).
50. Frank Dobbins, Music in Renaissance Lyons, Oxford Monographs on Music (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 25253.
51. Forney, Nymphes gayes. On Heyns see also Maurits Sabbe, Peeter Heyns en de
nimfen suit den Lauwerboom, Bijdrage tot de Geschiedenis van het Schoolwezen in de 16e
eeuw (Antwerp: Vereninging der Antwerpsche Bibliophilen, 1929).
124 Kristine K. Forney

52. Antwerp, Plantin Moretus Museum, M394, Rekenboek Peter Heyns, 15761582;
and M 240, Rekenboek Peter Heyns, 15801584.
53. Ibid.; sample entries are reproduced in Forney, Nymphes gayes.
54. This play was first published at Geneva in 1550, and reprinted many times, includ-
ing an edition in 1580 at Antwerp by Soolmans.
55. Christiani matrimonii institutio, in Opera omnia, V: 71718; cited in Clement A.
Miller, Erasmus on Music, The Musical Quarterly 52 (1966): 34748.
56. One of the most famous teaching dialogues from the Low Countries is Seer
gemeyne Tsamencoutingen/Collocutions bien familiers, published in 1543 by the Brussels
schoolmaster Jehan Berthout. In the books first chapter, we find evidence of young boys
singing duos in the mass, as discussed above, and of the general musical knowledge assumed
of the young; only at the very end does the dialogue confirm that girls too learned singing
and other musical skills. On this dialogue, see Ren Lenaerts, Het Nederlands Polifonies
Lied in de Zestiende Eeuw (Mechelen: Het Kompass, 1933), 15359.
57. Henri Vanhulst, La musique et lducation des jeunes filles daprs La montaigne
des pucelles/Den Maeghden-Bergh de Magdaleine Valry (Leyde, 1599), in Recevez ce mien
petit labeur: Studies in Renaissance Music in Honour of Ignace Bossuyt, ed. Mark Delaire and
Pieter Berg (Leuven: University Press, 2008), 26978.
58. I would like to thank Prof. Vanhulst for providing me a copy of his article prior
to its publication.
59. Jay oultre encore mono jeu de Manicorde O les Chansons Divines par toy
confictz: O as ouvr mon gr mieulx quonq feis. Soiuvent aussi je pren du croc ma harpe,
Et je la pendz mon col en escharpe Pour y jouer et Psalmes et Chansons Selon que Dieu
ma instruict en leur sons. Letter from Eustorg de Beaulieu to Clment Marot, Thierrens,
May 1543; cited in Dobbins, Music in Renaissance Lyons, 51.
60. Translation by Eugene Schreurs in the preface to the facsimile editions of Het
ierste Musyck Boexken (Antwerp: Susato, 1551), ed. Eugeen Schreurs and Martine Sanders
(Peer, Belgium: Alamire, 1989), Superius, p. 6.
61. Timothy McTaggart, Susatos Musyck Boexken I and II: Music for a Flemish
Middle Class, in Music Printing in Antwerp and Europe in the 16th Century, Colloquium
Proceedings, Antwerp, 2325 August 1995, Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation 2 (Leuven
and Peer: Alamire, 1997), 30732.
62. See Livre plaisant, 1529 & Dit is een seer Schoon Boecxke, 1568, with an introduc-
tion by John Henry van der Meer, Early Music Theory in the Low Countries 9 (Amsterdam:
Knuf, 1973); and Sebastian Virdung, Musica getutscht: A Treatise on Musical Instruments,
ed. and trans. Beth Bullard, Cambridge Musical Texts and Monographs (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993).
63. I have published a comparison of this intabulation and the original song in my
Nymphes gayes, 17374.
64. Bullard edition of Virdung, Musica getutscht, 14 (see above, note 62).
65. She was baptized on 20 May 1586, according to Alan Curtis, ed., Nederlandse
Klaviermuziek uit de 16e en 17e eeuw, Monumenta Musica Neerlandica 3 (Amsterdam: Ve-
reniging der Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1961), xxi.
66. This work was first published in Il primo libro de villotte . . . a quarto voci (Venice:
Gardano, 1557) and reprinted many times thereafter. The vocal version was never published,
as far as I know, in the north.
67. The inclusion of this pavane/galliarde set, not known in printed intabulations,
possibly calls into question the preparation of this manuscript in the Low Countries. Ar-
rangements of a pavane/galliard set by A. Bassano for keyboard and lute appear only in
English manuscripts, according to Denis Arnold and Fabio Ferraccioli, in David Lasocki et
al., Bassano, in Grove Music Online. See Oxford Music Online: www.oxfordmusiconline
 A Proper Musical Education for Antwerp's Women 125

.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/53233pg1 (accessed 8 June 2008). I have not been able

to check the music of the Susanne van Soldt manuscript against these other sources.
68. The settings are based on the Dathenus translation, De Psalmen Davids, published
in Rouen, Ghent, and Heidelberg in 1566. Alan Curtis, ed., Dutch Keyboard Music of the
16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam: Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis,
1961), xxvii.
69. See Piere Pidoux, Le Psautier Huguenot du XVIe sicle, vol. 1: Les mlodies (Basel:
Brenreiter, 1962).
70. Curtis, Dutch Keyboard Music, ix.
71. Het Antwerps Liedboek. 87 melodieen op teksten uit Een Schoon Liedekens-Boeck
van 1544, 2 vols., ed. Kees Vellekoop et al. (Amsterdam: Vereniging voor Nederlandse Mu-
ziekgeschiedenis, 1975), 1: 2829. Den lustelycke mey was used for monophonic settings
of this psalm (Symon Cock, 1540) as well as polyphonic ones, including that by Jacobus
Clemens non Papa, in Souterliedekens II (Antwerp: Susato, 1556), given here as psalm 79,
Ghi die condt Israel.
72. H. Colin Slim, On Parnassus with Maarten van Heemskerck: Instrumentaria and
Musical Repertoires in Three Paintings in the U.S.A., Part II, Musica disciplina 52 (1998):
181232.
73. John Wendland, Madre non mi far Monaca: The Biography of a Renaissance Folk-
song, Acta musicologica 48 (1976): 185204.
74. Wendland gives the various versions, including the Geuzen song Maraen, hoe
moogt gy spies en lans verheen tegen God, published much later in the famous Nederland-
sche Gedenck-clanck (Valerius, 1626). One of the most popular contrafacta of the Allemande
nonette was Von Gott will ich nicht lassen, on which Bach wrote a chorale; according to
Wendland, Madre non mi far Monaca, 191, this text was first published in Frankfurt in
1572 and widely disseminated in Lutheran song books.
75. Howard M. Brown, in Instrumental Music Printed before 1600: A Bibliography
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), lists six intabluations: four for lute
issued by Phalse (156312, 15687 15747, and 15846), and two for cittern (15784, published in
Strasburg; and 1582 5 by Phalse).
76. In his Instrumental Music Printed before 1600, Brown gives four sources, including
two cittern arrangements published by Phalse (15696, 15703). The tune was first printed in
the famous Susato Danserye (1551) for four-part ensemble, but without its title.
77. The contrafactum was entitled Een nieu liedeken vande Berchse soldaten, hoe sy de
stadt aen Parma vercochten, sung to the tune of Bruynsmadelijn. The text is available at www
.dbnl.org/tekst/_geu001geuz01_01/_geu001geuz01_01_0153.htm (accessed 8 June 2008).
78. The tune on which this is based is in G. A. Brederos Groot Lied Boeck of 1622, but
was clearly in circulation well before that publication.
79. On this Lasso edition, see my Orlando di Lassos Opus 1: The Making and Mar-
keting of a Renaissance Music Book, Revue belge de musicologie 3940 (19851986): 3360.
Kenneth Levys study on the Susanne complex does not recognize this Antwerp publica-
tion, in Susanne un jour: The History of a 16th-Century Chanson, Annales musicologiques
1 (1953): 375408.
 7
Juan Bermudo, Self-instruction,
and the Amateur Instrumentalist'
JOHN GRIFFITHS

The pedagogy of learning to play musical instruments embodies techniques,

intellectual systems, and values that reveal a great deal about the cultural con-
text in which instruction takes place. The advent of printing in the sixteenth
century provided the opportunity for a new kind of music book and a new
system of learning instrumental performance. Early in the history of music
printing, the pedagogical possibilities of the new medium were recognized
by the Valencian courtier Luis Miln and applied by him to El maestro (The
teacher), his 1536 anthology of music for vihuela, the Spanish guitar-shaped
lute. In advertising that his book would follow the same manner and order
that a teacher would bring to a beginning student: showing him progressively
from the beginning everything of which he might need to know, Miln estab-
lished the role that tablature books came to play in musical self-instruction
not in the intellectual comprehension and appreciation of music, but in the
mechanical dimension of music performance. From a contemporary point
of view, manuals of this kind thus tell us a great deal about the otherwise
undocumented practices of music teaching and music teachers in the Early
Modern period.
Twenty years after El maestro, the Franciscan friar Juan Bermudo pub-
lished a much more extensive treatise on musical instruments and instru-
 Juan Bermudo, Self-instruction, and the Amateur Instrumentalist 127

mental music, his Declaracion de instrumentos musicales (1555). This was the
first sixteenth-century Spanish book concerning instrumental music whose
primary objective was not to transmit a performance repertoire but to educate
instrumentalists in matters beyond musical practice. It was not an anthology
of tablature, but a treatise on many aspects of the history, science, and art
of music, formulated with a clear educative aim for instrumentalist readers
of diverse backgrounds, both amateurs and professionals. In contrast to El
maestro, self-instruction using Bermudos text leads principally to instrumen-
talists deepening of their musical understanding. At the same time, Bermudo
gives very practical advice on many matters that help us connect his theo-
retical concerns to the commonplace reality from which we construct musics
social history. My interest in this study is to focus on Bermudos contribution
to our understanding of learning to play musical instruments as one of the
day-to-day musical experiences of Renaissance urban life. Intertwined with
this practicality, of course, is Bermudos unequivocal intention of oering
the instrumentalist a pedagogical pathway toward achieving the status of the
Boethian musicus.
The essence of Bermudos advice for instrumentalists is that they should
learn by assimilating techniques derived from vocal music. This reinforces
the undeniable centrality of vocal polyphony in sixteenth-century musical
thinking and the close interconnection between vocal and instrumental mu-
sic. Bermudo views the appropriation of vocal polyphony by vihuelists and
keyboard players as a natural and normal part of an integrated musical world.
I wish to emphasize this point in an attempt to neutralize the propensity to
see instrumental and vocal music as distinct branchesas part of the ongoing
process of restoring the balance that existed between instrumental and vocal
music in Renaissance musical experience. Regarding instrumental music as
either peripheral or subsidiary is a legacy of modern historiography and does
not accord, at least in quantitative terms, with what I understand to have been
the soundscape of Renaissance cities and towns.
It also helps us to understand what Bermudo is talking about if we do not
consider instrumentalists to be a completely distinct category of musician. No
doubt some of Bermudos readers would have included clerics who frequently
heard or participated in the singing of vocal polyphony, but whose domestic
recreation included playing the clavichord or vihuela. William Byrd likewise
epitomizes the professional Renaissance musician who traversed both areas.
We thus need to keep in mind that many master polyphonists were also lu-
tenists or keyboard players, that many musicians primarily known to us as
128 John Griths

lutenists were composers of fine vocal polyphony, and that in urban societies,
many peoples experience of vocal polyphony was principally through the solo
instrumental medium.
With nearly every new document that surfaces in my archival investiga-
tions in Spain and Italy, the place of instrumental music moves closer into
vocal territory, and the old line separating the center from the periphery
becomes increasingly blurred. The ever-sharpening picture reinforces the
centrality of instrumental music and practice in sixteenth-century musical
culture, and the breadth of its social penetration: whether used at court or
domestically, for recreation or entertainment, or as a pedagogical or composi-
tional tool, the lute and other plucked instruments were a central part of the
sixteenth-century soundscape. This radiated outward from the very center of
mainstream musical activity, assisted by the lutes multiple roles as a trans-
mitter of vocal polyphony, a vehicle for spiritual and moral education and so
for self-improvement, and as a personal symbol of cultural achievement. Not
only did many nobles throughout Europe aspire to the model of Castigliones
lute-playing courtier, but the combination of class interaction and the print-
ing press empowered the literate urban professional classes to emulate these
same models from a few rungs further down the social ladder.
My exploration and Bermudos text, then, revolve around the pedagogy
that assisted the expansion of courtly musical practices into the urban sphere.
In the geographical areas that interest me most, the penetration of courtly art
music into urban society appears to have been quite significant. I estimate,
for example, that Spanish violeros may have built over a quarter of a mil-
lion instruments during the course of the sixteenth century, and we learn
from surviving printing contracts that instrumental music was printed in
extraordinarily large editions of 1,200 to 1,500 copiesprint runs that surpass
any other known kind of Spanish book production. Both pieces of evidence
point to widespread instrumental practice in urban society, demonstrated
through a correspondingly high level of consumption of musical materials.
My contribution to the discussion of Renaissance musical pedagogy is thus
primarily concerned not with the training of a professional elite, but peda-
gogy directed at amateurs. And because this phenomenon coincides with the
advent of printing, it also concerns self-instruction.
As implied above, Renaissance self-instruction literature is likely to mir-
ror the real practice of master-to-student teaching, but there are many avail-
able models and we cannot be sure. The absence of adequate documentation
of unwritten pedagogical practice is thus a severe limitation toward achieving
 Juan Bermudo, Self-instruction, and the Amateur Instrumentalist 129

anything like a holistic view of past instrumental pedagogy. We can but ac-
knowledge the role of unwritten pedagogical practice, even though we cannot
resuscitate the voices of the many teachers who gave one-to-one instruction
or who worked in the numerous privately operated music schools in cities
and large towns. We know very little about what they did, and the methods
they used. At the same time, there is probably a certain degree of congru-
ence between oral and print pedagogies, and we can only be reassured by the
indications given by writers such as Luis Miln who confirm their desire to
replicate real-life practice in their published manuals.
Learning an instrument requires the acquisition of physical, mechanical
skills, as well as the assimilation of the key stylistic elements of the music that
is being learned, unless this can be taken for granted as a priori knowledge.
Sixteenth-century students of solo instruments who had not had the experi-
ence of singing vocal polyphony are likely to have needed some guidance with
musical style. In contrast to the dominant instrumental pedagogy of the last
250 years, Renaissance instrumental pedagogy in Spain and Italy focuses
substantially on musical style and assumes that good technique will follow
automatically. The printed vihuela books, although aimed at the beginner as
well as the accomplished player, pay little more than lip service to mechanical
matters. None of them include specifically technical exercises, although brief
technical exercises are interpolated in numerous Italian lute manuscripts,
generally working manuscripts that belonged to individual owners.
The development of tablature notation is intimately connected to the
proliferation of lute music and also, to a lesser degree, to the proliferation
of keyboard instruments. In eect, playing by numbers brought the perfor-
mance of sophisticated polyphonic music within reach of the musically illit-
erate, and the pedagogical challenges that concern us were defined as much
by the notation as the music itself. Tablature is not dicult to learn and in
addition to its simplicity, it is graphically compact and an ideal way of writ-
ing music in score. It is probably no accident that the invention of tablature
coincided with the emergence of music printing, and authors and publishers
were quick to exploit the enormous social potential: some three hundred tab-
lature books were issued during the sixteenth century. For the first time, high
quality music was within reach of the bourgeoisie: a broad sector of society
with limited musical experience gained easy access to art music in an easily
intelligible format. No doubt, some of the great charmers of the era would
have known the odd piece of Josquin, Arcadelt, or Francesco, and with only
the flimsiest musical knowledge acquired through tablature editions, would
130 John Griths

have been able to feign an inflated level of cultural refinement in order to ap-
proximate Castigliones model courtier.
Returning now to Juan Bermudo, I wish to consider one short passage
from the Declaracin de instrumentos that is well known to instrumental schol-
ars, a pithy 400-word coda to his discussion of intabulation technique on fol.
99v, at the end of chapter 71: Some concluding advice on intabulations. It
is worth revisiting in the present context because of its pedagogical import.
In one of his rare moments of succinctness, following chapters of laborious
and detailed explanation of intabulations, Bermudo cuts to the chase as if
to say: now if you really want to be a good vihuelist, heres what you have
to do. It is a simple and rational recipe, based on instrumental emulation
of vocal polyphony. Mechanical skills are completely ignored. Instead, Ber-
mudo advises his reader to learn through intabulating (moving progressively
from the simple to the complex), to absorb the compositional technique of
vocal composers, and to use this knowledge for creating ones own works
(fantasia extemporization), the pinnacle of sixteenth-century instrumental
achievement.
In preceding chapters on intabulations, Bermudo teaches how to copy
polyphony into score, how to place the music to achieve the best match be-
tween music and instrument, and how to translate the mensural notation
into tablature. He does not advocate simply playing by numbers, but stresses
implicitly that the process of self-instruction involves becoming intimately fa-
miliar with the music through copying and analysis. In this respect, he reveals
an anity to Vincenzo Galilei in his concern for the integrity of the vocal
model and the use of intabulated polyphony for study possibly more than for
performance. Bermudos insistence on first making a score, in order to be
able to predict problems likely to arise in intabulating, diers from contempo-
raries such as Bartolomeo Lieto, who recommends intabulating each contra-
puntal voice directly from the bass upward without the intermediary stage of
making a score. Other musicians, such as Cosimo Bottegari, who were first
and foremost interested in producing intabulations to use as solo songsby
singing one of the original voices and converting the remaining voices into a
simple accompanimentdo not operate with a pedagogical imperative and
are more pragmatic than fastidious. The alternative that became both easy
and common due to the explosive upsurge in tablature printing in the 1540s
was, of course, to buy a book of tablature prt a porter.
Bermudo first instructs players to seek out and intabulate music com-
posed in two parts:
 Juan Bermudo, Self-instruction, and the Amateur Instrumentalist 131

The music with which you should begin to intabulate will be villancicos
(first duos, then in three parts) of homophonic music in which all the voices
usually sound at once. Intabulating these requires little eort because, as
the notes in each voice have the same value, the ciphers in each bar will
be equal in number. For those who might wish to take my advice: these
intabulations are not for performing because they are not artful music, so
do use them to train your ear. Homophonic villancicos do not have strong
enough musical foundations to develop and cultivate good taste in inven-
tion. Use them, therefore for practice and for learning how to intabulate;
they are not worth more.

Even if Bermudo is dismissive of these simple pieces, the student stands

to learn not only the mechanics of intabulation, but also the fundamentals
of counterpoint. Although never mentioned explicitly, Bermudo takes for
granted the pedagogical benefit accruing from copying the music into score
and intabulating it: this part of the process is possibly the most important of
all in terms of the assimilation of compositional style and technique. What-
ever the musical quality of these two-voice works, they are also good technical
exercises as they demand accurate finger placement, controlled plucking, and
linear fluidity.
Very few two-part villancicos of the kind that Bermudo recommends
survive in polyphonic sources, and not a single example was included in any of
the vihuela books published during the sixteenth century. The closest piece
is a setting in Fuenllanas Orphnica lyra of Si amores me han de matar, which is
attributed to Mateo Flecha; but this duo turns out to be identical to the tenor
and bass voices of an anonymous five-part setting in the so-called Cancionero
de Uppsala. It is impossible to determine which of the versions might have
given rise to the other: the five-part version could have been created by adding
voices to the duo, or Fuenllana could simply have extracted the lowest two
voices from the five-voice work, although this scenario seems less likely to me.
Not homophonic (as Bermudo recommended), Si amores me han de matar is of
the same imitative style as most of the other two-part music conserved in the
printed vihuela tablatures, settings of the Benedictus, Pleni, and Et resurrexit
from masses by Josquin and Mouton, along with other liturgical fragments
by Morales and Guerrero.
The three-part homophonic villancicos to which Bermudo refers are
likely to be works such as those in the old style by Juan del Encina and other
composers who figure alongside him in sources such as the Cancionero de
Palacio, as well as later pieces in the same style. Playing intabulated three-
132 John Griths

part homophonic works taught players to understand triadic harmony and

chordal progressions and cadential formulas long before the development of
a vocabulary to explain them. Triads were possibly understood as physical
hand-positions as much as theoretic constructs of superimposed intervals,
although it is likely that by Bermudos time players of plucked instruments
practiced a form of basso continuo, either reading from the bass part or entirely
by ear.
The second step in Bermudos method refers to the new style of imitative
three-part villancicos that emerged in Spain during the second quarter of the
century:

Having derived some kind of benefit from the above villancicos, the player
should seek out the villancicos of Juan Vsquez which are of high quality,
and works by an interesting author named Baltasar Tllez. The works of
this studious and wise composer possess four qualities that warrant report-
ing here: firstly because they are attractive and each voice can be sung in its
own right . . . as if it might have been written to be sung alone. From this I
infer the second quality: that their attractiveness makes them easy to sing
and play. Thirdly, they should have many well-placed suspensions as these
sound good on the vihuela. The last condition is that the music should have
a narrow range and the voices should not be far from one another when
each homophony is sounded.

The printed vihuela books include large number of this kind of villancico, in-
cluding many that embody exactly the qualities for which Bermudo praised
the works of Baltasar Tllez. The greatest number of surviving works of this
kind are the three-voiced villancicos by Vsquez, included in his Villancicos i
Canciones of 1551.
From three-part music, Bermudo moves to works of greater sophistica-
tion in four voices, music of greater length and complexity. He speaks of this
music with great reverenceof its inexplicable beauty, a source of wisdom
and spiritual edification. In this light, as well as for their range of solutions,
he also extols Morales, Josquin, and Gombert for the variety displayed in text
setting. The prominence he aords these three accords with the prevalence of
their works in the surviving instrumental sources, not only the Mass sections
that he recommends, but also large numbers of motets, chansons, madrigals,
and Spanish secular works that make up such a high proportion of the reper-
toire. His closing remark about the music of Gombert no doubt arises from
the composers thicker textures and more pervasive imitation:
 Juan Bermudo, Self-instruction, and the Amateur Instrumentalist 133

Among the Masses of the eminent musician Cristbal de Morales you will
find much music to intabulate, music of so many good qualities that I am
incapable of describing it. He who lends himself to this music will not only
gain wisdom, but also contemplative devotion. Only few composers possess
these qualities, and attain variety in text setting. And among these few, the
above-named author is one. Among the foreign music you might find, do
not forget that of the great Josquin, who founded music. The most recent
that you should intabulate is the music of the excellent Gombert. Due to
the diculty of intabulating it satisfactorily on the vihuela, for being so
overflowing, I put it in last place.

Having laid out this ground plan, Bermudo gives little further guidance.
Making intabulations according to the methods he elucidates in the preced-
ing chapters produces arrangements that sit well under the fingers because
they make good use of open strings and the standard vocabulary of chord
configurations. His further advice deals only with a few secondary small-
scale matters, such as how to deal with unisons between polyphonic voices.
Vincenzo Galilei gives much more painstaking detail in Il Fronimo about
maintaining polyphonic integrity in intabulations. Otherwise, there is a high
level of agreement between these two authors whose pedagogical principles
are closely aligned. They share the view, for example, that it is advantageous
that lutenists be able to read and comprehend mensural music. In content,
however, Galilei addresses his treatise to more accomplished players, perhaps
a reflection of a more sophisticated Florentine readership, unless this is an im-
pression that stems from his use of classical master-pupil dialogue format.
The conclusion of Bermudos chapter establishes the tight nexus between
intabulation and instrumental composition, and the need to have fully assimi-
lated all of the preceding steps before attempting to create ones own music.
This is one of the most frequently quoted sentences from the entire treatise:

Beginners err greatly in trying to impress with their own fantasies. Even
if they were to know counterpoint (at least as well as the aforementioned
composers) they should not be in such a hurry, so as not to do it with bad
taste.

The point is clear, vocal music is the instrumentalists model; however,

we might be equally critical of Bermudo for not going far enough. It seems
as though his pedagogy is one of imitation by absorption. He gives no direct,
concrete guidance on how to proceed from intabulation to fantasia: whether
it is by direct imitation, by analogy, by osmosis, or simply by drinking from
134 John Griths

the fountain of knowledge. As Philippe Canguilhem has observed, Galilei has

a similar diculty explaining satisfactorily in Fronimo how amateur players
built the bridge between intabulation and fantasia. The most detailed at-
tempt to teach fantasia improvisation is, of course, Santa Maras Arte de taer
fantasia of 1565. Using highly systematic pedagogy, Santa Maras oers the
most comprehensive and eective method for learning how to extemporize
imitative counterpoint. Despite its great excellence, the one vital element that
Santa Mara eschews along with every other sixteenth-century writer I have
consulted, is that of musical structure. While Santa Mara reveals very clearly
how to make all variety of imitative entries, he did not go so far as to oer a
strategy for composing a fantasia. Perhaps there did exist an unarticulated
belief that the only way for the instrumentalist to assimilate the rhetorical,
poetic, and narrative dimensions of contemporary musical discourse was, in
fact, through intabulations.
The congruence between Bermudos writings and those of other authors
who ventured to discuss early instrumental music suggests him to be an accu-
rate reporter of established pedagogical practice. If we put him into a broader
context, he aims at the curioso taedor or inquisitive player, and oers a more
intellectualized approach to playing than would have been the experience
of those who taught themselves by way of published tablature anthologies.
At the same time, Bermudo oers these players the opportunity to learn
skills that will help them move outside the confines of what was available in
print.
Beyond Bermudo, however, and beyond the theoretical literature, there
is other evidence about the way that lutenists and keyboard players acquired
musical knowledge. Musical sources still contain a great deal of additional
information that can be interpreted within our discussion of pedagogical
practice. On the one hand, instrumental parodies of vocal works such as
Vincenzo Galileis Fantasia sopra Anchor che col partireas one emblematic
exampleoer a window onto the nexus between intabulation and fantasy;
and at the same time, lute manuscripts in particular are full of brief, fragmen-
tary pieces that were probably intended to be memorized and incorporated
into improvised works during performance. Named clausula, final, tirata, and
so forth, they are highly suggestive of a practice of extemporized composition
that relied, at certain strategic points, on the ability to invoke preexisting
memorized materials, especially openings, cadential formulas, and codas.
Some Italian lute manuscripts from the late sixteenth century contribute
significantly to a growing body of evidence that supports the notion of extem-
 Juan Bermudo, Self-instruction, and the Amateur Instrumentalist 135

porized fantasia involving the real-time assembly of works using certain pre-
fabricated components. Some of these materials possibly record the activity
of their compilers as either teachers or pupils, and are likely to help us further
illuminate pedagogical practice, perhaps bringing us closer to understanding
unwritten practices relating both to compositional process and the way that
urban amateurs became musicians.

NOTES
1. Luis Miln, Libro de Musica de vihuela de mano. Intitulado El maestro. El qual trahe
el mesmo estilo y orden que un maestro traheria con vn discipulo principiante: mostrandose
ordenadamente desde los principios toda cosa que podria ignorar para entender la presente obra
(Valencia: Francisco Diaz Romano, 1536).
2. Juan Bermudo, Comiena el libro llamado declaracion de instrumentos musicales . . .
(Ossuna: Juan de Leon, 1555; repr. as Documenta Musicologica 11, ed. Macario Santiago Kast-
ner [Kassel: Brenreiter, 1957]).
3. Bermudo has been studied by numerous scholars over the last half century. Par-
ticularly significant are the contributions made by John Ward, Le problme des hauteurs
dans la musique pour luth et vihuela au XVIe sicle, in Le Luth et sa Musique, ed. J. Jacquot
(Paris: CNRS, 1958), 17178; Robert Stevenson, Juan Bermudo (The Hague: Martinus Nij-
ho, 1960); Maria Teresa Annoni, Tuning, Temperament, and Pedagogy for the Vihuela
in Juan Bermudos Declaracin de instrumentos musicales (1555) (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State
University, 1989); Wolfgang Freis, Becoming a theorist: the growth of the Bermudos
Declaracin de instrumentos musicales, Revista de Musicologa 18 (1995): 27112; and Paloma
Otaola, Tradicin y modernidad en los escritos musicales de Juan Bermudo: del Libro primero
(1549) a la Declaracin de instrumentos musicales (1555) (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2000).
Recently, Dawn Espinosa has published a parallel SpanishEnglish version of Bermudos
discussion of the vihuela as Journal of the Lute Society of America 2829 (19951996), and
my own practical manual, Taer vihuela segn Juan Bermudo (Zaragoza: Institucin Fer-
nando el Catlico, Seccin de Msica Antigua, 2003), is an attempt to produce a manual
for modern players based on Bermudos pedagogy.
4. The first book of Bermudos treatise is entitled Alabanas de Msica (In praise
of Music) and is written in the tradition of a classic laus musicae, heavily dependent upon
Boethius. Chapters 2 and 3, for example, are devoted to the Boethian divisions of music,
while chapter 5 explains the dierences between the Boethian tri-fold categorization of
musicians, lamenting the paucity in contemporary Spain of musicians worthy of the title
of musicus: En nuestra Espaa ay infinidad de cantantes, muchos Buenos cantores, y pocos
msicos (In Spain today, there are infinite singers, many good composers, and very few
musicians) (Declaracin, fol. 5v).
5. On this topic see particularly Howard M. Brown, The Importance of Sixteenth
Century Intabulations, in Proceedings of the International Lute Symposium Utrecht 1986, ed.
Louis Peter Grijp and Willem Mook (Utrecht: STIMU Foundation for Historical Perfor-
mance Practice, 1988), 129; Hlne Charnass, La rception de la musique savante dans
le monde des amateurs: les receuils de cistre au XVIe sicle, in Atti del XIV Congresso della
Societ Internazionale di Musicologia: Transmissione e recezione delle forme di cultura musi-
cale, ed. A. Pompilio et al. (Turin: Edizione di Torino, 1990) 3: 5967; and more recently
John Griths, The Lute and the Polyphonist, Studi Musicali 31 (2002): 7190.
6. This figure is estimated by assuming, conservatively, that the 170 violeros known
to have been active in Spain during the sixteenth century might represent only one tenth
136 John Griths

of those who really existed, and that each of them worked for an average of twenty years
producing ten instruments per year: 170 10 20 10 = 340,000.
7. See John Griths, Printing the Art of Orpheus: Vihuela Tablatures in Sixteenth-
Century Spain, in Early Music Printing and Publishing in the Iberian World, ed. Iain Fenlon
and Tess Knighton (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2006), 181214.
8. The prefatory matter of these books is examined in John Ward, The Vihuela de
mano and its Music, 15361576 (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1953).
9. Many examples are noted in Victor Coelho, The Manuscript Sources of Seventeenth-
century Italian Lute Music (New York: Garland, 1995).
10. De ciertos avisos para la conclusin del cifrar.
11. Vincenzo Galilei, Fronimo Dialogo di Vincentio Galilei fiorentino nel quale si con-
tengono le vere et necessarie regole del Intavolare la Musica nel Liuto (Venice, 1568); repr.
as Fronimo Dialogo di Vincentio Galilei nobile fiorentino sopra larte del bene intavolare et
rettamente sonare la musica . . . (Venice: Scotto, 1584), trans. and ed. Carol MacClintock,
Musicological Studies and Documents 39 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: American Institute of
Musicology & Hanssler-Verlag, 1985). See also the recent monograph by Philippe Canguil-
hem, Fronimo de Vincenzo Galilei (Paris: Minerve, 2001).
12. Bartolomeo Lieto Panhormitano, Dialogo quarto di musica dove si ragiona sotto un
piacevole discorso delle cose pertinenti per intavolare le opere di musica . . . (Naples: Matteo
Cancer, 1559).
13. Cosimo Bottegari, Il libro de canto e liuto / The Song and Lute Book, ed. Dinko Fabris
and John Griths (Bologna: Forni, 2006); modern edition: The Bottegari Lutebook, ed. Carol
MacClintock (Wellesley: Wellesley College, 1965).
14. La Msica que aveys de comenar a cifrar: sern unos villancicos (primero dos,
y despues a tres) de Msica golpeada, que, commnmente dan todas las bozes junctas. Para
cifrar estos quasi no ay trabajo: porque (como los puntos que dan unos con otros sean de
ygual valor) las cifras en los compases vernn yguales en nmero. Quien quisiere tomar mi
consejo: destas cifras no se aproveche para taer: porque no es Msica de cudicia, y no se
haga el oydo a ellas. Los villancicos golpeados no tienen tan buen fundamento en msica:
que sean bastantes para edificar, y grangear buen ayre de fantesa. Pues tmense para ensa-
yarse, o imponerse el taedor en el arte de cifrar: que no son para ms.
15. Three such pieces are copied in F:Peb, Chansonnier Masson 56, fols. 72v75, ed-
ited in Vilancetes, cantigas e romances do sculo XVI, ed. Manuel Morais, Portugaliae Musica
Serie A, 47 (Lisbon: Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian, 1986), 3031.
16. Miguel de Fuenllana, Libro de Musica de Vihuela intitulado Orphenica lyra (Seville:
n.p., 1554), fol. 2. The anonymous five-voice setting is in Villancicos de diversos autores, a dos,
y a tres, y a quatro, y a cinco bozes (Venice, 1556), edited in Maricarmen Gmez, El Cancionero
de Uppsala (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 2003), 34044.
17. One possible interpretation of Luis Zapatas famous anecdote from the 1530s or
1540s concerning the playing of Luis de Narvez who was of such great musical ability that
over four polyphonic voices in a book was able to improvise another four (de tan extraa
habilidad en la msica que sobre quatro voces de canto de organo de un libro echaba en la
vihuela de repente otras quatro) is that the vihuelist was playing what was later called
basso continuo (Miscelnea, chap. 15, in Pascual de Gayangos, Memorial Histrico Espaol 9
[Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1859], 95).
18. Despus que por estos villancicos estuviere el taedor en alguna manera in-
struydo: busque los villancicos de Ivan vazquez que son Msica acertada, y las obras de
un curioso msico que se llama Baltasar Tellez. Las obras de este estudioso y sabio author
tienen quatro condiciones, para que en este lugar dellas haga memoria. La primera, son
graciosas, que cada una por si se puede cantar, y con tanta sonoridad que parece averse
hecho aposta para cantarse sola. De adonde infiero la segunda condicin, que sern fciles
 Juan Bermudo, Self-instruction, and the Amateur Instrumentalist 137

de cantar, y taer: pues que son graciosas. La tercera es, que tienen muchas falsas bien dadas:
lo qual suena en la vihuela muy bien La ultima condicin es, que es Msica recogida ni anda
en muchos puntos, ni se aparta mucho una boz de otra al dar del golpe.
19. Juan Vsquez. Villancicos i Canciones, ed. Eleanor Russell, Recent Researches in
the Music of the Renaissance 104 (Madison: A-R Editions, 1995).
20. En las missas del egregio msico Christoval de Morales hallarys mucha Msica
que poner: con tantas, y tan buenas qualidades que yo no soy suciente a explicarlas. El que
a esta Msica se diere, no tan solamente quedar sabio: pero devoto contemplativo. Pocos
componedores hallareys, que guarden las qualidades, y dierencias de las letras. Y entre
los pocos, es uno el sobredicho autor. Entre la msica estrangera que hallareys buena para
poner: no olvideys la de el gran msico Iusquin que comen la msica. Lo ltimo que aveys
de poner sea Msica del excelente Gomberth. Por la dicultad que tiene para poner en la
vihuela, por ser derramada: la pongo en el ltimo lugar.
21. Mucho yerran los taedores, que comenando a taer: quieren salir con su fante-
sa. Aunque supiesse contrapunto (sino fuee tan bueno como el de los sobredichos msicos)
no avan de taer tan presto fantesa: por no tomar mal ayre.
22. Canguilhem, Fronimo de Vincenzo Galilei, chap. 3: De la mise en tablature a la
fantaisie: lexample dAnchor che col partire, 95121. Galileis limitation is the impossibility
of moving from a discussion of the process of intabulation to the conceptual appropriation
of formal and compositional strategies from one genre into the other.
23. Toms de Santa Maria, Libro llamado arte de taer fantasia (Valladolid, 1565);
trans. Warren. E. Hultberg and Almonte C. Howell as The Art of Playing Fantasia (Pitts-
burgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1991).
24. This is discussed further in the preface of John Griths and Dinko Fabris, eds.,
Neapolitan Lute Music: Fabrizio Dentice, Giulio Severino, Giovanni Antonio Severino, Fran-
cesco Cardone, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance 140 (Madison: A-R Edi-
tions, 2004).
Perspective 2
 8
The Humanist and the
Commonplace Book:
Education in Practice&
ANTHONY GRAFTON

At the core of learning, in early modern Europe, was a single complex set
of practices. Scholars described it, often, in organic terms. Every student
learned from Seneca that we should follow . . . the example of the bees,
who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey,
and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in.
Seneca grounded this plea for the creative exploitation of multiple sources,
naturally, with a well-chosen quotation: These bees, as our Virgil says, pack
close the flowing honey, and swell their cells with nectar sweet. Yet as he
also taught, extensive borrowing from others, when carried out correctly,
meant the transformation, and not the reproduction, of the sources used:
we could so blend these several flavors into one delicious compound that,
even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a dierent thing
from that whence it came. When Macrobius later explained to readers of
his Saturnalia that he had done this in his own work, he appropriated Sen-
ecas image and played with it, insisting that such bees produce a distinctive
new form of honey; Macrobius thereby oered his more learned readers
142 Anthony Grafton

the thrill of recognizing the exact nature of the practice Seneca had recom-
mended.
In the Early Modern period, one literary technology in particular em-
bodied this ideal of the beehive: the notebook, in all its gloriously complex
and indecipherable forms. And this was, of course, a classical revival. The
humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries knew that the elder Pliny
had dictated endless excerpts to his secretaries, who in turn had organized
them into the 160 commentarii which the younger Pliny had described as of
extraordinary value, and that these practices had underpinned the rich eru-
dition of one of their favorite books, the elder Plinys Natural History. More
importantly, they appreciated that great ancients had seen the making of good
notes as a form of mental discipline. As Macrobius wrote, the actual practice
of arrangement, accompanied by a kind of mental fermentation, which serves
to season the whole, blends the diverse extracts [in a notebook] to make a
single flavor. No wonder that Brutus had spent the eve of the decisive battle
of Pharsalus excerpting Polybius, or that Augustus had excerpted examples
of good behavior from histories and sent them o to those whose conduct
needed improvement.
It has long been known that the ideas and practices of humanism helped
to transform music in the Renaissance. Theorists used the methods of human-
ist philology to reconstruct the qualities of ancient music, with all its dramatic
eects. They also drew on the methods of classical rhetoric to give an account
of how music in their own time aected individual listeners. Composers and
singers, meanwhile, set the poetry of humanists from Petrarch onward to
music. Sometimes, as in the performances of the Florentine Camerata, theory
even helped to generate new musical practices, with dramatic eects. And one
feature of Renaissance musical practice in particular demands comparison
with the literary methods that every educated person mastered in school. The
Renaissance, in music, was the great age of the musical commonplace book:
the anthology that circulated, first in manuscript and then in hundreds of edi-
tions in print, reshaping musical lives and tastes just as the humanist school
reshaped literary lives and tastes. This essay is meant to oer a general account
of commonplacing, as thousands of young men and a smaller number of young
women encountered it in school, mastered it, and applied it throughout their
lives. Along with several of the strictly musicological chapters in this volume,
it raises a question like that which Michael Baxandall long ago raised about
Renaissance art: To what extent did the skills that every educated person
made part of his or her mental toolbox help to shape the musical tradition
 The Humanist and the Commonplace Book 143

and the way in which it was stored, processed, and accessed in the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries?
Commonplacing, after all, seemed anything but commonplace in the Re-
naissance. Some of the ancients who most closely resembled the humanists
above all that sharp-witted and ironic polymath, Aulus Gelliushad turned
the notebook itself into a literary genre. Whenever I had taken in hand any
Greek or Latin book, he noted in his prologue, I used to jot down whatever
took my fancy, of any and every kind, without any dierent plan or order, and
such notes I would lay away as an aid to my memory, like a kind of literary
storehouse. Gelliuss completed commentarii, he claimed, followed the ran-
dom order of the original notes he drew them from. By the end of the 1420s,
when Nicholas of Cusa excitedly announced that he had discovered a com-
plete text of the Attic Nights, he noted with special interest that this preface
which had circulated in the Middle Ages at the end of book 20came at the
beginning of the work. Guarino of Verona, the great teacher of the Este court
in Ferrara, emended the text and put it into wider circulation. And he also
revived the Gellian ideal as part of the core of modern classical education.
Guarino instructed his star pupil, Leonello dEste, that whenever he
read, he should

have ready a notebook . . . in which you can write down whatever you
choose and list the materials you have assembled. Then, when you decide
to revise the passages that struck you, you will not have to leaf through a
large number of pages. For the notebook will be at hand like a diligent and
attentive servant to provide what you need.

He also noted that he built on ancient precedent here: The ancient teachers
and students considered this practice so important that many of them, includ-
ing the elder Pliny, reportedly never read a book without taking notes on its
more interesting contents. Guarinos son Battista adopted his fathers prac-
tice, which he recommended in his own treatise on education, making clear
the level of grueling attention to detail that commonplacing required. The
teachers son Battista made clear what this discipline implied. Every word or
turn of phrase, every fact or anecdote of interest must be recorded in system-
atic collections: But they should hold fast to the practice of always making
excerpts of what they read, and they should convince themselves of the truth
of Plinys dictum, that there is no book so bad that it is totally useless.
And in fact, the notebook answered a new need. The humanist scholar
had to master the classics well enough to reproduce their style with satisfying
144 Anthony Grafton

consistency and accuracy. If he failed, after all, he risked the sort of humili-
ation that befell Poggio Bracciolini, when Lorenzo Valla wrote a dialogue in
which Guarinos cook and stable boythemselves barbarous Germans
read one of his works aloud and dissected its solecisms, one by one. The
modern humanist had, ideally, to read, digest, and make into his own flesh
and blood the texts of the ancientsto become a living library, like Peter
Kien, the hero of Elias Canettis terrifying novel Die Brandung. More than
one achieved this goalas Justus Lipsius, a master of the notebook method,
showed that he had when he oered to recite the text of Tacitus, from start to
finish, with a dagger held to his throat, to be plunged in if he made a mistake.
Only system, method, and hundreds of pages of notes could enable ordinary
mortals to become memory artists on this level.
By the sixteenth century, note-taking had become part of the educational
routine, and textbooks incorporated detailed protocols for it. The intellec-
tual basis for the art was well established. Everyone knew that, as Aristotle
and Cicero had explained, any given subject could be divided into what were
imagined, literally, as common placesthe headings where the topics and
arguments proper to it could be found. Rudolf Agricola devoted an influential
little book to summarizing the places or heads of argument. A generation
later, what most of the ancients had devised as mental preparation for public
oratory, techniques for writing invaluable materials and formulating power-
ful arguments on the wax tablets of an individuals memory, had transformed
itself into a spatially oriented form of information storage and retrieval.
Erasmus gave the idea of the commonplace book its final, decisive shape
in his widely read and revealingly titled manual, On Copiousness in Words and
Ideas. There he explained that the commonplaces of argument included not
only categories, but also sententiaea category that soon expanded to include
not only general statements, but also historical examples and apologues and
much else. The collecting of quotations now had a firm logical justification.
In Erasmuss hands, it also took on an epic scale: Anyone who wants to read
through all types of authors (for once in a lifetime all literature must be read
by anyone who wishes to be considered learned) will collect as many quo-
tations as possible for himself. The student, he explained, should devise a
complex, all-inclusive set of headings and subheadings, under which he could
enter his extracts:
Then, after having chosen yourself headings, as many as will be adequate,
arrange these in the order you want, then add to each its parts, then under
these subheadings you will at once note the loci communes or sententiae,
 The Humanist and the Commonplace Book 145

whatever you meet with in any author and particularly in the better ones:
exemplum, casus novus, sententia, joke or marvel, proverb, metaphor or par-
able. This method will have the result of fixing in your mind what you read,
and will accustom you to use the wealth of your reading. For there are some
people who keep many things as it were laid up for use, but when they come
to speak or write they are remarkably poverty-stricken and bare. And in
this way you will have, whenever occasion demands, a whole apparatus for
speaking, ready pigeon-holed, from which you can draw.

The commonplace booklike a well-plowed, sown, and irrigated field

guaranteed high returns for its owner, and ensured that no seed would go
to waste.
These precepts were anything but dead letters: schoolmasters system-
atically put them into practice. At Rivington School, the sixteenth-century
statutes instructed the masters that the eldest sort must be taught how to
refer every thing they read to some common place, as to virtue, vice, learning,
patience, adversity, prosperity, war, peace &c. for which purpose they must
have paper books ready to write them in. At Eton College, even less was left
to chance. Every Saturday afternoon, the boys had to Show their books for
Phrases collected that weeke, and their writing bookes. And at the other end
of Christian Europe, when the Jesuit Jeremias Drexel wrote an influential
treatise on commonplacing, he gave it the revealing title Aurifodina (Gold-
mine). Even more revealing was the image on the title page, which contrasted
miners digging arduously for the mineral gold with a single scholar who adds
even more of the genuine, intellectual gold of excerpts to his notebook. Sir
Philip Sidney was, for once, repeating a commonplace that he had learned as
a boy when he advised his brother on how to study works of history:

But that I wish herein is this, that when you read any such thing, you
straight bring it to his head, not only of what art, but by your logical
subdivisions, to the next member and parcel of the art. And so, as in a
table, be it witty words, of which Tacitus is full, sentences, of which Livy,
or similitudes, wherein Plutarch, straight to lay it up in the right place of
the storehouse, as either military, or more especially defensive military, or
more particularly defensive by fortification, and so lay it up. So likewise in
politic matters.

Naturally, not all learned men succeeded in disciplining themselves to

write down everything they read. But those who failed to do so recognized
that they were at fault. The influential Strasbourg rhetorician Johannes Sturm
told his students mournfully that I havent done this, and I am sorry that I
146 Anthony Grafton

didnt do it, and I wish my teachers had told me to do so. I could be more help-
ful to you now than I am. The great Huguenot philologist Isaac Casaubon
filled almost sixty notebooks, now in the Bodleian Library, with notes on texts
and conversations. More than once he took time to warn himself that these re-
cords underpinned all scholarly writing: Remember to set down everything
you read in books of excerpts. This is the only way to aid your failing memory.
As the proverb has it, One knows as much as his memory holds. Francis
Bacon noted that his own paper-books followed complementary systems:
one like a Marchants wast booke where to enter all maner of remembrance
of matter . . . w[i]thout any maner of restraint; another with Kalenders or
Titles of things . . . for better help of memory and judgm[en]t, while others,
which he called title books, held matter selected from the rest and copied,
in part by a servant. Casaubon, a scholar with many children, did his own
copying. But he followed a similar method, using some of his notebooks for
records of texts he had encountered, in chronological ordernot to mention
the ghost stories that his friend Lancelot Andrewes told himand turning
others into genuine commonplace books. Yet these notes, rich though they
were, recorded only a fraction of what he had learned, and summarized, in the
margins of his booksmany of which, once he moved from Paris to London,
were no longer at his disposal.
The form of reading that one mastered at school, in other words, was
dierent from reading as we know it now: it was reading as cross-pollination,
a rigorous and demanding exercise. One learned to carry it out in conditions
of strenuous attentiveness. One practiced it, ideally, in conditions of quiet and
isolation. Above all, one did it pen in hand, marking the apposite passages in
ones books and copying them out systematically for rapid retrieval. When
Jan Amos Comenius, the seventeenth-century Czech educational reformer,
showed schoolboys an image of a reader at work in his study, he naturally
incorporated the act of writing into the picture and its accompanying text:

The Study is a place where a student, a part from men, sitteth alone,
addicted to his studies, whilst he readeth Books, which being within his
reach, he layeth open upon a Desk and picketh all the best things out of
them into his own Manual, or marketh them in them with a dash, or a
little star in the Margent.

The reader sat forward, his fierce attention to the book before him materi-
ally embodied in the sharpened quill or bent nib with which he took down
everything that mattered most.
 The Humanist and the Commonplace Book 147

Naturally, scholars devised text retrieval schemes of the most wildly

varied kinds. Celio Calcagnini, a Ferrarese scholar dear to Erasmus for his
belief in church reform and delightfully cryptic epigrams, declined to emu-
late his friend Pandolfo Colenuccio, who used color-coded inks to identify
the subjects of the passages he underlined. Nor did he find it necessary, as
he explained, to draw little towers, pointing hands, or tiny columns in the
margins of his books, in order to call attention to points of interest. Instead,
he made notes, in separate notebooks or in the margins of the pages, a practice
that enabled him to review many entire books in half an hour. His copy of
Dioscorides in Latin, preserved in the Princeton University Library, confirms
this description: Calcagnini filled it, end to end, with neatly written notes of
many kinds. His energy and ability to find what was salient failed him, he
confessed, only once, when he tried to make notes on the elder Plinys Natural
History, that great rag-and-bone shop of ancient art, technology, and science
which was itself, as everyone knew, the precipitate of its authors brilliantly
systematic note-taking. As Calcagnini put it, without question, I did some-
thing absurd, since I ended up copying out all of Pliny.
Others oered mechanical devices that made it easier to lay out and re-
trieve what one read. Late in the sixteenth century, John Foxe the martyr-
ologist produced a printed model commonplace book, oering, in its second
edition of 1572, no fewer than 768 topics already laid out with spaces for the
reader to fill in. Sir Julius Caesar, an influential lawyer and Member of Parlia-
ment in the decades around 1600, not only filled in his copy with hundreds of
closely-written entries, but also enriched Foxes list of headings with almost
700 more of his own. He thus created, in William Shermans words, not
only a detailed record of six decades of reading, but also a powerful tool that
anticipated the kind of indexed archive now being delivered to anyone with a
networked computer by Google and its associates. A hundred years later,
Vincentius Placcius oered the public a Scrinium literatum, a device first
conceived by the British projector Thomas Harrison, as Noel Malcolm has
now shown. This organized the readers notes, taken not in books but on a
system of file cards or slips, on metal hooks in a cabinet where they were al-
most mechanically retrievable and could be rearranged and supplemented ad
infinitum. The bees and beehives of an older system of analogies had made
way for ecient, modern machinerya natural extension of the traditional
methods of the humanist school to meet and direct the floods of informa-
tion that threatened to overwhelm scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
148 Anthony Grafton

Even Placcius did not match the imagination or ambition of the Vene-
tian Giulio Camillo. Camilloas a friend of Erasmuss, Viglius Zuichemus,
reported with astonishmentbuilt a wooden amphitheatre, large enough for
at least two people to enter it and marked with many images and full of little
boxes. The seven planetary Gods of Olympus and the myths associated with
them divided the rows of the theatre into an allegorical encyclopedia in which
every subject matter, or locus, could be immediately found. At each point, the
userwho would occupy the space normally allotted to the stagecould
find a mass of papers which contained whatever about anything is found
in Cicero. The user would thus be able not only to comprehend the uni-
verse, but alsoa far more saleable accomplishment in period termsto talk
about his findings in perfect Latin prose. Whoever is admitted as spectator,
Zuichemus remarked, will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently
than Cicerothough Camillo himself, it turned out, stammers and speaks
Latin with diculty, excusing himself with the pretext that through continu-
ally using his pen he has nearly lost the use of speech. In Camillos hands,
the commonplace book bloomed like a vast mad orchid, becoming a three-
dimensional model of the human mind itself. No wonder that the proper
way to make and fill such books continued to occupy serious thinkers until
the Enlightenment, when Locke dedicated a treatise to the subject, or that so
many of the most prominent early modern writersMontaigne and Donne,
Jonson and Milton, Voltaire and Jeersonproduced them.
In the world of learning, the routines of commonplacing had eects
and underwent transformationsthat could not easily have been predicted
from their original role in elementary education. In theory, commonplace
books were private and individual. Each one should contain the precipitate
of a single persons systematic reading, and should represent a hermeneutical
autobiography. In practice, the distance between private and public rapidly
disappeared, as printed aids to composition appeared that had many of the
characteristics and uses of the commonplace book. Erasmus insisted that
each student must read his own way through the classics and make his own
collections of turns of phrase and historical examples. But the very work in
which he explained how to make notebooks, On Copiousness, oered sprawl-
ing lists of examples that readers could plunder as they wished: hundreds of
ways to say Thank you for the letter in good Latin, for example, and dozens
more for saying So long as I live, I shall remember you. His Adages, which
appeared in 1508, oered potted essays on thousands of subjects, each inspired
by a pithy and quotable ancient saying.
 The Humanist and the Commonplace Book 149

These books became bestsellers on a pan-European scale; just about half

of the books found in the libraries of students who died while at Cambridge
(as many did in the sixteenth century) were textbooks by Erasmus. And they
informed anyone who could read a bit of Latin that when he wished to advise
that peace was preferable to war, he should say War is pleasant, to those who
havent tried it, that when he wanted to point out that attacking a power-
ful antagonist was unwise, he should say Dont poke the fire with a sword,
and that when he wanted to counsel against precipitate decisions, he should
simply quote the emperor Vespasian: Hasten slowly. When Erasmus mis-
rendered the jar that Pandora opened, according to Hesiod, as a box, his
mistake became proverbial, thanks to endless reuse by writers who first en-
countered the story as schoolboys, in his Adages, in every European language
except Italian. Multiple systematic indicesanother practice learned from
ancient literary bees like Pliny and Gelliusmade the riches of these works
easily accessible, despite their deliberately unsystematic form.
Other textbook authors, less idealistic than Erasmus, assembled similar
materials more systematically. Henricus Arning, for example, compiled a
work entitled Marrow of the Transitions Most Used in Orations for Gymna-
sium students in Livonia. It oered not guidance in wandering the endless
Hercynian forests of Latin literature but model exordia, transitions, and
conclusions, in which the student could fill in the blanks as any occasion
demanded: Though our ancestors ordained many splendid things, none of
these was more splendid, more useful, more prudent, more carefully adapted
to preserve scholarship, more eciently designed to promote the studiousness
of the young, more brilliantly appropriate to preserving the authority of ranks
and orders, than . Theodor Zwinger provided intending scholars
with excerpts from over 500 authors, laid out to form a Theatre of Human Life
more than 5,000 folio pages long. More and more sophisticated indices made
it unnecessary even to read such works through. The commonplace book, in
short, not only served as an educational tool, but also became a published
genre in its own rightone that occasionally threatened to become the early
modern counterpart to such websites as Schoolsucks.com.
The pervasiveness of such compilationsand the universal expectation
that good students would produce more of themhad a powerful impact on
habits of reading and argument. Any regime of commentary tends to atomize
texts, to break them up into little units that can be coherently discussed. But
the commonplace method heightened this tendency. It schooled even think-
ers of the highest originality to think of the works they read not as coherent
150 Anthony Grafton

wholes, but as quarries, from which the modern reader could assemble any
sort of mosaic. No wonder, then, that so many early modern texts pullulate
with facts, examples, quotations, and anecdotes pulled from their contexts,
misrepresented as personal experience and misapplied to the most diverse
ends. After all, any given writer compiled his work, over time, often from his
own notebooks, the composition of which lay years in the past, or the compi-
lations of other men entirely.
Did contemporaries not realize that commonplacing was, itself, a com-
monplace? That accessible printed substitutes enabled idealistic and consis-
tent writers to dispense with taking their own notes, and simply mix and
match existing ingredients? Of course they did. From the fifteenth century
on, in fact, those who revealed their dependence on notebooks found them-
selves challenged, confounded, and humiliated. Angelo Decembrio, the Mila-
nese humanist whose De politia litteraria, a set of dialogues modeled on the
Attic Nights, described the literary world of Guarinos Ferrara, brought an
old schoolmaster on stage who had used notebooks to master all of Virgil.
He challenged all-comers to cite any line from Virgils corpus, and promised
that he would reply with the next one. Urbem, intoned the young poet Tito
Vespasiano Strozzi, quam dicunt Romam, Meliboee, putaviand forced
the schoolmaster to reply Stultus ego. But he, of course, had already become
senilethe natural fate, as Decembrio remarked, of those who spent too
much time with the young.
Erasmus attacked more glamorous prey. He devoted the opening pages
of his satire on the Ciceroniansthe Italians who tried to write a prose in
which every word, phrase, and fact came from the corpus of Ciceroto an
imaginative account of how one of them had ruined his health in his obsession
to capture the textual world of Cicero on paper. The Ciceronian Nosoponus
declares that he has compiled three great notebooks: an alphabetical list of
every word in Cicero, so large that two men can barely lift it; an alphabetical
list of every phrase in Cicero, even larger than the first; and a list of all the
metrical feet that occur at the beginnings and ends of Ciceros sentences. He
documents Ciceros usage by compiling not just every word, but every appear-
ance of it, making careful distinctions between the dierent senses it had in
dierent contexts. He refuses to use not just any word which Cicero had not,
but any form of it which did not figure in the Ciceronian corpus. And he pre-
pares to use these materials by eating only ten currants and three coriander
seeds coated with sugar for dinner, immuring himself in a library in the
inmost part of my house with thick walls, double doors and windows, and all
 The Humanist and the Commonplace Book 151

the cracks stopped carefully with pitch and plaster so that by day scarcely a
ray of light can break through or a soundand spending the whole night on
a single sentence. He even prepares for Latin meditation in the same way.
Boulephorus, his antagonist, makes fun of Nosoponus in many ways,
remarking that if I should prepare to work on Cicero to that extent at night
my wife would burst open the door, would tear the books, and would burn the
pages that are absorbed in Cicero. And what is even more intolerable, while
I was working on Cicero, she would find another lover. But his chief point is
more elegant. The ancient painter Zeuxis, he points out, had to paint a picture
of Helen for the citizens of Croton. To make it a perfect and lifelike example
of womanly charm, he did not use a single model, but from all who oered
themselves to him he chose several who were more excellent than the rest in
order that he might select from each what was most comely. Did this not sug-
gest that seeking a model of eloquence from Cicero alone was misguided? No,
replied Nosoponus: If Zeuxis had found a virgin of such beauty as Cicero,
perhaps he would have been content with a single model. His statement,
of course, condemned him. For it showed that for all his mastery of Ciceros
vocabulary, he had failed to see that Cicero himself was an eclectic stylist, who
recommended in his treatise On Invention that orators emulate Zeuxis. The
master of the notebook method revealed that his command of the texts was
actually lifeless, that he had not understood them fully and could not read
them in a productive way. Worse still, he failed to understand that the world
had changed since Ciceros timesomething that Cicero himself clearly had
understood when he made his productive adaptations from Greek originals.
Richard West made the same point more pithily in 1638:
Their Braines lye all in Notes; Lord! How theyd looke
If they should chance to loose their Table-book!

Yet Erasmus himself was liable to the same criticismas Mutianus Rufus, a
German friend of his, pointed out, when he remarked that Erasmuss Apho-
risms had been over-praised: they were only a device that enabled ignorant
schoolboys to pretend they were learned.
What made a great scholars notebooks dierent from those of an or-
dinary product of Latin school was, first of all, their sheer extentand the
first-hand way in which he had compiled them. Guillaume Bud, the great
French lawyer and contemporary of Erasmus who inspired the creation of
what became the Collge de France, mastered the entire corpus of Greek
by his own eorts. And he did so with notebooksnotebooks on a heroic,
152 Anthony Grafton

Herculean scale. Seven of these survive, in private hands in Geneva. Closely

written, two thousands pages long, these fragments of what must originally
have been an immense literary honeycomb confirm that Bud worked just
as hard as academic legend says (when a servant entered his study to tell
him that his wife thought he should know the house was on fire, he replied,
Kindly remind Mme Bud that domestic aairs are her concern and went
on working). They also show that he took the enterprise of notebook-keeping
with deep seriousness. Text after text, word after word is not only copied
out, but analyzed, in terms of its potential application. And the content of
these entries is as revealing as their form, as a single sample shows. When he
found the adjective demoboros, devourer of the people, in Homers Iliad, he
immediately noted that one could apply it to a king who exploited or enslaved
his subjects. Buds notebooks clearly formed an integral part of his lifelong
eort to create a Christian form of humanism. Even as he read his texts, he
imagined their application, not randomly but purposefullyand thus made
possible the composition of his great treatise On the Passage from Paganism
to Christianity.
In hands like Buds, commonplacing became a creative arta way to
make the classics useful for modern purposes. No one emulated his practices
more eectively than Justus Lipsius, the liar, heretic, and plagiarist who also
became a master teacher of everything from military tactics to Stoic philoso-
phynot to mention the many connections between them. In 1589, he issued
his Politica, a manual of politics in six books that would go through fifteen
editions in Latin between 1589 and 1599 alone (it eventually went through
fifty-four editions) and was translated into Dutch, French, English, Polish,
Spanish, Hungarian, and other languages. Even the most professional politi-
cianslike the hard-bitten Spanish cavalryman Bernardino de Mendoza
might take time o between eorts to assassinate Queen Elizabeth in order
to translate the text (in his case, into Spanish). No wonder, for Lipsius made
his work a systematic training in all the skills that early modern monarchs and
their ministers needed: how to raise armies, quell dissent, impose discipline,
trick an enemy (licitly or illicitly), and deal with religious dissenters. In each
case, Lipsius made his points not by proposing arguments of his own but by
setting out mosaics of quotations from authoritative textsin such a way as to
mix traditional ingredients into an up-to-date, even ultra-modern creation.
Should a state, he asked, tolerate religious dissent? To begin with, he
explained, one must distinguish between public and private dissent. Then one
can lay out the opinions of the ancients in a coherent and useful way:
 The Humanist and the Commonplace Book 153

I say that they sin publicly, who both entertain wrong opinions about God
and the traditional rites and induce others to do so by making distur-
bances. Privately, who entertain the same wrong opinions, but keep them
to themselves. As to the first, the question is, should such men get o
scot free? No! Let them be punished by you lest you be punished in their
place! (Cyprian)
Especially if they create disturbances. Better that one perish than that
unity perish. (Augustine)
The penalty for profanation of religions varies from place to place, but
there always is one. (Seneca)
There is no room for clemency here. Burn, cut, so that a member perish
rather than the whole body. (Cicero)

When challengedas Lipsius was by the Dutch irenicist Dirck Coornhert,

who objected to this apparently fierce demand that heretics be beheaded and
burnthe replied, calmly, that his opponents, even if already old men, needed
to go back to school. They had failed to see that his texts did not mean what
they seemed to. The phrase burn and cut merely recommended a necessary
form of surgeryas was clear from the original context in which Cicero had
used the phrase in his Philippics. Lipsiuss dazzlingly clever version of the com-
monplace booka model demonstration of both how one could pull texts
from their contexts to serve new purposes, and claim to be merely carrying
out a harmless, erudite form of compilation when challengedattracted the
interest of some of the most learned and original writers in Europe. Ben Jon-
son underlined his own copy of the Politica to death, and recycled material
from it in a curious work of his own, Timber, or Discoveries, which also resem-
bled a commonplace book given finished formthe book as honeycomb.
No case reveals the miseries and splendors of the notebook method more
vividly than that of Flacius Illyricus, the southern Slav who created a research
team in Magdeburg, which in turn compiled the first Protestant church his-
tory. This immense enterprisethe first grant-supported eort at historical
teamwork since ancient timesemployed no fewer than seven students, as
Flacius explained,

endowed with reasonable learning and judgment, with fixed grants. They
carefully go through the authors assigned to them and make excerpts from
them, paying close attention to the goals established with great care in our
Method. They carry out what amounts to an anatomy of the authors, and
copy everything out in its place [that is, its commonplace], and do so always
taking up one century at a time.
154 Anthony Grafton

A passionate Protestant and, as this last passage shows, an observer of the

new science practiced by Vesalius, Flacius was also a traditional humanist,
and made clear his own allegiance to the standard fable of the bees:

Next we support two Masters of Arts, men of outstanding maturity,

learning and good judgment. They are presented with the materials that
the hard-working little bees have already collected from flowers in various
places. Their job is to assess, outline, and arrange the materials that have
already been assembled, which should form part of the text, and finally to
work them up into a coherent historical narrative.

The resulting texta century by century history of the churchwas orga-

nized not as a linear narrative but as a honeycomb, each cell containing in-
formation about church doctrine, liturgy, or poor relief at a given timean
extraordinarily original form of historical writing.
But Flaciuss projectand the metaphors that he gaily flung together as
he described it to potential donorsdid not meet with universal enthusiasm.
In Wittenberg, for example, the followers of Melanchthon, who despised
him, seized upon the new and unbecoming metaphor of a public anatomy.
Flaciuss anatomies of historical books, the Wittenbergers cracked, are
well known, and much resented by those whose libraries have experienced
theman allusion to the fabled culter Flacianus which Flacius supposedly
used to gather his materials. Worse still, by bringing into play the corporeal
metaphor of the bees, Flacius and his allies unleashed the scatological imagi-
nations of their opponentsnever something in short supply in the German
professoriate. The Wittenberg critics used an elaborate organic metaphor
against the Institutum. The seven inspectors, they joked, formed the belly of
the beast. The inspectors, like the liver, separated chyme from blood, and
sent the excrementary byproducts along to the masters of arts, as if to the
intestines. As to Flacius and the other inspectorsthey must either be the
brain or the heart of the enterprise: Since Flacius is nothing in history, except
the impresario of the money, we can more fittingly compare him to the heart.
But clearly, if your heart is a great ass, it isnt very heartening to have it.
The Colleges elaborate table of organization, then, was nothing more than
an adaptation of the human anatomy and physiology that its members had
probably seen demonstrated for them on a chart. Like a human body, too, the
College in the end produced nothing but excrement.
The literary honeycomb had a double edgeas Flacius, who liked mix-
ing his metaphors, might well have remarked. Nonetheless, the notebook
 The Humanist and the Commonplace Book 155

played many vital roles in the practice of scholars daily lives and learned
work. It was not just a teaching aid for aspiring Latinists, but a hermeneutical
tool and a locus of research training in its own right. And it lived on at least
until the Enlightenmentwhen the British musical theorist Roger North,
setting out to compile an account of the origins and nature of music and to
draw up a musical grammar and syntax, began by composing what he
called a marginall index: a list of topics which served as headings, under
which he compiled thoughts and information. In the collecting of notes,
he explained, I have cast them into chapters and sectionsan unromantic
account of composition that would have seemed eminently familiar and no
less reasonable to Guarino, Erasmus, and Miltonand thousands of others.
He was certainly not alone.

NOTES
This chapter draws on my keynote address, How Renaissance Students Learned to
Read the Classics: Visions, Techniques, Memories, given as part of the conference Read-
ing and Writing the Pedagogies of the Renaissance: The Student, the Study Materials, and the
Teacher of Music, 14701650, at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, 24
June 2005. It also draws, in part, on my lecture Commonplace Books and the Practices
of Learning in Early Modern Europe, presented at the James Marshall and Marie-Louise
Marie Osborn Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book Library of Yale University, on 12 Sep-
tember 2001.
1. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 84.36. For this and other central sources of the com-
monplace tradition see G. W. Pigman III, Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance, Re-
naissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 132; Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structur-
ing of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Earle Havens, Commonplace
Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century
(New Haven: Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, distributed by the University
Press of New England, 2001), 1316.
2. Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1 praef. 5.
3. Pliny the Younger, Epistulae, 3.5.10.
4. Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1 praef. 6.
5. See, e.g., Claude Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Ann Moyer, Musica Scientia: Musical Scholarship in the
Italian Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Raaele Lippo Brandolini, On
Music and Poetry = De musica et poetica: 1513, ed. Ann Moyer (Tempe: Arizona Center for
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001).
6. See Baxandalls classic studies, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; 2nd edition 1988), and Giotto and the Orators (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Both oer rich insight into the humanists ways of compiling
and using information, especially about the Latin language.
7. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, praef. 2.
8. Remigio Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne secoli xiv e xv, ed. Eugenio
Garin (Florence: Sansoni, 1967), II: 2425. Poggio wrote: Agellium scilicet truncum et
mancum et cui finis sit pro principio.
156 Anthony Grafton

9. See generally Peter K. Marshall, Aulus Gellius, in Texts and Transmission: A

Survey of Latin Classics, ed. Leighten D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 176180;
and, for the wider context, Hans Baron, Aulus Gellius in the Renaissance: His Influence
and a Manuscript from the School of Guarino, in From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni (Chica-
go: Published for the Newberry Library by the University of Chicago Press, 1968), 196215,
though Barons ascription of the Newberry MS to Guarino is to be treated with reserve;
Guarino da Verona, Epistolario, ed. Remigio Sabbadini, 3 vols. (Venice, 19151919), III:
307; Sabbadini, La scuola et gli studi di Guarino Guarini Veronese (Catania, 1896), repr. in
Sabbadini, Guariniana, ed. M. Sancipriano (Turin: Bottega dErasmo, 1964), 11819.
10. Guarino, Epistolario, II: 26970.
11. Battista Guarino, A Program of Teaching and Learning, in Humanist Educational
Treatises, ed. and trans. Craig Kallendorf (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2002), 295; original on 294: Sed omnino illud teneant, ut semper ex iis quae legunt conen-
tur excerpere, sibique persuadeant, quod Plinius dictitare solebat, nullum esse librum tam
malum ut non in aliqua parte prosit (Ep. 3.5.10).
12. Rudolf Pfeier, Kchenlatein, Philologus 86 (1931): 45559, repr. in Pfeier, Aus-
gewhlte Schriften, ed. Winfried Bhler (Munich: Beck, 1960), 18187.
13. See esp. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, the excellent summary in Havens,
Commonplace Books, and Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces
(New York: Pageant Press, 1962).
14. Erasmus, De duplici rerum ac verborum copia, ed. Betty Knott, Opera omnia 1.6
(Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988), 26061.
15. The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. S. A. Pears (Lon-
don: W. Pickering, 1845), 201.
16. Bodleian Library MS Casaubon 16, fol. 5v: Quicquid legis in Excerptorum libros
referre memineris: haec unica ratio labenti memoriae succurrendi. Scitum enim illud est,
Tantum quisque scit, quantum memoria tenet. Cf. Thomas Fullers remark of 1642: Ad-
venture not all thy learning in one bottom, but divide it betwixt thy Memory and thy Note-
books . . . A Common-place-book contains many Notions in garrison, whence the owner
may draw out an army into the field on competent writing. Quoted by Peter Beal, Notes
in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book, in New Ways of Looking at
Old Texts, ed. William Hill (Binghamton, N.Y.: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993),
13147, at 132.
17. Beal, Notes in Garrison, 145.
18. Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 15591614, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1892), 429.
19. Jan Amos Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus, trans. C. Hoole (London: Mearne,
1672), 200201.
20. Celio Calcagnini, Opera aliquot (Basel: Froben, 1544), 26.
21. Pedanius Dioscorides, De re medica, ed. M. Adriani (Florence, 1518); Princeton Uni-
versity Library R126 .D6 1518q.
22. Calcagnini, Opera, 26.
23. British Library MS Add. 6038; see William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers
in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), chap. 7.
24. Sherman, Used Books, 148.
25. Noel Malcolm, Thomas Harrison and his Ark of Studies: An Episode in the His-
tory of the Organization of Knowledge, The Seventeenth Century 19/2 (October 2004): 196
232.
26. Ann Blair, Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550
1700, Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 1128; and her Note-Taking as an Art of
Transmission, Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 85107.
27. Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W.
 The Humanist and the Commonplace Book 157

Garrod, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19081958), 9: 479; see Frances Yates, The Art
of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), and Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della
memoria (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1995).
28. Erwin Panofsky and Dora Panofsky, Pandoras Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythi-
cal Symbol (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956).
29. Ann Blair, Annotating and Indexing Natural Philosophy, in Books and the Sciences
in History, ed. Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 6989.
30. Heinrich Arningk, Medulla variarum earumque in orationibus usitatissimarum con-
nexionum (Altenburg: Ottonem Michaelem, 1652), 11; Walter Ong, Commonplace Rhapso-
dy: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger and Shakespeare, in Classical Influences on European Culture,
AD 15001700, ed. Robert R. Bolgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 11118.
31. Ann Blair, Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book,
Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 54151; and Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean
Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
32. Angelo Decembrio, De politia literaria, ed. Norbert Witten (Munich: K. G. Saur,
2002), 5.58, 39495.
33. Erasmus, Dialogus Ciceronianus, ed. Pierre Mesnard, Opera omnia 1.2 (Amsterdam:
North-Holland, 1971); Izora Scott, Controversies over the Interpretation of Cicero as a Model
for Style (New York: Columbia University, 1910).
34. See Beal, Notes in Garrison (note 16, above).
35. Mutianus Rufus, Briefwechsel, ed. Carl Krause (Kassel: A Freyschmidt, 1885), 392.
36. Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1997), 16972.
37. Anthony Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2001), 237. See Ann Moss, The Politica of Justus Lipsius and the Commonplace
Book, Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 42137.
38. For a facsimile, see Robert Evans, Jonson, Lipsius, and the Politics of Renaissance
Stoicism (Wakefield, N.H.: Longwood, 1992).
39. De ecclesiastica historia quae Magdeburgi contexitur narratio (Wittenberg: n.p., 1558),
[sig. A iiij verso]B[recto]. On Flaciuss enterprise and its outcome, see Heinz Scheible, Die
Entstehung der Magdeburger Zenturien (Gtersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1966); Marina Hartmann,
Humanismus und Kirchenkritik: Matthias Flacius Illyricus als Erforscher des Mittelalters
(Stuttgart: Thorbeck, 2001); and Greg Lyon, Baudouin, Flacius, and the Plan for the
Magdeburg Centuries, Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 25372.
40. De ecclesiastica historia, sig. FFv.
41. Roger North, The Musicall Grammarian 1728, ed. Mary Chan and Jamie Kassler
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 65.
 Part Three

Renaissance Materials
and Contexts$
 9
Musical Commonplaces
in the Renaissance$
PETER SCHUBERT

Renaissance readers, writers, and speakers were well-trained in textual

recycling, and one of their most powerful and pervasive tools was the
commonplace booka collection of notes from reading and other sources
that the compiler might want to recall, and reuse, at a later date. While
the structure and purpose of these volumes varied enormously, they were
distinguished from random collections of quotations (in theory at least)
by being gathered under conventional headings called loci communes or
common places. . . . The headings could be tailored to an individuals
personal or professional needs, suggested by teachers, or bought in blank-
books with printed headings and decorative bordersand readers who
did not have the patience or the resources to gather their own entries
could even buy a book with the quotations already printed or written in.

Although the tradition of commonplace books in Renaissance literary edu-

cation has received serious attention, its place in music is less well known.
This may be because we have only two treatises that contain collections of
musical examples explicitly called commonplaces. The first, by Francisco de
Montanos, is the Arte de musica teorica y pratica (1592); the second, which
draws heavily on the first, is the famous El melopeo y maestro by Pedro Cerone
(1613). Each author prints many four-voice musical examples that the young
162 Peter Schubert

composer is to use as his own. These collections, which are the focus of
this study, are like the many printed phrase-books in which a young writer
would find pithy sayings (sententiae) from classical authors to use in the pro-
cess called imitatio. For examples of good Latin usage, or for poetic models,
the compiler would turn to Cicero or other Latin authors; for material for
sermons, to the Bible or the Church Fathers; for theological arguments, to
sententiae from Luther and Melanchthon.
By calling their musical examples commonplaces, Montanos and
Cerone introduce music into this tradition of textual recycling. While the
making of commonplace books has already raised fundamental questions
about the organization of thought into dierent levels of abstraction, and
about plagiarism and intellectual property, we now have to consider whether
and how music can be treated in the same way as legal precedent, stories,
and proverbs. In this study I will apply contemporaneous principles of com-
monplace organization to the musical examples in these collections, to show
that imitative sections of polyphonic pieces in which voices enter successively
with the soggetto (what we have traditionally lumped together as points of
imitation), are actually several distinct presentations of thematic material.
And finally, just as readers noted the rhetorical devices they found as they ran
through the letters of Cicero, in the final section of this study we will take
Cerones advice and look to the opening-points of the motets in Palestrinas
First Book of Four-Voice Motets for these types of thematic presentation.

NOTEBOOKS

The commonplace book is the primary tool of the notebook and heading
method, in which a writer or speaker jots down for future use particularly
good bits he finds in his reading. The most durable emblem of this practice is
Senecas famous image of the bees: We should follow, men say, the example
of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing
honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in;
these bees, as our Vergil says, pack close the flowing honey, / and swell their
cells with nectar sweet. Petrarch, concerned with the dangers of plagiarism
in imitation, repeated Senecas metaphor of the bees, being careful to distin-
guish modeling or imitation from mere quotation or reproduction.
Some authors of music treatises advocated the same kind of notebook
collecting. Jessie Ann Owens describes Johann Froschs advice: Near the end
of the chapter, Frosch recommended that the student study the compositions
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 163

of good composers and select the best phrases to be assembled in a collection

so that when the need for them will come to you, you will have them ready,
which you will adapt to your ways and in time insert into your own song.
Lodovico Zacconi is another who recommended copying excerpts from seri-
ous authors and working out new parts to them.

PUBLISHED MUSIC COLLECTIONS

Cristle Collins Judd is the first musicologist to have examined music treatises
in light of the commonplace tradition, although the treatises she looks at do
not explicitly associate themselves with commonplace tradition. She exam-
ines those sections of treatises that deal with mode, where musical examples
(or references to pieces) from repertoire are grouped under modal headings.
Like literary commonplace book compilers, who favored the best authors,
her theorists looked to respected composers and usually credited them with
their contributions, since their names would carry authority. However, dem-
onstrating the ways in which Glareans framing of examples broadly reflects
the precepts of Erasmuss De copia, she notes that Glarean also includes
inferior music because he wants to contrast the examples of such superior
symphonetae as Josquin with the less beautiful songs of others, to aid the
reader in judgments.
Mode is not the only source of headings for musical examples. Joachim
Burmeisters catalogue of rhetorical devices is organized as a series of head-
ings under which are placed references to musical examples from respected
composers (mostly Lassus). Adriano Banchieris cento cadenze are appar-
ently to be copied directly or modeled after, and Girolamo Diruta reprinted
a selection of fifty of Gabriel Fattorinis 320 accadenze, varied accompani-
ments to a short cantizans cadential motion. Like notebook collections, none
of these examples is ordered in any explicit way, and thus none meets one of
the criteria for commonplace books.
Instead of relying on famous composers, some authors of music treatises
(like Banchieri and Fattorini) printed their own examples. Although these
might be lacking in the authority of examples by superior symphonetae, they
oer the advantage of responding to a particular pedagogical need in a more
economical format than citing a whole piece, as Glarean did. Erasmus con-
firms that some of the things collected need not be the product of reading,
but may be made up: There is a class of sententiae, not that, indeed, devised
by writers, but by us for the purpose of the present work. The musical
164 Peter Schubert

examples in the two commonplace treatises under consideration here are

likewise not credited, and thus are not cited for their authority. In addi-
tion, these two published collections dier from those mentioned above in
that they are labeled as, and organized as, commonplace books, and employ
a variety of headings.

MAKING A LITER ARY COMMONPLACE BOOK

In order to appreciate the significance of Montanoss calling his musical ex-

amples commonplaces, it is necessary to examine some of the many meanings
of the terms that coexisted in the sixteenth century. We can get a good idea of
these meanings from Erasmuss De Copia (1512), a work which is acknowledged
to be an important influence on the commonplace books that came after it.
His principles will help us interpret the rich associations that are packed into
our music treatises.
In his discussion of collecting examples from ones reading, Erasmus says:

. . . whoever has resolved to read through every type of writer (for he

who wishes to be considered learned must do that thoroughly once in his
life) will first collect as many topics (locos) as possible. He will take them
partly from classes of vices and virtues, partly from those things that are
especially important in human aairs, and that are accustomed to come
up most often in persuasion; and it will be best to arrange these accord-
ing to the principle of anity and opposition. For those that are related
to one another automatically suggest what should follow, and the same
thing is true of opposites. Suppose, for example, the first general classifica-
tion (primus locus) is Piety and Impiety. Under the former heading will be
placed the several particular kinds. First there is piety toward God; second,
toward the fatherland . . . The next title (titulus) might be, if it seems suit-
able, Fidelity; you may divide this into its particular kinds (species).

Here locus, which seems to be synonymous with titulus, refers to general

topic headings that are to be subdivided, and under which examples will be
filed. After listing other such headings, with their opposites for easy memo-
rization, Erasmus continues: These can be run through all the places (Haec
per omnes locos tractari possunt). Here the meaning of locus is dierent. It has
origins in the commonplaces of Aristotles Topics, where it refers to questions
that one asks about a subject in order to make arguments or to destroy those
of ones opponent. These categories of inquiry, which include definition,
genus, property, and accident, can be applied to arguments about any subject.
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 165

Thus when your opponent asserts something, you can investigate whether
he has made a mistake in defining it, whether he has confused property and
accident, or whether he has included it in the wrong genus. The list of such
lines of inquiry gets longer when they are used in rhetorical debate. Ciceros
list includes definition, enumeration of parts, etymology, conjugates, genus,
species, similarity, dierence, contraries, adjuncts, antecedents, consequents,
contradiction, cause, eect, comparison.
Erasmus chooses a topic, piety, to run through the places. He says that we
should inquire: First, what piety is [definition]; how it diers from the other
virtues [dierence, contraries]; what is peculiar to it [property]; in what ways
it is preserved or violated [adjuncts]; by what things it is strengthened [cause]
or corrupted; what it profits man [eect]. These investigations will broaden
the field, making it easier to locate useful examples in ones reading. Returning
to the source of headings, he says, those general classifications selected apart
from the vices and virtues are partly exempla and partly commonplaces. His
examples of the former consist of bald facts, particularities like extraordinary
longevity, . . . sudden changes in fortune, sudden death, voluntary death, un-
natural death, . . . subtlety of intellect, extraordinary physical strength . . .
Exempla also include historical occurrences like the death of Socrates, or
natural phenomena like the mating habits of elephants.
For Erasmus, it seems that commonplaces, in contrast to exempla, are
more elaborate propositions or arguments. With this, locus has acquired yet
a new meaning, one dierent from the topic headings and lines of inquiry we
saw above. Moss notes that the commonplace as a proposition is a new develop-
ment in the early sixteenth century: The examples of commonplace-headings
listed by Erasmus take the form of propositions (sententiae) or comparisons
(comparativa) susceptible of debate . . . By calling them loci communes, Eras-
mus has brought the notebook, or, rather, commonplace-book, firmly into the
ambit of rhetorical and dialectical discourse . . . Likewise, for Melancthon,
commonplaces, now indistinguishable from general heads, capita or tituli,
are much more tightly related to the world of things. His headings include
Tyrant, Rebellion, Mercy, Cruelty, Peace, War . . . These are clearly what
Erasmus meant by things that are especially important in human aairs.
This type of commonplace is usually formulated as a complete sentence: It
makes a very great dierence to what studies you become accustomed as a
boy . . . He gives twice who gives quickly. His own conduct determines the
fortune of every man . . . war attractive to the inexperienced . . . Many of
these commonplaces are in fact his famous adages.
166 Peter Schubert

Erasmuss method can work from the bottom up or from the top down.
The latter method begins with headings, and under these headings one places
things found in ones reading. He gives instructions for constructing imagi-
nary nests in which to classify ones findings:
Then after you have collected as many headings as will be sucient and
arranged them in the order you wish, and have placed the appropriate
divisions under each, and to the divisions have added the commonplaces
or sententiae, then whatever you come across in any author, especially if it
is very noteworthy, you will immediately mark down in its proper place
whether it be a fable, an apologue, an exemplum, a strange occurrence, a
sententia, a witty or otherwise unusual expression, an adage, a metaphor, or
a parable. This method will also have the eect of imprinting what you read
more deeply on your mind, as well as accustoming you to utilizing the riches
of your reading . . . Finally, whenever the occasion demands, the stu of
speech will be ready to hand, as if safe nests had been built, whence you can
take what you wish.

He reminds us not to assemble too much under a single heading: But, lest
a disorderly mass of materials produce confusion, it will be useful to divide
more general classifications into several subdivisions . . .
We should not assume that compilers had all the headings ready in ad-
vance, as labels on prefabricated cells in a literary honeycomb, when they
started utilizing the riches of their reading. They could also start at the
bottom of the hierarchy with an exemplum, a fact, phenomenon, or specific
case involving a historical figure. Erasmus uses the story of the death of So-
crates to show how several commonplaces can be derived from an exemplum.
Moreover, the death of Socrates provides not only an exemplum that death
should not be feared by the good man, since Socrates drank the hemlock with
such a cheerful countenance, but also that virtue is liable to injury from envy
and is not safe when surrounded by evil men . . . We can work from the
top down or vice versa because commonplaces and exempla are both compos-
ite items: Erasmus takes dierent episodes from the Death of Socrates and
draws further commonplaces from each of them. Each commonplace can have
more than one exemplum under it, and any exemplum can have more than one
commonplace derived from it.
The fact that the term locus can be used both for the items collected
and the headings under which those items are collected is illustrated by the
history of Erasmuss famous Adagia. This collection, which contains some
commonplaces from De Copia, is so enormous that Erasmus considered or-
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 167

ganizing it with headings, but did not, thinking that part of its appeal was the
entertaining mishmash of variety. In describing the origins of the book, he
says he accumulated at random from a few days reading some sort of collec-
tion of adages (sylvam aliquam adagiorum) . . . In the commentary on The
labors of Hercules, he elaborates:

I saw too that it would be possible to introduce some sort of order, if I had
put forward as many headings as possible, following the principle of like
and unlike, opposite and closely akin, and had assigned each proverb to
some supposed proper class. But this I deliberately did not do, for several
reasons. Partly because in miscellaneous materials of this kind it seemed
to me somehow right and proper that there should be no order; partly
because I saw that if I had crammed everything that expressed the same
opinion into the same class (so to call it), the resulting uniformity would
be a source of tedium for the reader, who would cry out periodically in his
disgust Twice served cabbage is death and Corinthus son of Jove is in the
book; partly because I was daunted by the size of the task. Why not tell the
truth? I saw clearly that that could not be done without rewriting the whole
book afresh from head to heel . . .

The Herculean task of arranging the adages under headings was taken
up by compilers, who did not fear repeated servings of cabbage. Moss calls
this procedure commonplacing, and cites its almost immediate application:
The Adagia were indexed for the Venetian edition of 1508, presumably under
the direction of Erasmus himself. The system is closely related to the one he
recommended shortly later in De Copia. General heads are arranged by op-
posites and association . . . for example: Divitiae; Paupertas; Munerum cor-
ruptela; Forma, deformitas . . . (wealth, poverty, corruption by money, form,
deformity). In sum, the term commonplace can refer both to the heading
and to the thing collected under it; it can be a single abstraction or a more
composite proposition, proverb, lesson, or maxim; it can be drawn out of an
exemplum or it can be used to label a box to put exempla in; and it can refer to
dierent angles from which we question an argument.

MUSICAL COMMONPLACE BOOKS

Can music be treated the same way as the headings, propositions, and senten-
tiae described above? Judd answers no, arguing that music is not a legitimate
member of the commonplace tradition. Although treatises like Heydens and
Glareans contain examples grouped under headings (the names or numbers
168 Peter Schubert

of the modes), and thus might deserve to be called commonplace books, she
does not grant them that status because the medium to be collected is music,
not words. The Munich partbooks and Tschudis Liederbuch share certain
features of commonplace books, but cannot be commonplace books per se
because while modal indicators can function as loci they must, of necessity,
stand outside the loci communes tradition. The medium of music is dierent
from the medium of the headings: Erasmus is writing about writing (words)
and there are a number of ways in which his prescriptions for gathering and
framing may and may not apply to musical notation or to other iconic or
symbolic representations. The notebook Erasmus describes is a model for
production in kind.
However, we know that in addition to the self-styled commonplaces of
Montanos and Cerone there existed other commonplace books that collected
non-verbal items like symbols or emblems. Such items can be collected, but
they cannot be placed at dierent levels in a hierarchy. The musical example,
like the emblem, will be a specific exemplum at the lowest level. Yet the head-
ings above a given example may be divided and subdivided.
Because Montanos calls his musical examples commonplaces (lugares
communes) and groups them under headings, he invites the reader to think
along the lines of categorizing, subdividing, and even adding more examples.
So, to truly participate in the commonplace tradition, we must run music
through the places, asking questions that lead to new headings under which
we could collect more examples. What will these questions be for music,
which has no semantic content? Definition, genus, cause, eect, and so on,
cannot be applied very well. Nor, in the case of Montanos, can we apply modal
commonplaces (almost all his examples are Dorian, and he says that they
may be transposed). Rather, we can use places that are based on formal
structure. Adding subheadings under Montanoss headings is the project of
the following pages.

MONTANOS

Montanos thinks his Arte de Musica theorica y pratica consists entirely of

commonplaces. The books index is headed: Tabla de los lugares mas essenciales
contenidos en este seys tratados de musica (Table of the most essential places
contained in these six treatises on music). The sixth treatise, called Tratado
ultimo de los lugares communes (Last treatise, on commonplaces), begins with a
rundown of the contents of the previous five. Unlike Glareans examples from
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 169

Josquin, which are not meant to be stolen wholesale, Montanos says that com-
monplaces are for everyone to use as his own. This is expressed in the following
sententia: loca communia sunt illa, quibus generaliter ut propria utuntur, which
appears in italics and is translated into the vernacular as well: lugares comunes
son aquellos, de los quales generalmente usan como proprios (commonplaces are
those things one generally uses as ones own). This sentence shows that the
student is not to feel bad about copying them.
After he has summarized the contents of the previous five tratados (add-
ing a few things that he had passed over earlier so as not to burden the begin-
ner), only then does he embark on the many musical examples that he has
gathered under his headings:

MONTANOSS COMMONPLACE HEADINGS

1. entradas with one passo
2. entradas with two passos
3. fabordones for natural voices
4. fabordones for equal voices
5. commonplaces for when the text calls for widely spaced voices
6. commonplaces for when the text calls for closely spaced voices
7. phrygian cadences (with the semitone in the tenorizans voice)
8. sustenida cadences (with the semitone in the cantizans voice)
9. fenecimientos (cadential extensions)
10. commonplaces for equal voices

The first two distinguish how many head-motives there are in the open-
ing; the next two are fabordones divided by register; the fifth and sixth are
for text painting; the next three are types of cadence; and the last is for equal
voices, but not fabordones. Some of these, like the cadences and fabordones, are
commonly found in treatises, but the fifth and sixth commonplaces for when
the text calls for widely spaced and closely spaced consonances are unique
to this treatise. The musical example of the former sets the text esto circa nos
(stay close to us), and the distance between outer voices never exceeds a
tenth; for the latter, the text is viam longissimam (the longest way), and the
outer voices are between a twelfth and a nineteenth apart.

POINTS OF IMITATION
The openings (entradas) will be the focus of the rest of this study. Introducing
these, Montanos says A good discourse can be expected from a good begin-
ning according to the knowledge of the composer, implying that his openings
170 Peter Schubert

EXAMPLE 9.1. Montanos no. 23, Cerone no. 2.

provide such good beginnings. He arranges them under only two headings:
those in which each voice sounds the same melodic fragment (passothe
word refers to what we now call a head-motive), and those that begin with
two voices sounding two dierent melodies right away (that is, two dierent
melodies or passos).
In order to understand these headings, we must refer to Montanoss ad-
vice in the section of Arte called treatise on composition, that once you can
compose a duo, you can make a four-voice piece out of it by repeating it in
another pair of voices, adding continuations to the first duo. The term duo
here means two melodies sounded together as a combination, producing a
characteristic succession of vertical intervals. Obviously all four-voice Renais-
sance polyphony is replete with duos, but Montanos explicitly bases four-
voice composition on those two-voice combinations that repeat. Although
Montanoss principle of repeating the duo applies whether the opening duo
is imitative or non-imitative, it is easiest to see how the duo functions as the
basis for four-voice composition by looking closely at the entradas with two
passos.

THE ENTRADA WITH TWO PASSOS

In example 9.1, the two passos appear first in the soprano and tenor (the so-
prano has one passo, the tenor the other). I refer to this as a non-imitative
(NIm) presentation because there is no imitation within the duo. This duo,
with the vertical-interval succession that is particular to it (8-6-3-5-6 boxed
in the example), is repeated a fourth lower by the alto and bass. Meanwhile
the soprano and tenor continue with good intervals, that is, enriching the
sound by adding two dierent notes to the bare E octave that begins the
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 171

TABLE 9.1. Cerones commonplaces with two passos.

Montanoss nos. in column 6

R = order of pcs. reversed

2nd duo
Cerone Free 1st duo varied by Comment Montanos
1 AS -8 22
2 TS -4 23
3 TB ic10 +3/ +12 pc. other than octave, 4th, or 5th 24
4 ST ic10 +3/ -8 pc. other than octave, 4th, or 5th 19
5 AS -8 20
6 AS -8 21
7 ST ic8 1/ -8 T=A 16
8 BA 4 17
9 TB 8 18
10 AS ic5 -4/ -8 10
11 ST ic12 +5/ -8 11
12 AS -8 13
13 TA 5/ -4 Vert. ints. compounded 12
14 TA ic12 +8/ -5 pcs. other than octave, 5th, or 4th 15
15 BS 1 S = A, T = B 4
16 BA 4 5
17 AB 4 6
18 x AT dierent time relation; R 7
19 SA -8 8
20 AS -5 T & A overlap 9
21 AT 8/ +1 T = B, vert. ints. compounded 1
22 AS -5 2
23 BT ic8 +8/ 1 T=A
24 BS ic8 +4/ -5 3
25 BT 8 later 3rd entry of one passo
26 x TB 2 dierent points; R
27 x SA dierent time relation
28 AS -8
29 x SA dierent time relation
30 x TS melodic inversion &
rhythmic alteration
31 BT 8
32 x TA dierent time relation
33 x TB 2 dierent points; R
34 BT 8
172 Peter Schubert

EXAMPLE 9.2. Montanos no. 16, Cerone no. 45.

second duo. This conforms to Zarlinos prescription for vertical sonorities,

and illustrates composing against a two-voice soggetto. The seamlessness
that characterizes Renaissance style is assured in this example by the smooth
melodic continuations in the soprano and tenor, particularly the tied note in
the soprano part that makes a dissonant suspension.
Table 9.1 collects and summarizes all of the two-passo openings in both
Cerone and Montanos; Cerones numbering appears in the leftmost column
and Montanoss in the rightmost column. In this way it is clear which ex-
amples Cerone borrowed from Montanos, how he reordered them, and which
new ones he added. The two-passo openings could be subdivided into several
categories based on which pair of voices begins (column 3), how far the duo
is transposed when it reappears in the other pair of voices, and whether the
second duo appears in invertible counterpoint (column 4). However, we will
not dally here, in order to spend more time on the one-passo opening, which
is more widely used.

THE ENTRADA WITH ONE PASSO

In this type, all four voices sound the same passo in turn. In example 9.2 the
duo is made of a brief fuga sciolta at the fifth below after a semibreve. The imi-
tation breaks o into free counterpoint after five notes, and the tenor entrance
initiates a repetition of the opening duo an octave lower. For the purpose of
showing the structural module, we can disregard the distinction between
imitative and free counterpoint, and merely label the vertical intervals as we
did in example 9.1; this makes it easy to see how the tenor and bass replicate
what the soprano and alto did.
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 173

The abundance of one-passo openings is apparently undierentiated in

both Montanos and Cerone. However, lest a disorderly mass of materials
produce confusion, as Erasmus put it, we could introduce subdivisions based
on which voice starts, on pitch interval of imitation, on whether imitation is
above or below, etc. But by far the most fruitful source of places through
which we can draw music in order to extract commonplace headings is the
time-interval of imitation; a closer look at the openings in which each voice
begins with the same passo reveals two large groups based on the time-interval
separating the entries. These groups are among the five presentation types I
identified in my article on Palestrina.
Example 9.2 is based on a simple repetition structure, in which the imi-
tative duos are paired; we will refer to it as Imitative Duo, abbreviated ID
in the tables. Example 9.2 shows the time-intervals t1, t2, and t3 bracketed
beneath the score. The time-interval that forms the first duo is replicated
between the voices of the second pair of entries. The module results from
the two melodies in the same time relationship. The time-interval between
the second and third entries is usually longer, as here; when it is shorter, we
call it compressed (see column 8 of table 9.2).
The second large group is a special category of one-passo openings, in
which the first three or four entries are separated by the same time-interval.
We call this Periodic Entries, abbreviated PEn in the tables. As in the pair
of duos, the module (i.e., the contrapuntal combination) is what happens after
the first time-interval of imitation, and so in Periodic Entries, the length of
the module is equal to the time-interval of imitation.
Although there are several ways to present Periodic Entries, only two
appear frequently among our commonplaces. In one type, the duo created
by the second and third entries is a double-counterpoint transformation of
that created by the first and second entries. This technique is called the in-
vertible canon opening. Seven entradas conform to this structural pattern
(nos. 810, 34, 42, 43, and 45). The other type uses tonal answer in order to
accommodate the new pitch interval of imitation (nos. 38 and 46tonal ans
in column 8).
An example of invertible canon is shown in example 9.3. The module con-
sists of the first three notes of the theme in the soprano against the 4th7th
notes in the alto, which we can call the accompaniment. The combination
is repeated between the tenor and soprano; that is, the same two melodic
fragments are sounded together, but the 4th7th notes of the alto are moved
174 Peter Schubert

EXAMPLE 9.3. Montanos no. 42, Cerone no. 16.

up a fifth, while the first three notes of the soprano are transposed down an
octave, resulting in invertible counterpoint at the twelfth. The extensive use
of invertible counterpoint in imitative openings is not surprising, given its use
by young improvisers, but not much attention has been paid to it.

EXAMPLE 9.4. Montanos no. 38, Cerone no. 19.

An example of tonal answer is shown in example 9.4. Here successive

entries come at the fourth below and then the fifth below after the same time-
interval (two semibreves). The accompanimental continuation of the passo is
altered too, to accommodate the tonal answer (marked with an asterisk).
Table 9.2 summarizes the contents of Montanoss forty-eight openings
with one passo. The seven examples of free imitation are tallied in column 2
with the opening pitches of each entry. Imitative Duos are likewise tallied in
column 3, and Periodic Entries in column 4. The pitch interval of imitation
between the voices of the first duo is shown in column 5. The means by which
the second duo is varied (transposed, etc.) is shown in column 6. Time-inter-
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 175

TABLE 9.2. Montanoss commonplaces with one passo.

R = order of pcs. reversed

di. cont. = no repeated module

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
# Free ID PEn imit. var. time ints (sb) Comment
1 a'd'-ad -5 -8 1 3 1 2 1&2 sim. 1st sp.
2 a'd'-ad -5 -8 1 3 1
3 a'd'-ad -5 -8 1 2 1
4 da-d'a' 5 8 1 4 1 4&6 sim. 1st sp.
5 b'e'-be -5 1 2 3
6 da-d'a' 5 8 1 4 1
7 a'a-d'd -8 -5 1 5 1
8 d'd-aA -8 ic12 1 1 1 8&10 sim. 1st sp.
9 gd'-g'd'' 5 dc2 1 1 1 alt. 4 + 5 (see fn. 50)
10 d'd-aA -8 ic12 1 1 1
11 '-c'c'' 8 5 1 2 1 1.5
12 a'a-d'd -8 5 1 4 1
13 a'd'-ad -5 -8 2 3 2 Cf. nos. 1&2
14 da-d'a' 5 8 1 3 1 Cf. nos. 4&6, 1721
15 da-d'a' 5 8 1 2 1 Cf. nos. 4&6
16 a'd'-ad -5 -8 1 4 1 2 Cf. no. 30
17 da-d'a' 5 8 1 2 1 Nos. 1721 sim. 1st sp.
18 da-d'a' 5 8 1 5 1
19 da-d'a' 5 8 1 3 1
20 d'a'-da 5 -8 1 2 1
21 da-d'a' 5 8 1 3 1
22 a'd'-ad -5 -8 1 3 1
23 a'd'-ad -5 -8 2 2* 2
24 a'd'-ad -5 -8 1 3 1 1 ID + PEn; cf. no.2
25 d'a-dA -4 -8 1 2 1 Ave maris stella
26 a'e'-ae -4 -8 1 2 1
27 ae-a'e' -4 8 1 3 1
28 ae-a'e' -4 8 1 2 1
29 d'a-dA -4 -8 1 3 1
30 e'a'-ae 4 1 3* 3* Cf. no. 16, di. cont., R
31 ae'-da' NIm + ID
32 b'e'-be -5 1 2 1* 3 Altered
33 ea-e'a' 4 8 1 3 1
34 d'a'-ad 5 ic12 2 2 6 2 PEn + ID, R
35 a'd'-ad -5 -8 2 3 2
36 a'd'-ad -5 -8 2 1 2 2* Compressed
37 d'a'-da 5 -8 3 2 3
38 d'a-dA -4 -8 2 2 2 tonal answer
39 d'a'-ad 2 2* 2* di. cont., R
(continued on next page)
176 Peter Schubert

TABLE 9.2. (continued)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
# Free ID PEn imit. var. time ints (sb) Comment
40 da-d'a' 3 1 2
41 d'a'-ad 2* 2* 3 di. cont., R
42 d'a'-ad ic12 2 2 3 R
43 d'd-aA -8 ic12 2 2 2
44 a'e'-ae -4 -8 2 1 2 Compressed
45 g'c'-c''g -5 ic12 2 2 3 2 PEn + ID, R
46 d'a-dA -4 -8 2 2 2 tonal ans; cf. no. 38
47 a'd'-ad -5 -8 2 1 2 Compressed
48 d''g-d'g -5 -8 1 2

vals are shown in column 7 (for Imitative Duos, the first and third columns will
have the same number; for Periodic Entries, the same numbers will appear in
adjacent columns). Sometimes the same time-interval in two columns is not
associated with modular repetition because the continuation after the head
motive is dierent in dierent voices. Those time-intervals are marked with
asterisks and di cont in column 8. This oers the possibility of reversing the
pitch classes of the first duo in the second (labeled R in column 8).
The criteria at the heads of the columns in table 9.2 are places into
which we have subdivided the openings, commonplacing them as editors did
in the Adages of Erasmus published in Hanover in 1617 (see note 34), group-
ing all the Imitative Duos together, all the Periodic Entries, and all the free
counterpoint, in their own columns under the appropriate headings.
Even though he does not provide the explicit headings used in table 9.2,
Montanos shows that he has indeed subdivided his openings according to
such criteria by grouping likes together. For instance, in the first half of the
series of forty-eight, the only pitch intervals of imitation used are the fifth
and the octave; in the second half, the fourth accounts for ten of twenty-four.
The time-interval of imitation between the voices of the first duo also reveals
conscious grouping: it is one semibreve in thirty-one of the first thirty-three;
by contrast, among the last fifteen, all but one have a time-interval of two
semibreves or more. Thus, the shorter time-intervals and imitation at the fifth
predominate in the first half of the collection, while longer time-intervals and
imitation at the fourth are reserved for the end. Furthermore, Imitative Duos
account for twenty-five of the first twenty-nine openings, while there are pro-
portionally far fewer (seven) in the remaining nineteen; most of the openings
in the second half are either free or periodic. The preponderance of reversals
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 177

of pitch classes of opening notes (R) and compressed presentations are

likewise reserved for the later examples. The grouping, although not perfectly
consistent, suggests fine subdivision, and the progression of diculty and/or
complexity implies a pedagogical intention.
If we used other criteria for categorization (which voice starts, whether
invertible counterpoint is used, whether tonal answer is used, etc.), one ex-
emplum might fit under several more headings. In order to respond to that
problem, and to make the examples easier to find, one could again follow the
practices of the compilers of the Hanover 1617 edition of Erasmuss Adagia,
and number the examples and have separate indices for each criterion. Each
search term could be followed by a list of numbers indicating the example
to be looked up. With these materials so organized, the teacher could pro-
vide his student one type at a time to copy, or adapt whenever the occasion
demands as Erasmus said.
At the end of the seventy-two examples, Montanos adds instructions for
adapting the commonplaces for practical use:

Of the six dozen openings in four voices that are placed up to this point
as commonplaces, regarding the two manners of common imitation, both
those with two voices on a single passo, and those with two dierent ones
(it is the latter I like best because it allows the words to be understood even
though it is not used as much as the common one with all voices on one),
you may profit from both, changing the notes according to the choice of
mode you compose in, you may [also] add notes, or change a note, making
of these openings many others for variety.

Thus Montanos shows how flexibly one might use any of these short excerpts
in ones own composition.
The classification in table 9.2 is made on the basis of only the first four en-
tries in each example. However, a few (eight) have a fifth entry. Sometimes the
last entry repeats a contrapuntal combination, making a more complex struc-
ture (no. 24 adds a Periodic Entry; nos. 34 and 45 add an Imitative Duo). As
we will see, Cerone doubles the proportion of these longer points, bringing his
commonplaces closer to the actual practice found in Palestrinas openings.

CERONE

At over eleven hundred pages, Cerones El melopeo y maestro can be under-

stood as the largest selva of borrowed material in the history of music. Selve
178 Peter Schubert

are collections of writings excerpted from other sources and republished.

Paolo Cherchi defines them as those works that collect, without any clear
order, fragments of histories, natural and anthropological curiosities, ques-
tions of etymology, lists of personages and historical events classifiable un-
der a particular heading, sayings of illustrious people, names of inventors of
things and similar subjects, treatable in short form. Cherchi sees the most
authoritative model from antiquity in Aulus Gellius, who characterized his
own Nocte Atticae as a variam et miscellam et confusaneam doctrinam (a varied
miscellany of learning in no particular order). Identifying the vernacular
archetype of the genre as Pedro Mexiass Silva de varia lecin (Seville, 1540),
Cherchi proposes that the selva is the beginning of the rhetorical process of
invention; it is the collection of primary matter in its elemental stage, in
a temporary state of collection, not considered in terms of any organizing
criterion, the simple heap of material prior to the classification according to
the seats of invention. The theft we find here of massive amounts of prose
or poetry is not an issue for compilers of selve: The explicit reliance on oth-
ers works is of course in keeping with the genre of the selva, which does not
require an authors originality but instead his agility in gathering and piecing
together curiosities.
A commonplace book diers from a selva in that the excerpts are gener-
ally shorter and grouped under rationally organized headings. As we have
seen, Erasmus called his initial little collection of adages a selva. Occasionally,
however, selve had some large-scale order, like Lidea del giardino del mondo of
Tommaso Tomai, in which there exists a certain taxonomy which starts o
from the earth and ends with the sky.
Although occasionally accused of plagiarism, Cerone was doing exactly
what a selva compiler was supposed to do. In fact, Cerone acknowledges his
debt to the authors from whom he borrowed, including the famous Mon-
tanos, from whom he borrowed not only the idea of commonplaces but most
of the specific examples. In his early chapters, Cerone is much more explicit
about his interest in the field of rhetoric than Montanos, and these pages may
well be his most original contribution after his agility in gathering.
From Montanos, Cerone does not borrow the fabordones, and he puts the
music for words requiring widely-spaced and closely-spaced consonances
in a dierent section, one about word-painting. He adds accompaamientos
ordinarios, four-voice passages arranged according to sequential motions of
the bass and soprano voices. He vastly expands the collection of cadences
and buries the fenecimientos (cadential extensions) among them.
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 179

TABLE 9.3. Cerones commonplaces with one passo.

Montanos nos. in column 8
R = order of pcs. reversed
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
C# Free ID PEn var. time intervals (sb) Comment M#
t1 t2 t3 t4 t5
1 SA -8 2 7 2 tonal answer
2 SA -8 1 4 1 tonal answer
3 SA -8 4 3 5 3 tonal answer
4 ATS ic12 2 2 5 tonal answer
5 x 2 3 6 R
6 SA -8 2 4 2
7 SA -8 2 4 ID +
TBS ic12 2 2 1 PEn
8 SATB -5,-4 2 2 2 tonal answer 46
9 SA -8 1 2 1 3 48
10 SA -8 2 1 2 2 47
11 STAB ic12 2 2 2 43
12 SA -8 2 1 2 44
13 ATS ic12 2 2 3 PEn + 45
TS -4 2 ID
14 x 3 1 4 40
15 x 2 2* 3 1 R 41
16 AST ic12 2 2 3 42
17 SA -8 2 1 2 2* 36
18 AS -8 3 2 3 37
19 SATB -5,-4 2 2 2 tonal answer 38
20 SA -8 2 3 2 13
21 BTAS +5,+4 1 1 1 9
22 x 1 3 2 14
23 BT 8 1 2 1 15
24 STAB ic12 1 1 1 (Cf. nos. 11&19) 10
25 ST -5 1 4 1 imit. at 8ve 12
26 BA 4 1 2 1 imit. at 8ve 11
27 STAB ic12 1 1 1 Cf. no. 11 8
28 SA -8 2 3 2 35
29 x 1 2 2* R
30 x 1 2 1* 3 32
31 BT 8 1 3 1 33
32 x 1 3 3* 1* R 30
33 TBA ic12 2 2 4 2
34 x 2 1 4
35 BT ic8 1 2 1 R
36 TB 8 1 2 1 28
(continued on next page)
180 Peter Schubert

TABLE 9.3. (continued)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
C# Free ID PEn var. time intervals (sb) Comment M#
t1 t2 t3 t4 t5
37 SA -8 1 2 1 25
38 TB 8 1 3 1 27
39 SA -8 1 2 1 26
40 SA -8 1 3 1 22
41 AS -8 1 2 1 20
42 SA -8 2 2* 2 2* 3 23
43 SA -8 1 3 ID + 24
TBS ic12 1 1 PEn
44 BT 8 1 3 1 19
45 SA -8, dc4 1 4 1 2 1 16
46 BT 8 1 2 1 17
47 BT 8 1 5 1 18
48 STAB ic12 1 1 1 Cf. no. 11 11
49 BT 8 1 4 1 4
50 SA -8 1 3 1 2 1
51 SA -8 1 3 1 5th entry? 2
52 SA -8, +8 1 5 1 5 1 little overlap
53 ST -5 1 4 1 imit. at 8ve 7
54 AST ic12 3 3 2 3*
55 TB, BA 8, ic12 2 3 2 3 MTI
56 x 1 3 R
57 x 1 1 R
58 AB +4, ic15 1 2 1 imit. at 8ve
59 x 2 3 3* R
60 BT 8 2 3 2
61 BT 8 3 4 3
62 x 1 3 2 R
63 x 1 3 2 R
64 SA -8 1 7 ID +
TBA ic12 1 1 PEn
65 AS -8 1 2 1 2 new subs later?
66 SA -8 1 6 1 5
67 BT 8 1 4 1 new sub later
68 ST -5 1 3 1 2 imit. at 8ve
69 AS -8 1 4 1 new sub later
70 SA -8 1 2 1 2 csj altered
71 TB 8 2 3 2 new sub later
72 x 1 3 2 3* R
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 181

EXAMPLE 9.5. Cerone no. 55.

As for the entradas, Cerone maintains groups with one and two passos, but
he reverses the order of these groups, preferring perhaps to show the simpler
one, that with two passos, first; or because, like Montanos, he believes this type
allows the words to be understood more clearly, even though it is not used as
often. He diers from Montanos in printing his examples in score, and not
choir-book format; in enlivening the rhythm of the parts (by breaking longer
notes into repeated notes, and sometimes replacing a semibreve with a minim
rest and a minim); in adding cadential ficta; and in extending some examples.
Table 9.3 shows how Cerone has regrouped Montanoss entradas with one
passo: he has scattered the Periodic Entries among the Imitative Duos and
mixed up the various pitch and time-intervals of imitation as if, like Erasmus
with his adages, he would prefer the variety and interest brought by the dis-
organization that characterizes a selva. Cerone further muddles Montanoss
order by inserting many examples of his own: thirty-one in the one-passo
group (nos. 17, 29, 3335, 52, and 5472). By adding these primarily at the
beginning and end of the collection, Cerone may be trying to make it appear
more his own.
Several of these added examples contain a fifth or even a sixth entry,
creating Imitative Duos at dierent time-intervals or Periodic Entries and
Imitative Duos combined. The lone example of the former is shown in ex-
ample 9.5. One combination, A, begins when the second voice (the bass)
enters after two semibreves; another, module B, begins when the soprano
enters three semibreves after the bass. The melodies are the same, but they
are combined in two dierent temporal relationships so they produce two
combinations with dierent characteristic vertical intervals. Module A is
later repeated between the soprano and alto, and module B is repeated be-
tween alto and bass. This complex, labeled MTI for Multiple Time-
182 Peter Schubert

EXAMPLE 9.6. Montanos no. 45, Cerone no. 13.

Intervals (of imitation), occurs more frequently in Palestrinas openings,

as we will see.
Another combined type can be analyzed as a Periodic Entry followed by
an Imitative Duo or vice-versa. Example 9.6 shows a Periodic Entry and an
Imitative Duo combined. These compound types (MTI, ID + PEn) adum-
brate the even more elaborate points of imitation containing seven or eight
entries that we will see below in Palestrina.
For all his improvements to Montanoss commonplaces, Cerone is quite
modest about their contribution. While he repeats Montanoss sententia
about commonplaces belonging to everybody, and the possibility of changing
them by transposition, adding notes, and so forth, he hastens to add, almost
apologetically:

I must observe that all of these openings are for beginnersfor educated
people they are a dime a dozen; and if you use them, the majority should
be used in the middle of the composition, and rarely at the beginning; and
thus I say that a good discourse can be expected from a good beginning, accord-
ing to the knowledge and ability of the composer.

In the italicized sententia we recognize Montanoss introduction to his entra-

das, but now it has been turned against him: Cerone warns us that these com-
monplaces are not suitable for beginnings. Beginnings for Cerone presumably
require greater individuality of character to make a good discourse, and only
once the piece is under way may these commonplaces be used.
It is typical of plundering and refashioning that Cerone also reinterprets
the word dozenas, which Montanos used literally to describe his six dozen
openings (seys dozenas)Cerone now uses it in the figurative sense of doz-
enales (something worthless, a dime a dozen).
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 183

TABLE 9.4. Opening points in Palestrina 1564.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
# Free ID PEn var. time intervals (sb) Comment
t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6 t7
1 SA -8 2 13 2
2 x 2 4 8 6
3 SBA ic12 3 7 6 6 8 4
4 x 3 5 6 1 6* 6*
5 AS, ST -8 4 8 8 4 6 MTI
6 TB 8 2 10 2 8 8*
7 x cantus firmus
8 AST ic12 5 5 6 5* 7
9 AS -8 1 8 6 1 15
10 AS -8 4 7 ID +
BTS 8 4 4 PEn (tonal)
11 AS -8 4 7 9 4 6 5 1
12 SA -8 1 6 1
13 x -8 3 7* 7* 7*
14 SA -8 4 16 ID +
TBA ic12 4 4 10 PEn (inv)
15 SA -8 4 10 5 11 (extra sb; 4 = 5)
16 SAT -4 4 4 8 8* PEn (tonal) +
TB -8 4 ID
17 SA 4 7 5 (extra sb; 4 = 5)
18 ATS ic12 4 4 8 8* PEn (tonal) +
SA ic8 4 5 4 ID
19 TB, TS 8 4 6 1 7 1 7 3 MTI
20 AS -8 4 6 10 4
21 AS 4 7 7 MTI; ID +
STB -5 4 4 PEn (tonal)
22 SATB -4 4 4 4 7 PEn (tonal) +
SBA ic12 4 4 PEn (inv)
23 x
24 SA -8 1 6 1 4 5 4*
25 x 2 4 10
26 AS 4 6 8 6 9
27 AS -5 4 13 4 7
28 TASBT ic12 4 5 4 5 3 (extra sb; 4 = 5)
29 AS -8 3 9 3
30 x 2 4 10
31 SA ic8 4 8 4 10 2 7 1
32 x cantus firmus
33 SA, AT -8, ic12 4 6 8 4 6 10 MTI
34 AS -8 4 8 4* 4 10
35 SA -8 2 8 2 9 5 6
36 SA -8 4 11 4
184 Peter Schubert

TABLE 9.5. Percentages of presentation types by collection.

Free Pure ID Pure PEn Combinations

Montanos 12 65 15 8
Cerone 19 60 15 6
Palestrina 1564 22 53 8 17

PALESTR INAS FIRST BOOK OF

MOTETS FOR FOUR VOICES
Both Montanos and Cerone recommend Palestrina to their readers, and
Cerone refers specifically to the first book of motets in his discussion of writ-
ing four-voice music based on pairs of duos. He says: Whoever wishes to
learn to use duos appropriately, with art and judgment, should carefully ex-
amine the first [book of] four-voice motets of Palestrina. Applying our
commonplaces to the openings in Palestrinas first book of motets, we can see
how pervasive they are, tabulating their occurrences as in tables 9.13. Table
9.4 shows the presentation type for each motet opening in the collection.
Of the thirty-six, eight are free, nineteen are simple pairs of Imitative Duos
(including three MTIs), three are simple groups of Periodic Entries, and six
are the combination types. Of these combination types, two are PEn + ID,
three are ID + PEn, and one (no. 22) is PEn + PEn. Usually, MTIs are associ-
ated with pairs of Imitative Duos, but number 21 has the distinction of using
the modules created by dierent time-intervals in both IDs and PEns.
Several striking features emerge from table 9.4. The first is that the
commonplace types, including combined forms, account for roughly three
quarters of the openings, and free counterpoint for only one quarter. A com-
parison of the proportion of presentation types in table 9.5 reveals that our
two commonplace collections faithfully reflect the incidence of free and pure
Imitative Duo use in Palestrina. However, pure PEns are fewer in Palestrina,
replaced by longer combined forms. Montanos and Cerone may have wanted
to eschew these more complex items, expecting the student to learn the ad-
vanced lesson from a master composer like Palestrina.
Another striking feature is the complete absence of Non-Imitative pre-
sentations. NIms are perhaps too texturally dense for the beginning of a
piece, but occur frequently in later points within the motets.
An important dierence between Palestrinas motet openings and those
in the commonplace collections is Palestrinas use of longer time-intervals of
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 185

imitation. The purpose may be to add gravitas, to accumulate density gradu-

ally, and to hide repetition and regular periods, making for the uniqueness
that Cerone seems to require of a good beginning.
Finally, table 9.4 reveals a certain mannerism or predilection on Pal-
estrinas part: three of the combined forms (nos. 10, 21, and 22) use the same
time-intervals of imitation, four and seven semibreves in alternation.

CONCLUSION

In polyphony, one means of achieving varietas would have been to change the
structural principle governing the beginning of each piece or each successive
section of the piece. Montanos provided the young composer with music
to use whenever the occasion demands, with variety of time-interval, pitch
interval, texture, or starting voice(s), and variety of thematic presentation.
When borrowing these commonplaces for use in texted music, the composer
can alter the rhythms in the commonplace to reflect the prosody of the text,
choose a passo that reflects the meaning of the text (e.g., a big skip for O mag-
num), and transpose the commonplace to suit the mode. But the structure of
the commonplace may be completely independent from the text.
Finally, these commonplaces suggest that we should be focusing on very
small compositional units. The ones given by Montanos and Cerone are just
the beginning of the compositional process; like sententiae borrowed from
famous authors, they are meant to be varied, expanded, and worked into long
passages with more entries. Owens noted of Froschs substitute passages,
that the impression that these examples create . . . is of a piece constructed
like a mosaic . . . The segments are often contiguous, and as a result we see a
passage divided up into tiny components, too small to make much sense musi-
cally, but evidently large enough to be thought of as building blocks. This
study shows that the loose term point of imitation hides a rich and finely
articulated variety of musical techniques that are equivalent to the phrases
and sentences borrowed by young writers in the Renaissance.

NOTES
A shorter version of this essay was presented at the Joint AMS/SMT Meeting in Seat-
tle on 14 November 2004, and at Reading and Writing the Pedagogies of the Renaissance: The
Student, the Study Materials, and the Teacher of Music, 14701650, at the Peabody Institute
of the Johns Hopkins University, 24 June 2005. The author is grateful to Joseph Kerman,
Alison Laywine, Lars Lih, Jessie Ann Owens, and Pilar Ramos for their suggestions and
encouragement.
186 Peter Schubert

The epigraph is from William H. Sherman, Editorial Introduction, in Renaissance

Commonplace Books from the British Library, Adam Matthew Publications; see www.ampltd
.co.uk/collections_az/RenCpbks-BL/editorial-introduction.aspx (accessed 10 March 2006).
1. The most comprehensive is Ann Mosss Printed Commonplace-Books and the Struc-
turing of Renaissance Thought (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
2. Francisco de Montanos, Arte de musica theorica y pratica (Valladolid, 1592); Pietro
Cerone, El melopeo y maestro (Naples, 1613; repr. Bologna, 1969).
3. See Howard Mayer Brown, Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and
Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance, Journal of the American Musicological Society 35
(1982): 148.
4. An example is described by Earle Havens in Commonplace Books: A History of
Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.:
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2001), 22. It is that of Teodoro of Verona, a
fifteenth-century preacher whose commonplace book contained but the smallest, choic-
est fruits of the Church Fathers, the most modest bouquets of medieval ecclesiastics, and
the merest classical smattering of Seneca, Virgil and Ovid under 110 headings ranging
from divine grace (De gratia divina) to adolescence (De adolescentibus) to vineyards (De
vineis).
5. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Motecta festorum totius anni cum communi sanc-
torum quaternis vocibus, liber primus (Venice: Gardano, 1563); RISM P689. The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians only refers to the lost 1563 edition. For a modern edition
see Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Il libro primo dei mottetti a 4 voci, which is vol. 3 of Le
opere complete, ed. Raaele Casimiri (Rome: Fratelli Scalera, 19391987); or Motecta festo-
rum totius anni cum communi sanctorum quaternis vocibus, liber primus, ed. Daniele V. Filippi
(Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2003). For complete analyses of all of the motets in this collection, see
Peter N. Schubert, Hidden Forms in Palestrinas First Book of Four-Voice Motets, Journal
of the American Musicological Society 60 (2007): 483556. A revised and corrected version of
the table in the appendix may be accessed at www.music.mcgill.ca/~schubert.
6. The term comes from Robert Ralph Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficia-
ries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 272. Bolgar manages to avoid using the
term commonplace in the main text, although it appears in a footnote about the Summa
predicantium of John of Bromyarde (p. 432).
7. The Epistles of Seneca, trans. Richard Gummere (London: William Heinemann,
1930), vol. 2, ep. 84, pp. 27679.
8. Martin L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and
Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),
2526, gives several examples of Petrarch rewording something he had borrowed, including
Senecas image of the bees.
9. Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 14501600
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 191. The passage can be found in Johannes Frosch,
Rerum musicarum opusculum (Strasburg, 1532; 1535), chap. 19. Owens reproduces his alterna-
tive passages and their application in plates 7.25ab and 7.26ab. Brown discusses the same
passage in Emulation, Competition, and Homage, 41.
10. Lodovico Zacconi, Prattica di mvsica vtile et necessaria (Venice: B. Carampello,
1596), III, 33, pp. 16162. This passage is discussed in James Haar, A Sixteenth-Century
Attempt at Music Criticism, Journal of the American Musicological Society 36 (1983): 191
209.
11. Cristle Collins Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory: Hearing with the Eyes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129.
12. Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory, 136. In the passage that she is referring
to, Glareanus says: Moreover, just as those who publish books of letters frequently inter-
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 187

mingle with their own eorts the letters of others who do not speak as clearly, evidently
so that the contrast of opposites, as philosophers say, may place their own in greater relief,
as we see has been done a little before our time by Angelo Politian, so it has seemed neces-
sary to do likewise in these examples, namely, that to those very learned songs of Josquin
des Prez, and of other superior symphonetae, we should also add the less beautiful songs of
others, so that through the antithesis the reader could make a somewhat clearer judgment
than has been made thus far. The reference to Politian connects Glareanus to the larger
literary world of the Ciceronian debates. See Henricus Glareanus, Dodecachordon (Basel
1547), trans. Clement Albin Miller (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1965), III, 13,
p. 248 (facs. 240).
13. Joachim Burmeister, Musical Poetics, trans. Benito V. Rivera (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993), chap. 12. He is like Aron, in citing passages from repertoire but not
reprinting them. Burmeisters approach has been explicated in Claude V. Palisca, Ut Ora-
toria Musica: The Rhetorical Basis of Musical Mannerism, in The Meaning of Mannerism,
ed. Franklin W. Robinson and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of
New England, 1972), 3765.
14. Adriano Banchieri, Cartella musicale (Venice: Vincenti, 1614), 23548. The caden-
ces, many with commentary, are all to G, and may be transposed.
15. Girolamo Diruta, Il Transilvano, part II (Venice: Vincenti, 1609, 1622; repr. Bo-
logna: Forni, 1969), 15. Diruta says ho dolore di non poterle far stampare tutte, le quali
son trecento, e vinti; nho fatto scelse delle pi belle, e pi artificiose, e da quelli essempii
intenderete li variati accompagnamenti delle consonanze. I have omitted mention of orna-
mentation treatises, although these may be related to the commonplace tradition as well.
16. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B.
King and David Rix (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1963), 80.
17. I have only recognized one as borrowed from repertoire: Montanoss two-passo
opening number 7 is lifted un-transposed, with only the most minor alterations, from Pal-
estrina 1564 (see note 6, above), number 27, mm. 9192 (magister meus Christus), with
overlapping notes removed. If others are borrowed, they would also most likely come from
inner points of pieces because of their short time-intervals of imitation. The prevalence of
chanson rhythms (b-sb-sb) may point to another source. It is probable other openings are
borrowed and, since they are meant to be borrowed in turn by the reader, we can see that
Montanos and Cerone have provided a book for readers who did not have the patience or
the resources to gather their own entries (see epigraphs, above).
18. Erasmus, On Copia, 8788.
19. Desiderius Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, ed. Betty I. Knott, Opera
omnia 1.6 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988), 259. Translation mine, in which I have tried
to retain a distinction between heading and place. King and Rix have: All of these
topics can be treated along the following lines (Erasmus, On Copia, 88). Betty Knott has:
These topics can be developed through all the standard treatments (Desiderius Eras-
mus, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, trans. Betty I. Knott, vol. 24 of Collected
Works of Erasmus, ed. Craig R. Thompson [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978],
636).
20. Aristotles lines of inquiry for evaluating an argument include property, definition,
genus, and accident. Beginning in book II, he shows how to use these criteria. See Topics,
trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/topics.html (accessed
21 November 2008).
21. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 6.
22. Erasmus, On Copia, 88.
23. Ibid., 88.
24. Ibid., 90.
188 Peter Schubert

25. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 110.

26. Ibid., 120.
27. Ibid., 126.
28. Erasmus, On Copia, 89.
29. Ibid., 8990.
30. Ibid., 89.
31. Ibid., 9091. Likewise, Melanchthon and his followers drew commonplaces from
passages in the Bible to provide preachers with clear lessons for use in sermons. See Robert
Kolb, Teaching the Text: The Commonplace Method in Sixteenth Century Lutheran Bibli-
cal Commentary, Bibliothque dHumanisme et Renaissance 49 (1987): 57185.
32. From a 1523 letter to John Botzheim, Collected Works of Erasmus, trans. R. A. B.
Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 9: 316; quoted in Kathy Eden, Friends
Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 2. The word sylvam is one of many words used
to describe a collection.
33. Desiderius Erasmus, The labors of Hercules, in Adages III, trans. R. A. B. Mynors,
vol. 34 of Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), i, 1, p.
177. Twice-served cabbage is death is an adage that refers to unpleasant or inappropriate
repetition; see Adages I, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, vol. 31 of Collected Works of Erasmus
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), v, 38, p. 417. Corinthus son of Jove refers to a
phrase that causes disgust when it repeatedly comes into conversation; see Adages II, trans.
R. A. B. Mynors, vol. 33 of Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1991), i, 50, p. 44; and see also Margaret Mann Phillips, The Adages of Erasmus (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1964), ix.
34. Moss documents several other instances of commonplaced editions of the Ad-
ages: Of particular interest among later commonplace arrangements of the Adagia are
the Adagia sive sententiae proverbiales . . . in locos communes redactae (Strasburg, 1596)
of Josephus Langius . . . who on this occasion orders his commonplaces on the universal
model progressing from God through heaven, earth, metals, plants, and animals, to man
and his concerns (Printed Commonplace-Books, 187 n. 3). In this downward progression
we recognize the reverse of Tommaso Tomais plan for his selva, Lidea del giardino del
mondo. A similar collection was published in Hanover in 1617, with additions by other
authors. The editor of this vast tome (Desid. Erasmi Roterodami adagiorum chiliades iuxta
locos communes digestae) had to decide on categories, then group the thousands of adages
anew under headings, which were presented alphabetically. Although as seems inevitable,
many headings are opposites of each other (iniustitiae / iustitiae, gratitudo / ingratitudo,
etc.), the significance of opposites is lost since they are alphabetically arranged. The book
proudly features three types of index: one by headings, which merely recaps the contents
of the book without the commentary; one by first-words of the proverbs; and one by rerum
and verbum. Such indices show what the compiler, on behalf of his audience, thought was
important. Thus to find the famous adage dulce bellum inexpertis (war is pleasant to those
who have not experienced it), you need to know either the first word of the adage or that the
compiler thought it was about inexperience (imperitia), the locus under which it is grouped.
If war is the only thing you can remember, you will be disappointed in your search, for no
entry for war appears in any of the three indices.
35. Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory, 175.
36. Ibid., 129.
37. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 205206.
38. Strictly speaking, music can serve as a heading to other music under some restrict-
ed circumstances. Consider the case of a simple version acting as a heading for dierent
ornamented versions of the same basic framework, as in the example by Montanos printed
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 189

and discussed in Peter N. Schubert, Counterpoint Pedagogy in the Renaissance, in The

Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2002), 518.
39. Montanos intends his commonplaces to be used somewhat freely.
40. Montanos, Arte de musica, fol. 28r; Cerone, El melopeo y maestro, 813. I have not
found the origin of this sentence, nor do I know why the word for place is in the neuter,
which more often applies to geographical places than to figurative ones. Montanos may have
invented the sentence. In Printed Commonplace-Books, 26061, Moss cites a seventeenth-
century French commonplace book by Charles Sorel (1671) that contains virtually the same
sentence.
41. These are what Burmeister calls supplementa in Musical Poetics, 15051.
42. Montanos, on lugares comunes, in Arte de musica, fols. 46v47r.
43. El discurso bueno del buen principio se puede esperar segun la sciencia del com-
positor (ibid., fol. 31r).
44. Montanos, on compostura, in Arte de musica, fol. 11r. Although Montanos is typi-
cally laconic, this process is described in much greater detail by Sancta Maria, who focuses
on the overlap between the end of the first duo and the entries of the voice of the second.
See Thoms de Sancta Maria, Libro llamado arte de taer fantasia (Valladolid: 1565; repr.,
Geneva: Minko, 1973), II: 3750.
45. Jessie Ann Owens has referred to such repeating combinations as modules, and
we will retain this term. See Owens, The Milan Partbooks: Evidence of Cipriano de Rores
Compositional Process, Journal of the American Musicological Society 37 (1984): 284.
46. . . . con especias buenas (Montanos, Arte de musica, fol. 11r).
47. Vertical sonorities should contain a third and a fifth or sixth. Gioseo Zarlino,
Le Istitutione harmoniche (Venice: 1558, 1573; repr. New York: Broude Bros., 1965); The
Art of Counterpoint: Part Three of Le Istitutioni harmoniche, 1558, trans. Guy A. Marco and
Claude V. Palisca (New York: Norton, 1976), III: 59. On Zarlinos definition of the two-voice
framework used as a soggetto, see Benito Rivera, Finding the Soggetto in Willaerts Free
Imitative Counterpoint: A Step in Modal Analysis, in Music Theory and the Exploration of
the Past, ed. Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 99.
48. In borrowing from Montanos, Cerone generally took groups of three (which is how
Montanoss twenty-four appear on the page), but started at the end and worked his way
backwards, perhaps in order to hide his tracks.
49. Schubert, Hidden Forms, 490.
50. A third type, based on alternating fourths and fifths, appears only once (no. 9 in
table 9.2), and never in Palestrinas openings. Consequently it has been omitted from the
present discussion.
51. Zarlinos discussion of doppia consequenza was added to the 1573 edition of the
Istitutioni harmoniche (III, 63, 314.). See Denis Collins, Zarlino and Berardi as teachers of
Canon, Theoria: Historical Aspects of Music Theory 7 (1993): 10323; and Peter N. Schubert,
Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 16.
52. This term is used by Sancta Maria to denote something like a countersubject. See
Sancta Maria, Libro llamado arte, II, 33, fol. 64v.
53. See Schubert, Counterpoint Pedagogy in the Renaissance, 51417. Joshua Rifkin
has drawn attention to the importance of invertible counterpoint, remarking that mul-
tiple counterpoint . . . typically refers to longer, non-imitative linear units. See Miracles,
Motivicity, and Mannerism: Adrian Willaerts Videns Dominus flentes sorores Lazari and
Some Aspects of Motet Composition in the 1520s, in Hearing the Motet: Essays on the
Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Dolores Pesce (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 245. While this is true of most treatise-presentations of the subject, here
190 Peter Schubert

(and in the Palestrina examples we will look at below) they occur often in shorter, imita-
tive contexts.
54. The characteristic vertical interval succession here begins 10-5. The subject rises
a total of a seventh to make a third above the answer on A, then falls a third (*) to make a
fifth above D. The answer, on the other hand, rises only a sixth to make a third above D, and
falls only a second (*) to make a fifth above A.
55. Generally, if the first duo uses imitation at the fifth above or below, both voices
of the second duo will be an octave away; if the first duo uses imitation at the octave, the
second duo will be a fourth or fifth away. Sancta Maria says that the bass and alto voices
correspond at the octave, likewise the tenor and soprano. See Sancta Maria, Libro llamado
arte, II, 35, fol. 74v.
56. In the Comments column (8) are entered similarities between the various open-
ings. Sim 1st sp. means that the opening duos would reduce to a similar first species struc-
ture. Such openings based on the same basic structure may be thought of as synonyms.
The soggetto of number 25 is a paraphrase of the chant, Ave maris stella.
57. De seys dozenas de entradas, a quatro, que hasta aqui estan puestas por lugares
comunes, de dos maneras de la ymitacion comun, y otras dos vozes un passo, y dos otro
diverso, la qual tengo por muy buena, porque se dexa entender la letra aunque no tan usada
como la comun de un passo todas De la una y otra se pueden aprovechar mudando los signos,
segun pidiere el tono que compusieren, pueden poniendo mas figuras, o mudando algun
punto hazer destas entradas otras muchas para diversidad (Montanos, on lugares comunes,
in Arte de musica, fol. 44v).
58. . . . spezzoni di storie, curiosit naturali e antropologiche, questioni di etimologia,
liste di personaggi e di eventi storici classificabili sotto un esponente particolare, detti di
personaggi illustri, nomi di inventori di cose, e simili soggetti, trattabili in forma breve
(Paolo Cherchi, La selva rinascimentale: profilo di un genere, Ricerche sulle selve rinasci-
mentali, ed. Paolo Cherchi [Ravenna: Longo, 1999], 9).
59. Quoted and translated in McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance,
196. Gellius gives many synonyms for selva, among which we find florilegium, practica, exer-
citationes, osservationi, and others that we also find used as titles of music treatises.
60.
0. . . . allo stato di raccolta provvisoria, non pensata secondo alcun criterio orga-
nizzativo, il semplice cumulo di materiali anteriore alla classificazione secondo le sedes
dellinventio (Cherchi, La selva rinascimentale, 13).
61. Lynn Lara Westwater, La nuova seconda selva of Girolama Giglio: A Case of Riscrit-
tura in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Venice, in Ricerche sulle selve rinascimentali, 43.
62. Esiste dunque una certa tassonomia che prende avvio dalla terra e si conclude con
il cielo (Daniela Pastina, Lidea del giardino del mondo di Tommaso Tomai, Ricerche sulle
selve rinascimentali, ed. Paolo Cherchi [Ravenna: Longo, 1999], 122). The contents of this
selva move from the earth (including earthquakes and minerals) through man (including
procreation, illnesses, and parts of the body), to the air (including comets and fire). The
overlap between selva and commonplace book is exemplified in the title of another com-
monplace book, Sylva Sententiarum, Exemplorum, Historiarum, Allegorairum, Simultitu-
dinium, Facietarum, Partim ex Reverendi Viri, D. Martini Lutheri, ac Philippi Melanchthonis
. . . in Locos Communes ordine Alphabetico disposita (Frankfurt: Fabricium & Feyrabend,
1566).
63. For a brief account of Cerone reception, see Robert Stevensons review of the Forni
reprint of El melopeo in Journal of the American Musicological Society 24 (1971): 48182. An-
other view of Cerones contribution is provided by Gary Towne in chapter 16 of the present
volume, The Good Maestro: Pietro Cerone on the Pedagogical Relationship.
64. Cerone, El melopeo y maestro, I, 32, p. 87. For a list of theorists named in the treatise,
see the introduction to that edition (pp. xxvi). Moss cites many examples of such plun-
 Musical Commonplaces in the Renaissance 191

dering of one commonplace-book author by another, just as Judd meticulously notes all of
Glareans debts to previous theorists.
65. To give but a few examples: Cerone, in El melopeo y maestro, says that the word
maestro in his title refers to Quintilians perfect orator (I, 1, p. 7). The treatise is sprinkled
with sententiae, and marginalia in italics are used to indicate the famous authors being
quoted or the rhetorical device or type of embellishment being used. In talking about the
overuse of certain intervals, he quotes a notorious sententia by Cicero that he calls a verso
sin gracia, because it contains the same sounds too many times: O fortunatam natam me
consule Romam (XII, 6, p. 674). Finally, he likens the seven species of musical interval to
the letters of the alphabet, from which thousands and thousands of orations can be made
(IX, 3, pp. 56566).
66. Cerone, El melopeo y maestro, XII, 5, p. 668.
67. Cerone, El melopeo y maestro, XV, 1, pp. 82932. These progressions are loosely
based on Sancta Marias in the Libro llamado arte, II, 1131. See Miguel Roig-Francol,
Playing in Consonances: A Spanish Renaissance Technique of Chordal Improvisation,
Early Music 23 (1995): 93103. Also see Schubert, Counterpoint Pedagogy in the Renais-
sance, 52527.
68. Cerone, El melopeo y maestro, XV, 1, pp. 83272. The means of expansion include
a separate set of cadences for two to eight voices, and, within each set, separate cadences
to D, E, F, and G.
69. Cerone, El melopeo y maestro, XV, 1, p. 813: . . . dexa entender la letra.
70. As with the two-passo openings, those from Montanos are taken mostly three at a
time beginning at the end.
71. Cerone has replaced Montanoss lone example (table 9.2, no. 11) with his own.
72. Note that module B is repeated in invertible counterpoint at the twelfth, and the
melody in the alto is altered to avoid a vertical seventh (the D sounds a minim earlier).
73. Montanos had only three of this type (his nos. 24, 34, and 45); Cerone kept two,
replaced one, and added a fourth.
74. Advierto que todas estas Entradas son para principiantes, que para gente professa
son muy dozenales; y caso se sirvieren dellos, servirsehan la mayor parte en medio de la
Composicion, y pocas vezes en el principio: y assi digo que el discurso bueno, dal buen prin-
cipio de puede esperar, segun la sciencia y habilidad del Composidor (Cerone, El melopeo y
maestro, XV, 1, p. 829).
75. Cerone is much more vigorous in his condemnation of plagiarism in El melopeo y
maestro, XII, 6, p. 675.
76. Quien dessea deprender usar los Duos con Arte, juyzio, y a proposito, examine
con diligencia los primeros Motetes a quatro bozes de Prenestina (Cerone, El melopeo y
maestro, XII, 11, p. 685).
77. Three motets feature IDs and PEns whose modules are not the result of the same
time-interval of imitation (nos. 15, 17, and 28). This is because Palestrina adds an extra semi-
breve between the entries of the second occurrence of the duo, in all three cases changing
four sbs to five (noted in the rightmost column). The module is the same, but the rigorous
periodicity is weakened.
78. The reader may note two minor dierences between the data in table 9.4 and that
in the corrected appendix to Hidden Forms: (1) Some of the openings identified here as
free contain modules presented semi-imitatively; and (2) I identified the full-textured
opening of motet number 23 (Salvator mundi) as a NIm on the basis of a module of
parallel thirds buried inside (p. 549)this is one of the few debatable cases in the entire
collection.
79. I have shown dierent structural principles at play in successive sections of a Wil-
laert ricercar, in Recombinant Melody: Ten Things to Love About Willaerts Music, Cur-
192 Peter Schubert

rent Musicology 75 (2003): 91113. Contrast of structural principle is not a hard and fast rule:
Palestrina has structurally imitated himself a couple of times in the opening points of his
1564 collection. The time-intervals of motets 10, 21, and 22 have been discussed; likewise
motets 16 and 18. In these groups, the thematic material is presented in the same way, on
the same scaolding, but of course has quite dierent themes, modes, etc.
80. Owens, Composers at Work, 193.
 10
Music Education and the Conduct
of Life in Early Modern England:
A Review of the Sources&
PAMELA F. STARR

POLYMATHES: Stay, brother Philomathes,

what haste? Whither go you so fast?
PHILOMATHES: To seek out an old friend of mine.

So begins the dialogue that launches one of the most frequently invoked mu-
sic treatises published in England, Thomas Morleys A Plaine and Easie Intro-
duction to Practicall Musicke. In it, as every cultural historian of the period
knows, Morley builds on the social discomfiture of Philomathes to justify the
construction of a carefully guided course of instruction in the practice of mu-
sic. This treatise is aimed at the previously untutored, is scrupulously detailed
in its content, and is based on the presumption that there would be a wide
market for such a textbook. Morleys presumption was, of course, right on
the mark. There was, by 1597, a considerable demand for what he oered. And
the evidence for this, as I have discovered, was not merely in the documented
sales of the first edition, or in the publication of a second edition nine years
194 Pamela F. Starr

later and the frequent citing of the work in the seventeenth century. Morley
might have inferred the putative market for his treatise from the testimony
of the courtesy and conduct manuals that were rolling o the press at this
time. Within their covers could be found the why that prompted Morleys
how-to book.
Not five years before the publication of Morleys treatise, London playgo-
ers would have heard one of the most eloquent examples of music instruction
ever penned. The passage begins:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears soft stillness, and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony . . .

And it ends thus:

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his aections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.

These words from act 5, scene 1 of Shakespeares Merchant of Venice enclose

a justly famous passage of great poetic beauty, and one that also brings to
our attention two important themes of the play. The beginning of the speech
launches a stunningly evocative apostrophe to Harmonythe ancient
Boethian, but still-prevalent worldview of the Music of the Spheres and its
power over the minds and actions of human beings. Several scholars have rec-
ognized the role of music in this play as a symbol for characters in concord or
in discord with each other and with society. The conclusion depicts the out-
sider, the self-excluded alienunmistakably in this context, Shylock, and by
extension, all Jewswho remain outside of and who threaten the harmoni-
ous concord of society. Not by coincidence, Shylock is the one character
in this play who rejects the touches of sweet harmony as mere noise. Even
Jessica, a converted Jew, allows herself to be instructed in the theory of the
Music of the Spheres by her Christian husband.
This passage prompted me to begin a study of the role of music, musi-
cians, and music patronage in those segments of early modern English so-
ciety that were viewed as marginal. Such a study, I felt, must necessarily be
 Music Education and the Conduct of Life in Early Modern England 195

preceded by an understanding of how the mainstream of English society had

received, understood, and used music. I undertook this baseline study by
examining not only the standard treatises and music theory textsbut also
nearly one hundred manuals of conduct and instruction of young men and
women published between 1500 and 1700. This latter group, I thought, might
give a more balanced view of music in English society than the more special-
ized music treatiseswhich might be thought, as it were, to be preaching to
the choir. From this assemblage of printed volumes, represented in the superb
collections of the Folger, Newberry, and Huntington libraries, I identified
and studied forty-five works that contained passages specifically on music
and the teaching of music. Space does not permit the inclusion of all these
passages here, of course, but the reader will find below, with contextual com-
mentaries, a sampling of some of the most evocative and persuasive opinions
about the value and power of music education.
Conduct and courtesy books emerged, as Frank Whigham has put it,
as a repertoire of actions invoked by, and meant to order, the surge of social
mobility that occurred at the boundaries between ruling and subject classes
in late sixteenth-century England. The new social mobility began under the
early Tudors, as advancement through government bureaucracy was oered
to the lesser landed gentry, and eventually, to members of the urban artisan
and professional middle class. The road to preferment at court and a possible
patent of nobility was opened through a mastery of the habits of mind and
conduct set forth in the courtesy book. Works in this genre were frequently
modeled on Il Cortegiano by Baldassare Castiglione, while individual trans-
lations of this seminal work were reprinted in England throughout the six-
teenth and well into the seventeenth centuries as The Courtier. And like their
distinguished progenitor, many of the volumes of courtesy and conduct that
flooded the English market found a place for music as part of the formation
of the young gentleman and young gentlewoman. Many others, however,
inveighed sharply against it. Instead of an expected uniformity of view, I
found a delightful farrago of opinion and rationale, both pro and con, which
revealed a multivalent and inclusive reception of music in the lives of both
children and adults. What follows will be a selective survey of views in the
distinctive voices of the authors themselves, grouped by topic and by point
of view.
The first example (excerpt 1) is drawn from William Batess late-breaking
apostrophe to the time-honored doctrine of the Music of the Spheres, and is
immediately contrasted with Thomas Lodges rather cynical preference for
196 Pamela F. Starr

music that one can actually hear (excerpt 2). In excerpts 35, Philip Sidney,
William Vaughan, and William Higford argue for the curative agency of
music, while Lonard Marand, Richard Whitlock, and Tommaso Buoni
explore diering aspects of music and the Aections, in excerpts 68. Begin-
ning with excerpt 9, specific attitudes toward the teaching of music to infants
and children of both sexes are explored, in the words of such distinguished
sixteenth-century pedagogues as Roger Ascham (excerpt 9), Thomas Elyot
(excerpts 10ac), and Richard Mulcaster (excerpts 11ad). The latter, in an
extensive treatise dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, argued forcefully for the
civic and humanistic values of music education in the lives of young women.
In the seventeenth century, women writers joined the groundswell of sup-
port for womens education, including training in music. Anna Maria Schur-
man (excerpt 12), Hannah Woolley (excerpts 13ab), and Bathsua Makin
(excerpt 14) each have a dierent take on the specific value and use of music
education for women, with Woolley presenting a Miss Manners list of dos
and donts for women performers. But I have not omitted the contrarian views
of Elizabeth Joscelin (excerpt 15), Thomas Powell (excerpt 16), Thomas Salter
(excerpts 17ab), and William Darrell (excerpts 1819), all of whom saw music
education as either a waste of time or a downright induction into folly or sin
(this especially in regard to music education for young women).
The reader will find brief contextual remarks about many of the authors of
these excerpts, as well as information on the dedicatees of their treatises (fol-
lowing the individual passages). These illuminate the diverse and varied points
of view regarding music instruction in the Early Modern era in England.

EXCER PTS FROM THE COURTESY BOOKS

EXCERPT 1
William Bates, The soveraign and Final Happiness of Man (London: Printed by J. D. for Braba-
zon Aylmer, 1680), 54.

O, the unspeakable pleasure of this [Heavenly] concert! when every soul is

harmonious and contributes his part to the full musicke of heaven. O could
we hear but some Eccho of those Songs wherewith the Heaven of Heaven
resounds, some remains of those voices wherewith the Sains above triumph
in the praises in the solemn adoration of the King of spirits, how would it
inflame our desires to be joynd with them?

William Bates (16251699), BA, MA (Oxford), DD (Cambridge), served as a chaplain to the

newly restored Charles II, but his inclinations toward moderate Puritan dissent led to his
 Music Education and the Conduct of Life in Early Modern England 197

ejection from the court and his pulpit at St. Dunstans, London. Bates argued that sensual
pleasures distracted from the attainment of the highest good of mankindnamely, salva-
tion and the experience of the bliss of the heavenly choirs. (ODNB Onl., accessed 9 July 2008;
and Bates, The soveraign, preface and p. 12)

EXCERPT 2
Thomas Lodge, A Reply to Gossons Schoole of Abuse (London, 1579; repr. Arthur Freeman, ed.,
New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1973), 29, 27.

What Homers music was, that was so dierent from todays. . . . When I
speak with Homer next, you shall know his answer . . .
But to speak my conscience, methinks music best pleaseth me when I hear it.

Thomas Lodge (15581625), a playwright, poet, travel-writer, and pamphleteer, was prob-
ably a secret Catholic. His Defense of Poetry: A Reply to Gossons Schoole of Abuse, was
intended as a riposte to Gossons polemic against not only poetry, but all the arts, including
music. Gosson invoked the same views of earthly versus heavenly music as Bates, in excerpt
1, to which Lodge averred his preference for music that he actually heard. (ODNB Onl., ac-
cessed 10 July 2007)

EXCERPT 3
Philip Sidney, Correspondence, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1963), 133.

Now, sweete brother, take a delight to keepe and increase your musick; you
will not believe what a want I finde of it in my melancholic times.

The poet Philip Sidney (15541586) wrote to his younger brother Robert in 1580, urging
the study of various subjects, including history, mathematics, military science, music, and
horsemanship. Music in particular would serve to relieve the mind after the labors of seri-
ous study.

EXCERPT 4
William Vaughan, Directions for Health, Naturall and Artificiall, 7th edition, reviewed by the
author (London: Printed by Thomas Harper, for Iohn Harison, 1633), 129, 15859.

Show me a diet for melancholike men. . . . Fourthly, musicke is meete for

them.
But indeed, Musicke, such as the Violl, the Irish-Harpe, &c. will allure the
outward senses, and also temper the extravagant thoughts of the minde,
more than any thing. . . . And even as faire colours doe please the eyes,
sweet meates the taste, perfumes the nose, so melodious Musick will aord
198 Pamela F. Starr

delight, not onely to the eares, but also to the dejected spirit. Here also I
cannot but highly commend the loud Musicke of our Countrey Coridons,
Pipes, Tabours, and Bag pipes, so they sue them not to prophane the Sab-
bath day, as I have known some.

William Vaughan (ca. 15751641), dubbed Orpheus Junior, was a writer, antiquarian, and
an early colonist of Newfoundland. His family, including one dedicateehis brother Rob-
ert, First Earl of Carberyhad strong ties with Essex, and may have been implicated in his
1601 rebellion. (ODNB 56: 207208)

EXCERPT 5
William Higford, The Institution of a Gentleman (London: Printed by A. W. for William Lee,
1660), 78, 80.

But you will be most compleat when you joyn the vocal and instrumental
both together . . .
When you are oppressed with serious and weighty business, to take your
viol and sing to it will be a singular ease and refreshment.

William Higford (15801657) was a member of a Gloucestershire family patronized espe-

cially by the Chandos family, loyal adherents to Charles I. Higfords conduct manual was
published from manuscript by Clement Barksdale, an Anglican clergyman, author, and
devoted royalist. It was dedicated to Lord Scudamore of Sligo, a politically well-connected
courtier of Charles I, also a devoted Anglican. The manual was modeled on the Basilicon
Doron of James I, intended for the Prince of Wales. (ODNB 3: 907; 27: 52; and Higford,
Institution, preface and dedication)

EXCERPT 6
Lonard de Marand, The Judgment of Humane Actions, trans. John Reynolds (London: Bourne,
1629), 3536.

Hearing is nothing else but a feeling of the tune or sound in this part, which
accordingly, more or less, as it strikes our eare, makes the sound grave or
harsh, sweet or displeasing: and if it strikes us too rudely or violently, then
it not only touches the eare, but all the whole body, as when a great noyse or
thunder makes all things tremble or shake under us, and seems to strike and
astonish the foundations of houses by this sudden and violent feeling.

John Reynolds (1588after 1655), the translator of Lonard Marands original treatise,
dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu, was a merchant and writer based in France, from 1619.
He dedicated his translation to Edward Sackville, Fourth Earl of Dorset, another expatri-
ate in France, and eventually Chamberlain of the household of Charles Is French-born
queen, Henrietta Maria. (ODNB 46: 542; 48: 53234; and Marand, Judgment, preface and
dedication)
 Music Education and the Conduct of Life in Early Modern England 199

EXCERPT 7
Richard Whitlock, Zootomia; or, Observations of the Present Manners of the English . . . With Useful
Detection of the Mountebanks of both Sexes (London: Printed by Tho. Roycroft, and are to be sold
by Humphrey Moseley, at the Princes Armes in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1654), 483, 486.

Musick hath had its use in the Wars of Passions, and routed discontents
out of troubled minds. . . . It unsaddens the melancholy, quickens the dull,
awaketh the drowsie, &c . . .
The enemy of musick is one God loveth not.
The publishers blurb praises Whitlocks Zootomia for having been written after, and not
before his rigorous research into all the arts and languages: it is not a mere compendium,
but a synthesis and analysis of the facts. The Anglican clergyman and poet Jasper Mayne
(16041672), a Royalist sympathizer and friend of John Donne, wrote a sincere encomium
of Whitlock (b. 1615 or 1616) and his work. (ODNB 37: 603605)

EXCERPT 8
Tommaso Buoni, Problemes of Beautie and all Humane Aections, trans. S. L. [= Sampson Len-
nard] (London: Printed by G. Eld, for Edward Blount, and William Aspley, 1606), 13031.

"WHY DOE LOVERS DELIGHT IN MORNING MUSICKE?

PROBLEME 64
Perhaps to the end that by meanes of that delight which is in musicke,
either vocall or instrumentall, and that willingnesse they expresse thereby
to please, and consent, they may stir up the aections of those they love,
to requite them againe with reciprocall aection, which many time doth
happily succeed. . . . Or perhaps because there is not a thing that doth
better expresse an angelicall minde, than an angelicall voice, which having
something in it, though I know not what, that is divine, they desire by the
worth thereof, to express their own worthiness. For every action of a Lover
should bee such, as by the vertue and valour thereof, may stirre aection.
Sampson Lennard (d. 1633), the translator of Buonis treatise, was an antiquarian and pur-
suivant in the College of Arms. He also translated a history of the papacy, in the hopes that
he might live to march over the alpes and trayle a pike before the walls of Rome, behind
the Princes [i.e., Prince Henrys] standard. (ODNB 33: 348)

EXCERPT 9
Roger Ascham, Toxophilus: The Schole of Shooting (1545), ed. Edward Arber (London: A. Mur-
ray & Son, 1868), 42.

For even the little babes lacking the use of reason, are scarce so well stilled
in sucking their mothers pap, as in hearying their mother syng.
200 Pamela F. Starr

Roger Ascham (1515/161568), one of Renaissance Englands most distinguished humanists

and pedagogues, served Princess and then Queen Elizabeth, first as tutor and later as Latin
secretary. His most famous work, The Schoolmaster (published posthumously in 1570), made a
place for music in the curriculum of a gentlemans education, but strictly for recreation and
diversion. In the earlier Toxophilus, Ascham specifically advocates the teaching of plainsong
and pricksong to children of both sexes. (Ascham, Toxophilus, 41)

EXCERPT 10
Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor (London, 1531), ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London:
Dent, 1962), 2022.

a) The discretion of a tutor consisteth in temperance: that is to say, that

he suer not the child to be fatigued with continual study or learning,
wherewith the delicate and tender wit may be dulled or oppressed; but
that there may be therewith interlaced and mixed some pleasant learn-
ing and exercise, as playing on instruments of music, which moderately
used and without diminution of honour, that is to say without wanton
countenance and dissolute gesture, is not to be contemned.
b) But in this commendation of music I would not be thought to allure
noblemen to have so much delectation therein, that in playing and
singing only they should put their whole study and felicity; as did the
emperor Nero, which all a long summers day would sit in the theatre
. . . and in the presence of all the noblemen and senators would play
on his harp and sing without ceasing. . . . O what misery it was to be
subject to such a minstrel, in whose music was no melody, but anguish
and dolour!
c) And if the child be of a perfect inclination and towardness to virtue, and
very aptly disposed to this science, and ripely doth understand the rea-
son and concordance of tunes, the tutors oce shall be to persuade him
to have principally in remembrance his estate. . . . He shall commend
the perfect understanding of music, declaring how necessary it is for the
better attaining the knowledge of the public weal; which, as I before have
said, is made of an order of estates and degrees, and by reason thereof
containeth in it a perfect harmony . . .
Sir Thomas Elyot (ca. 14901546), one of the earliest authors of English conduct manuals,
was a courtier of Henry VIII and a friend of Thomas Cromwell. He studied with Linacre
and probably met Erasmus, Colet, Vives, and Lily. His treatise, The Book Named the Governor,
was dedicated to Henry, and purported to instruct the tutors of the ruling elite. (Elyot, Book
Named, vxii)

EXCERPT 11
Richard Mulcaster, Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children (London, 1581), ed. William
Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 4850, 17983.
 Music Education and the Conduct of Life in Early Modern England 201

a) But for the whole manner of Musick this shall be enough for me to say
at this time, that our countrey doth allow it: that it is verie comfortable
to the wearied minde: a preparative to perswasion: that he must needes
have a head out of proportion, which cannot perceive or doth not delite
in the proportions of number, which speake him so faire: that it is best
learned in childehood, when it can do the least harme, and may best be
had . . . Musick will not harme thee, if thy behavior be good, and thy
conceit honest, it will not miscarry thee if thy eares can carie it, and
sorte it as it should be.

b) Musick by the instrument, besides the skill which must still increase, in
forme of exercise to get the use of our small joyntes before they be knitte,
to have them the nimbler . . . Musicke by the voice . . . by the waye of
Phisick, to sprede the voices instrument while they be yet but young.

c) And to prove that they [young maidens] are to be trained, I finde foure
speciall reasons, wherof any one, much more all may perswade any their
most adversarie, much more me, which am for them with toothe and
naile. The first is the manner and custome of my countrey, which allowing
them to learne, will be lothe to be contraried by any of her contreymen.
The second is the duetie, which we owe unto them, whereby we are
charged in conscience, not to leave them lame, in that which is for them.
The third is their owne towardnesse, which God by nature would never
have given them, to remaine idle, or to small purpose. The fourth is the
excellent eectes in that sex, when they had the helpe of good bringing up.
. . . What can be said more? Our countrey doth allow it, our duetie doth
enforce it, their aptnesse calls for it, their excellencie commands it . . .

d) And is a young gentlewoman, thinke you, thoroughly furnished, which

can reade plainly and distinctly, write faire and swiftly, sing cleare and
sweetely, play well and finely, understand and speake the learned lan-
guages, and those tongues also wich the time most embraceth . . .

For the later sixteenth century, Richard Mulcasters Positions Concerning the Training Up of
Children was the indispensable educational treatise. Mulcaster, from 1561 to 1581 headmaster
of the Merchant Taylors School, then the largest school in London, designed his curricu-
lum not only for aristocrats but also for children of the middle classwith the paramount
goal of training informed, loyal subjects of the English state, as well as future government
bureaucrats. His treatise was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, one of the most musically ac-
complished women of her day. (Mulcaster, Positions, xiv)

EXCERPT 12
Anna Maria Schurman, The Learned Maid; or whether a Maid may be a scholar? A Logick Exer-
cise Written in Latine by That Incomparable Virgin Anna Maria Schurman of Vtrecht (London:
Printed by J. Redmayne, 1659), 45.
202 Pamela F. Starr

But especially let regard be had unto those Arts which have nearest
alliance to theology and the moral virtues, and are principally subservi-
ent to them. In which number we reckon Grammar, Logick, Rhetorick,
especially Logick, fitly called the key of all sciences; and then Physicks,
Metaphysicks, History, etc. . . . The rest, i.e. Mathematicks (to which is also
referred Musick), Poesie, Picture, and the like, not illiberal Arts, may ob-
tain the place of pretty Ornaments and ingenious Recreations. [Emphasis
added.]

Anna Maria Schurman (16071678) was living proof of her own argument. While still in
her twenties she was proclaimed the Tenth Muse: proficient in many modern and ancient
languages, respected friend of Descartes, Huygens, theologian Andr Rivet, and other Eu-
ropean intellectuals of the day, a carefully trained musician (voice, harpsichord, and lute),
and a distinguished visual artist. (Miriam De Baar et al., Choosing the Better Part [Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1996], 2434)

EXCERPT 13
Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewomans Companion, or a Guide to the Female Sex: The Complete Text
of 1675, intro. Caterina Albano (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2001), 115.

a) Do not discover upon every slight occasion you can sing or play upon
any Instrument of Musick; but if it be known to any particular friend in
company . . . and he can perswade you to sing, excuse your self as mod-
estly as you may; but if your friends persist, satisfie their desires, and
therein you will express no part of ill breeding. . . . Having commenced
your Harmony, do not stop in the middle thereof to beg attention, and
consequently applause to this trill, or that cadence, but continue with-
out interruption what you have begun, and make an end so as not to be
tedious, but leave the Company an appetite: As you would desire silence
from others being thus applied, be you attentive, and not talkative when
others are exercising their harmonious voices.
b) Let your prudence renounce a little pleasure for a great deal of danger.
To take delight in an idle vain Song without staining yourself with the
obscenity of it, is a thing in my mind almost impossible; for wickedness
enters insensibly by the ear into the Soul, and what care soever we take
to guard and defend ourselves, yet still it is a dicult task not to be
tainted with the pleasing and alluring poison thereof.

Hannah Woolley (1622/23ca. 1675) was one of several women authors who addressed the
educational formation of young women in seventeenth-century England. A professional
cook and former schoolmistress, she was the author of several popular cookbooks, as well
as conduct manuals for young ladies, of which The Gentlewomans Companion was the most
popular and most often reprinted. (Woolley, Gentlewomans Companion, 7, 16)
 Music Education and the Conduct of Life in Early Modern England 203

EXCERPT 14
Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (London, 1673), repr. in
Frances Teague, Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University
Press, 1998), 13031.

If any distinctly desire to know, what should they [i.e., women] be instruct-
ed in? I answer: I cannot tell where to begin to admit women nor from what
part of learning to exclude them in regard of their capacities. The whole
encyclopedia of learning may be useful some way or other to them. Respect
indeed is to be had to the nature and dignity of each art and science, as they
are more or less subservient to religion, and may be useful to them in their
station. . . .
[And after enumerating and describing the study of grammar, rhetoric,
logic, physic, tongues, mathematics, and geography, she goes on to say
that] Music, painting, poetry, etc. are a great ornament and pleasure. Some
things that are more practical are not so material because public employ-
ments in the field and courts are usually denied to women. Yet some have
not been inferior to many men even in these things also. Witness Semera-
mis amongst the Babylonians, the Queen of Sheba in Arabia, Miriam and
Deborah amongst the Israelites, Katherine de Medici in France, Queen
Elizabeth in England.

The distinguished Englishwoman of letters, Bathsua Makin (1612after 1673) was brought
up in the Puritan tradition by her schoolmaster father and was a successful instructor at
her fathers grammar school, before being engaged in 1640 as tutor to the nine-year old
Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Charles I. Encouraged by Anna Maria Schurman, a men-
tor, Makin developed a curriculum for educating young women, and applied it in her own
school for boys and girls that she opened in 1673. (Teague, Bathsua Makin, 2829, 59, and
9193)

EXCERPT 15
Elizabeth Joscelin, The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Childe, ed. Jean Le Drew Metcalf (To-
ronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 49.

I desire her [a female childs] bringing up may bee learning the Bible, as my
sisters doe, good housewifery, writing, and good works: other learning a
woman needs not: though I admire it in those whom God hath blest with
discretion . . .

Elizabeth Joscelin (15961622) was brought up and carefully educated by her grandfather,
Bishop William Chaderton of Lincoln. Her treatise, primarily a manual of religious instruc-
tion, was written just before the birth of her first childand Joscelin died of purpureal fever
nine days after giving birth. (Joscelin, Mothers Legacy, 4)
204 Pamela F. Starr

EXCERPT 16
Thomas Powell, Tom of all Trades, or the Plaine Pathway to Preferment (London: Printed by B. Al-
sop and T. Fawces for Benjamin Fisher, and are to be sold at his shop, 1631), sig. G 3.

Let them learn plaine works of all kind. . . . Instead of song and musicke,
let them learne cookerie and laundrie. And instead of reading Sir Philip
Sydneys Arcadia, let them read the grounds of good huswifery. Let greater
personages glory their skill in musicke. . . . This is not the way to breed a
private Gentlemans daughter.

Thomas Powell (died ca. 1635) was a lawyer, jurist, and (very) minor poet of Welsh extrac-
tion. His only conduct manual, designed for the children of minor gentry in search of pre-
ferment at court, included much information on educational practices in early seventeenth-
century England. (ODNB Onl., accessed 18 July 2008)

EXCERPT 17
Thomas Salter, A Mirrhor mete for all mothers, matrons, and maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Mod-
estie . . . (London: Printed by J. Kingston for Edward White, 1579), sigs. Cvi, Di.

a) But nowadaise it seemeth to some that it [music] is a godly ornament

and a brave setting out to a young maiden . . . to be an excellent fine
singer, or a cunnyng player upon instruments. . . . For my part, I do not
only discommend, but judge that a thing of no little daunger, which
ought in all women to be eschewed.
b) She learneth by looking into this mirrhor to abhor and disdain all foul
and unseemly usages . . . how unseemly her cheekes swelleth when she
plaid upon her wind instrument called a flute, and seeing how evil it was
for one of her calling to have a face so diormed, she violently threw it
from her and broke it upon the grounde, renouncing quite the use of it
and all such like.

Little is known about Thomas Salter (fl. 15791581), apart from the two books he wrote. In
1579 he published A Mirrhor mete for all mothers . . . , which was dedicated to Anne Lodge, the
wife of Thomas Lodgeauthor of A Reply to Gossons Schoole of Abuse, quoted above
as excerpt 2; and in 1580, a text with the suggestive title, A contention between three bretheren,
that is to say, the whoremonger, the dronkarde, and the diceplayer to approve which of them three is the
worste, which was published by Lodges antagonist, Thomas Gosson. (ODNB Onl., accessed
18 July 2007)

EXCERPT 18
William Darrell, The Gentleman Instructed, 5th edition (London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for
E. Smith, 1713), xlixlii.
 Music Education and the Conduct of Life in Early Modern England 205

For music has a strange ascendant over our Passions. . . . How many for
want of care have split upon the quick sands? Was not Madam W. plaid
out of her reputation and violind into a match below her quality? And how
many gentlemen have been sung out of their innocence at the playhouse
and musick meetings? Though therefore musick itself be innocent, its often
fatal in the consequence, and strikes us at a rebound.

EXCERPT 19
William Darrell, A Supplement to the 1st Part of The Gentleman Instructed, with a word
to the Ladies. Written for the Instruction of Both Sexes, in The Gentleman Instructed, 5th
edition (London: Printed by J. Heptinstall for E. Smith, 1713), xxxv.

And now Miss leaves the nursery to plie at the Dancing School, and to
finger the guitar or the Virginals, and when she has mastered a Minuet and
an air alamode; when she can practice a brace of grimaces and wave the fan,
good God! How mama titters. She is now fledgd for the World and sets
out for Company.

William Darrell (16511721), a Jesuit trained at the English Colleges at St. Omer and Lige
(where he later taught), was a nephew of the Earl of Castlemaine. Darrells conduct manual
went into a fifth edition: the supplemental feature A Word to the Ladies made it par-
ticularly popular. Although a Catholic clergyman, Darrell dedicated his book to George
Hickes, an Anglican bishop who was a supporter of the exiled Stuarts after 1688. (ODNB
15: 168)

NOTES
The author is indebted to the sta of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry
Library, and the Huntington Library, and to the generous advice and assistance of Profes-
sors Carole Levin and Linda Austern.
1. Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, 2nd edition, ed.
R. Alec Harmon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 9.
2. See, for example, C. L. Barber, Shakespeares Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic
Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 18889;
Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1978), esp. 17095; S. K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmol-
ogy and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1974), 45; John
Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 15001700 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1961), 15053; Frank Kermode, The Mature Comedies, in Early
Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3
(London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 224; and Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeares Comedy of Love
(London: Methuen, 1974), 14450.
3. Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy
Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xi.
4. Ibid., 26.
206 Pamela F. Starr

5. All information on authors, translators, dedicatees, and preface-writers of the

conduct books quoted here is taken from the printed Oxford Dictionary of National Biog-
raphy, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
60 vols. (hereafter ODNB), from the online edition at www.oxforddnb.com (hereafter
ODNB Onl.), or from information contained in the conduct books and related literature,
as cited below.
 11
Vandals, Students, or Scholars?
Handwritten Clues in Renaissance
Music Textbooks(
SUSAN FORSCHER WEISS

FROM PICTURES TO WORDS

AS AIDS TO LEAR NING

The Renaissance saw a flurry of teaching materials in the form of handbooks

or manuals on music. A great majority of printed musical textbookspartic-
ularly in areas where Catholicism reignedcontained the ubiquitous image of
the so-called Guidonian hand. Hands, along with ladders, trees, and temples
among what we might label generically as memory theatreswere included
in manuscripts and books from the Middle Ages on as a mnemonic device in
music and a variety of other disciplines. Such images were key tools in the de-
velopment of memory and in the organization of information dating back to the
writings of Aristotle. The inscribed palm (and on occasion the back) of the left
hand was an aid in learning that emphasized sight, sound, and memory. The
presence of the hand is often a clue that a text was intended for teaching music
to beginners. The writing on the hands themselves suggests authors coming to
terms with changes in teaching methodologies concerning the hexachords.
208 Susan Forscher Weiss

A hypothetical music lesson might include having students review the

visual image of the hand with a teacher, memorize the sequence of notes,
and then trace the information on their own hands. In contrast to mod-
ern memorization techniques involving the use of lists and words, medieval
memories employed vast storehouses of visual images, disposed in struc-
tured places, symmetrical and concrete. In this context, images could
stimulate the memories of those who relied on the literacy of others for
access to texts.
It was during my work with such hands that I first became aware of
the significance of the handwriting on these images and elsewhere in music
textbooks. Many early printed texts imitated the manuscripts from which
they were copied, including the use of printed annotations in and around
the margins. Alongside the printed marginalia in some of these texts, we
often find handwritten notes, and somebut not allare relevant to the
subject matter. While the majority of early printed music-theoretical texts
survive without annotations, a small percentage contain substantive and
clearly decipherable markings, and some of these can be identified as the
work of a particular reader or readers. Copies of a select few Renaissance
music treatises contain notes by well-known Renaissance theorists such as
Franchinus Gaurius (14511522), Giovanni Spataro (ca. 14581541), Hein-
rich Glarean (14881563), and Gioseo Zarlino (ca. 15171590), as well as by
later musicians, such as the eighteenth-century music teacher and bibliophile
Padre Giovanni Battista Martini, and twentieth-century teacher and concert
pianist, conductor, editor, and collector Alfred Cortot. It is this interaction
of readers with didactic music textbooks, a source of our understanding of
musical literacy in the Renaissance, that is the focus of the present studya
subject that has for the most part escaped the attention of scholars. The
annotationswords, musical notation, and other clues in the marginsnot
only reveal evidence of use, but on occasion provide the clues that can point to
a network of writers, readers, printers, teachers, and students in the process
of learning the rules and skills of music or refining methods of teaching the
subject matter.
Some early music textbooks contain images of a teacher holding a book,
surrounded by students holding books or tablets. Among them is one
that depicts a similar scene without any visible textbooks. In this instance,
the teacher was imparting knowledge stored in his memory. Images such
as these highlight the pedagogical importance of both senses: seeing and
hearing. Identifying and decoding the various marginalia, doodles, and
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 209

grati can reveal privileged information about specific writers and their
readers.
In his article Lessons in Theory from a Sixteenth-Century Composer,
James Haar contends that young musicians received instructions orally, and
most likely did not use treatises. In Haars opinion, the textbooks (he uses
the words treatise and textbook interchangeably) were mainly for teachers
rather than for students, who tended to receive oral instruction. While this is
true in many instances, Haars case study takes up two short notational trea-
tises attributed to composer-teacher Giovan Tomaso Cimello (fl. 15101580).
These manuscripts (one residing in Bologna and the other in Naples) not only
reveal links between Cimello and his students, but also oer glimpses into the
pedagogical practices of a Renaissance music teacher. Evidence exists within
the covers of printed textbooks and in related notebooks that demonstrates
usage by both teachers and students. Some books contained only enough
material for learning to sing, others for learning to play an instrument, but the
content of most included basic music history, theory, and counterpoint. The
multiplicity of types of textbooks matches the array of places in which music
lessons were taughthomes, palaces, religious or secular schoolsand re-
veals a variety of skills and backgrounds of their authors, many of whom were
composers, performers, and teachers.
An early sixteenth-century copy of Bonaventura da Brescias Regula mu-
sice plane (Bologna, Museo Internazionale, A 57) belonged to the eighteenth-
century music teacher and bibliophile, Padre Giovanni Battista Martini. Not
only did Martini identify himself as the books owner by writing P. Martini
on the cu of the hand, he also annotated other parts of the text, adding com-
ments, corrections, and his own musical excerpts (figure 11.1). Martinis copy
of another well-known early sixteenth-century treatise is annotated in two
distinct hands. In a 1533 edition of Andreas Ornithoparchuss De arte cantandi
micrologus (published in Leipzig as Musice active micrologus in 1517), Martinis
comments appear alongside those of a Renaissance reader (figure 11.2).
That Martini was still interested in sixteenth-century treatises, in partic-
ular a primer like Bonaventuras Regula musice plane, is not surprising in light
of his illustrious teaching career. In 1770, none other than the fourteen-year-
old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart came to study counterpoint and composition
with Martini in Bologna at the prestigious Accademia dei Filarmonici. Mar-
tini and his sixteenth-century counterparts, teacher/theorists like Giovanni
Spataro and Heinrich Glarean, were hired to teach both youthful beginners
and university students while they engaged in more sophisticated dialogue
FIGURE 11.1. Bonaventura da Brescia, Breviloquium musicale (Brescia, 1497), sig. Aiii verso
(Bologna, Museo Internazionale, A 57).
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 211

FIGURE 11.2. Andreas Ornithoparchus, De arte cantandi micrologus (Cologne, 1533), sig. A3v
(Bologna, Museo Internazionale, B 129).

with seasoned theorists about matters concerning music theory and music
pedagogy. Glareans textbook, Isagoge in musicen, published in 1516, contains
ten chapters intended as a simple didactic treatise for school children, prob-
ably those he taught at a boarding school in Basel. His Dodecachordon, on the
other hand (published in 1547), was a treatise for learned readers. Ten years
later, Glarean published an abridged version, the Musicae epitome sive com-
pendium ex Glareani Dodecachordo, as well as a version in German. These last
books were most probably aimed at older students, many enrolled in music
classes at the university. Glarean himself studied at Cologne with the Ger-
man music teacher Johannes Cochlaeus (14791552), whose music textbook
(and its revisions) undoubtedly served as models for his student. Coch-
laeuss students included the well-to-do children of Willibald Pirckheimer in
Nuremberg. And Cochlaeuss own models, in turn, included a fellow student,
the Lotharingian music theorist and theologian Nicholas Wollick (Volcyr de
Srouville, ca. 14801541). Wollick wrote a music textbook in collaboration
with their teacher in Cologne, Melchior Schanppecher (born ca. 1480). An-
212 Susan Forscher Weiss

other important influence on and source for Glarean was the Italian theorist
and teacher Franchinus Gaurius, whose music theory books were widely
read and annotated. The connections between their treatises are strength-
ened by the knowledge that the writers knew one another personally. Gaf-
furius met with Glarean in Milan. Numerous copies of Gauriuss three
treatisesknown together as the Trilogia Gafuriana, and among the most
influential treatises of the sixteenth centurysurvive with annotations.
Gaurius, together with one of his students, produced an abridged version of
one of his earlier treatises, possibly for the use of nuns. Gaurius annotated
Spataros copy of his teacher Bartolomeo Ramos de Parejas treatise, and also
marked up a copy of Wollicks 1512 treatise, Enchiridion musices, and sent it on
to Giovanni Spataro for review.
Glareans library contained numerous annotated books, including his
own musical treatises and two by Gaurius. Cristle Collins Judd has dem-
onstrated how Glareans annotations in his own copy of Gauriuss Practica
musicae wound up as part of his treatise Dodecachordon. Glareans margi-
nalia, in chapter 14 of Gauriuss Practica musica (Brescia: A. Britannicus,
23 November 1497), are a combination of musical and textual annotations.
Judd also noted that Glareans copy of another of Gauriuss treatises, De
harmonia musicorum instrumentorum opus (Turin, 1518), was bound together
with eighteen folios of manuscript music in the late sixteenth century. Al-
though the process of trimming the pages, common in rebinding, cropped
many of the annotations, what does remain of the handwriting and music
notation reveals at least four dierent hands including Glareans and one of
his students, Petrus Scudus (Peter Tschudi).
Unlike Glarean, who taught music in a school, Giovanni Spataro taught
the children of his patrons Giovanni and Ginevra Bentivoglio in their pal-
azzo in Bologna. Spataros letters provide insight into his teaching, into
his particular relationship with Gaurius and his students such as Ermes
Bentivoglio, and into his interest in music textbooks, such as one of the
two written by Nicolas Wollick and those of other theorists. A copy of the
second of Wollicks music textbooks, now in Bologna, contains not only
Martinis handwritten marginalia, but also annotations in a hand that is
almost certainly that of Giovanni Spataro. It too bears a resemblance to
the writings of Gaurius. We will examine some of these sources, follow-
ing descriptions first of the function and then of the form of annotations in
scholastic books.
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 213

THE FUNCTION OF ANNOTATIONS

ON IMAGES AND TEXT

The subject of marginal notes has been a source of heated debate in scholarly
circles, with one side proclaiming that the more extensive notes or glosses
reinforce the books authorship (e.g., citations from the church fathers) while
others evidently subvert the authority (e.g., drawings of cheating merchants,
fornicating nuns, and defecating monks). The study of marginalia has been
neglected for a number of reasons. Annotations are often cut o in the re-
binding process, and publishers of facsimile editions routinely erase margi-
nalia in an eort to print clean copies. Keepers of bookscollectors and
librariansprefer to buy books in good condition, rather than well-worn,
heavily marked-up exemplars. On top of this is the seemingly banal fact that
the least-used books survive the longest. These factors, among others, make
the task at hand all the more dicult.
Recent studies of marginalia in early printed books, among them An-
thony Graftons Commerce with the Classics (1997), Heather Jacksons Margi-
nalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001), and more recently Jacksons Romantic
Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (2005), address the subject of readers
writing in books. The process of annotating is in itself an aspect of the ars
memorativa, as much as images of temples, theaters, hands, trees, and other vi-
sual aids. The markings and notes can be an attempt to construct an orderly
arrangement for the purpose of quick, secure recollection.
Annotating is done at various levels, as the books themselves fall into
several categories: those owned and read by literati (treatises), others pro-
duced and marketed for institutions of learning, and those intended for use
in the home (manuals, broadsides). The more substantive annotations ap-
pear in treatises where learned readers took notes, not only in order to recall
important points, but also to comment, adjust, and correct the text. Some
readers will write in one book, but not in another. Still others annotate in an
external source, such as a notebook; some of these surviving manuscripts are
bound together with the printed texts that were their sources. Jackson states,
readers notes in books are a familiar but unexamined phenomenon. We
dont understand the practice well, butto the chagrin of many librarians
and bibliophilesmarking up a book is a traditional and important part of
literacy. Roland Barthes says of all reading that it is subject to the structure
imposed by the text; it needs and respects itbut it also perverts it. Read-
214 Susan Forscher Weiss

ers try to declare themselves independent of the text, but their notes prove
otherwise.
Marginal annotations abounded in the centuries when readers usually
went through books with pen in hand (pencils were not routinely used until
the eighteenth century, but ink colors varied from black to brown to red); they
expose the often surprising messages that individuals have left on the page as
they read. Many original writers and thinkers, such as Martin Luther, John
Adams, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge have filled their books with notes that
are indispensable to understanding their thought. Thousands of forgotten
men and women have covered Bibles and prayer books, recipe collections,
and political pamphlets with pointing hands, underlinings, and notes that
give insights into which books mattered, and why. Before examining some
specific annotations and determining what they represent, it is necessary to
examine the various types and systems of marginalia.

TYPOLOGY OF MARGINALIA

When present, handwritten inscriptions appear not only on images, but

elsewhere in the book: on frontispieces, on flyleaves, in the margins, as well
as within the text. A variety of annotations appear throughout books of
music, not unlike those found in other disciplines. Some readers develop
their own system of annotating with characteristics that oer clues to the
identity of the reader. Markers such as cartoons of fingers, asterisks, crosses,
underlinings, as well as interlinear and marginal verbal notes serve as in-
dices to passages readers wish to recall. The pointer or index finger, also
called a manicule, creates an index of the authors key points as perceived
and comprehended by a particular reader. Diagrams of fingers pointing
to text transform the words from abstract sentences to organized thoughts,
the marginal words or symbols forming a summary of the contents of the
book.
Select words and phrases and even musical notes are copied from the text
into the margins as if the reader were using a highlighting pen. Insertions
include comments, corrections, and translations. Some comments may be
considered an early form of the footnote. These notes in the margins act as
tabs, keywords, or indices and are known as shoulder notes (a moniker that
references another part of the human anatomy).
In some cases, the annotations are minor, but telling. The Flores musices,
a manual written by the fourteenth-century music teacher Hugo Spechtshart
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 215

van Reutlingen (ca. 12851359), was one of the first music primers to attract
the attention of the Strasbourg printer Johann Prss, who published a num-
ber of incunables in the late 1480s and early 1490s. Surviving copies contain
few markings. In one copy of Hugos primer, now at the Walters Art Museum
in Baltimore, there is a single inscription on the woodcut of the hand indicat-
ing that the book belonged at one time to a monastery in Salzburg. In another
copy, now at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the text is carefully
rubricated (red handwriting to set o headings or directions); it also contains
some manuscript additions, perhaps made by the same reader. These mark-
ings (particularly those in red ink) may be purely decorativethe readers
attempt to recreate the appearance of a manuscript, perhaps along the lines
of a hypothetical fourteenth-century copy of Hugos text, a more valued and
valuable artifact than a printed book.
Some books reveal signs of multiple owners. These include some with
multiple comments by various readers whose identities are unknown. An-
other example turns up in a popular sixteenth-century music manual that was
part of the cantorini tradition (named for the cantorinus, a small practical book
of music theory popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). Orazio
Scalettas Scala di Musica was printed in numerous editions throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This little manual represents one of the
simplest of textbooks aimed at the young singer and seems to be the kind of
book held by students in a classroom. Each copy contains rules for singing
chant, musical examples, and an image of a Guidonian hand. Written work
may have been done in separate notebooks. One of the numerous surviving
copies contains an inscription on the flyleaf with the names of two owners
(figure 11.3).
According to the inscription, Scalettas book was presumably bought on
9 March 1693 in the Piazza in Bologna by a Signor Giovanni Battista Dia-
manti. He may have been from the same family as a well-known singer by the
name of Maria Diamante Scarabelli, detta La Diamantina, born in Bologna
in the second half of the seventeenth century. On 13 March 1693, after own-
ing it for a mere four days, he gave the book to a woman named Anna Maria
Pomi, possibly his student or another teacher, although her handwriting has
a youthful appearance. It is possible that Signor Diamanti bought the book
for Anna to use in her lessons. Not surprisingly, there are no other mark-
ings in this copy of Scala di musica; relatively few annotations appear in any
surviving copies of Scalettas manual, but those that do would seem to be the
writing of youthful beginners.
216 Susan Forscher Weiss

FIGURE 11.3. Orazio Scaletta, Scala de musica (Venice, 1656), flyleaf (Bologna,
Biblioteca Universitaria, AIV Q X 34).

Another category of annotations includes translations of the text. Ein

Tutsche Musica, the so-called Bern manuscript of 1491, was written by an
anonymous German musician, but is annotated in the same hand in the mar-
gins, in Latin. Nicolas Wollick, whose two musical treatises date from early
in his career, is also the author of several texts on other subjects, both histori-
cal and theological. A manuscript and several of his printed books are written
in French with Latin shoulder notes.
A number of books appear to contain marks that suggest the reader as a
reviewer or editor. These marks include corrections within the text and in the
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 217

margins: cross-outs and insertions. The first six or so handwritten folios of a

copy of Andreas Ornithoparchuss treatise, Musice active micrologus (Manual
on practical music), now in the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris, were os-
tensibly copied from another source, most likely to replace pages that were
missing from this single surviving copy of the 1517 Leipzig print (figure 11.4).
Not only does the writer take pains to reproduce the missing text (perhaps
copied from a later edition), complete with shoulder notes, but he makes his
own annotations within and on the margins. The writer also takes pains to
make corrections throughout the print. Martinis copy of a later incarnation
of Ornithoparchuss treatise, De arte cantandi micrologus (Manual on the art
of singing), was published in Cologne in 1533 and is now in Bologna. In the
margin, Martini makes a note suggesting that he compare it with the Leipzig
edition. Along with Martinis eighteenth-century notes are those written in
a contemporaneous sixteenth-century hand. The treatise, based on Ornitho-
parchuss lectures at the University of Heidelberg, became a popular textbook
in the sixteenth century. In 1539 it was used at Krakow University. In a 1547
edition of Angelo da Picitonos Fior angelico di musica, published in Venice,
are entire chapters copied from Ornithoparchus. Claudio Sebastiani copied
large sections in his Bellum musicale, published in Strasbourg in 1563; and in
1609, John Dowland published his English translation of Ornithoparchuss
treatise.
The earlier-mentioned copy of Heinrich Glareans Musicae epitome sive
compendium ex Glareani Dodecachordo, published in Basel in 1559, contains
a date of 1560 written at the bottom of the title page, under an image of the
Guidonian hand. An inscription by Georgy Werdenstein, then eighteen years
old, indicates that the book was given to him by Glarean. Werdenstein
became a major collector of music prints; his extensive library, numbering in
the tens of thousands of volumes, was purchased by the Bayerische Staatsbib-
liothek in Munich around 1592. Glareans text is filled with corrections and
edits that could only have been made by someone familiar with the subject
mattersomeone like his stepson, editor, and translator, Johannes Litavicus
Wonnegger (ca. 1512c. 1577), or by the author himself. It seems less likely
that Werdenstein is the annotator. The edits include spelling corrections and
insertions for missing words or notes; asterisks in the margins signal changes
within the text in almost all instances. The precision and meticulousness
of the annotations suggest that the entries were made by Glarean himself.
Comparisons of the signs and writing with Glareans autographs reinforce
this hypothesis (figures 11.5ac).
FIGURE 11.4. Andreas Ornithoparchus, Musice active micrologus (Leipzig, 1517), sigs.
A6v (above) and B1 (below) (Paris, Bibliothque Nationale, Rs V 2484).
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 219

FIGURE 11.5a. Heinrich Glarean, Musicae epitome sive compendium ex Glareani Dodecachordo
(Basel, 1559), title page (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. Th. 3765).

The absence of marginalia within a printed manual is not necessarily a

sign of little interaction with the book. Copies of Bonaventura da Brescias
Regula musice plane (Venice, 1510) and Adriano Banchieris La Cartella (Ven-
ice, 1610) in the British Library are devoid of any internal markings, but their
rules and examples were assiduously copied onto blank pages and bound to-
gether with the printed textbooks. The handwriting on those pages matches
the owners inscription in the books themselves. A copy of Bonaventuras
Regula plane that was owned by one Camillo Guidottis, is bound with a
FIGURE 11.5b. Heinrich Glarean, Musicae epitome sive compendium ex Glareani Dodecachordo
(Basel, 1559), frontispiece (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. Th. 3765).
FIGURE 11.5c. Heinrich Glarean, Musicae epitome sive compendium ex Glareani Dodecachordo
(Basel, 1559), fol. 37 (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. Th. 3765).
FIGURE 11.6a. Adriano Banchieri, Cartellina del canto fermo gregoriano (Venice, 1601),
title page (London, British Library, Hirsch I. 49).
FIGURE 11.6b. Adriano Banchieri, Cartellina del canto fermo gregoriano (Venice, 1601),
first page of manuscript tipped in (London, British Library, Hirsch I.49).
224 Susan Forscher Weiss

FIGURE 11.7. Regole di contrapunto di Bartolomeo Lazari, first opening (Rome, Vatican
Library, Chigi, Q IV 22 1639).

five-page manuscript in Guidottiss hand that contains rules and musical ex-
amples based on the text. A copy of another of Banchieris music manu-
alshis Cartellina del canto fermo gregoriano, printed in Bologna in 1614
belonged to a monk named Franciscis de Cattis, who not only signed the fron-
tispiece but copied the rules from the printed text. Seventeen manuscript pages
contain de Cattiss exercises, written on four-line staves. The written notation
for the Lamentations of Jeremiah and a copy of rules and counterpoint exercises
are based on the materials in Banchieris manual. In lieu of writing notes in the
margins, de Cattis made his notes in a separate notebook (figures 11.6ab).
The Chigi collection at the Vatican library contains a number of simi-
lar notebooks. Each is small and contains no more than few dozen pages
of rules, examples, and exercises. One of them is the notebook of a student
named Antonio Melendez. Still another, containing less sophisticated script,
is not marked as belonging to him, but contains the signature Antonio M
above one of the exercises. Another, a notebook containing the rules of coun-
terpoint with examples illustrating good and bad resolutions, belonged to
Bartolomeo Lazari. His name and a 1639 date appear on the first page above a
verbal depiction of the hand, labeled Mano. It is likely that Lazari worked
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 225

FIGURE 11.8. Simon Quercu, Opusculum musices (Landeshut, 1516), Giiii versoGv recto
(Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, ML171.Q4 1516 Case).

from a printed book in the same way as the students whose notebooks were
attached to their models did (figure 11.7).

TOWARD AN INTERPRETATION OF MARGINALIA

IN RENAISSANCE MUSIC TEXTBOOKS

One of the best ways to understand annotations is to compare multiple cop-

ies of the same book to see how dierent readers interact with the material.
Some annotations have, in fact, little or nothing to do with the material in
the text. A music theory book by Simon Quercu, a Netherlandish theorist
in the service of Duke Lodovico Sforza of Milan and tutor to his sons, was
published in Landshut in 1516. A copy now in the Library of Congress is awash
in markings covering almost every white space on every last page. Strange-
looking annotations from dots and deltas to little hearts and other symbols
cover the text, with seeming disregard for its meaning and content. Rather,
the extensive markings seem to be some sort of cryptographic message. This
particular copy of Quercus textbook, one acquired by the library in the early
1950s, may have simply served as a handy surface for transmitting confidential
information (figure 11.8).
226 Susan Forscher Weiss

FIGURE 11.9. Franchinus Gaurius, Practica musice (Milan, 1496), chap. 12 (Trinity College,
Dublin).

John Dygons Proportiones practicabiles secundum Gaurium, a manuscript

written in the first half of sixteenth century, is an English adaptation of Gau-
riuss Practica musica, first published in the late 1490s. Dygon, a Benedictine
and prior of a monastery in Canterbury from 1528 until its dissolution in 1538,
supplicated for a B. Mus. at Oxford in 1512, with additional studies in 1521
at universities in Paris and Leuven, under the tutelage of the humanist Juan
Luis Vives. Along the way, he undoubtedly encountered the treatises of Gaf-
furius. John Hawkins, the eighteenth-century music historian, presented his
own copy of Gauriuss Practica musice to the British Library in 1778. Within
the covers of this 1502 Brescian copy are Hawkinss own marginal notes, par-
tially obscuring another set of notes in a distinctly English sixteenth-century
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 227

hand; the marginalia is extensive in book IV of this copy of Gauriuss Prac-

tica, the source for Dygons treatise, suggesting that the hand may be that of
Dygon himself. An unknown annotator of another copy of Gauriuss Prac-
tica now in Trinity College, Dublin, adopts a system of letters in the text that
correspond to places on the musical example (figure 11.9).
The textual and musical marginalia in several copies of Thomas Morleys
A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke reveal attempts on the
part of various readers to work out selected examples. The variety of results
attests to the wide-ranging appeal of Morleys text. In a Library of Congress
copy of Morleys book, the reader was well enough trained to have realized
the complex canon (figures 11.10ab).
A comparison with a copy of the treatise now in the Folger Shakespeare
Library in Washington, D.C., reveals a dierent sort of interaction. An En-
glish gentleman by the name of W. Northall has made an eort to follow
Morleys rules by copying them from the preceding page into the left margins
alongside the exercises. As there are no further annotations, we may surmise
that his skills did not match those of the reader of the Library of Congress
copy (figure 11.11).
Renaissance theorists and teachers were buying, reading, translating,
and commenting on a large number of one anothers treatises. Thomas Morley
includes a list with the names of his sources on the final folio of his Plaine and
Easie Introduction. Morley cites almost every known musical authority, group-
ing them in several categories, e.g., late writers, ancient writers, English
writers. He borrows material from Gaurius for his section on measured
music. Among his other sources are Tinctoris, Ornithoparchus, Tigrini, and
Zarlino.
As if in response to all the theoretical texts he consultedtexts undoubt-
edly annotated by Morley and other readershe includes his own printed
annotations at the end of his treatise, claiming that it is necessary for the un-
derstanding of the Booke, wherein the veritie of some of the precepts I proved,
and some arguments which to the contrary might be objected are refuted.
By the seventeenth century, English textbooks frequently included printed
annotations.
Another author to be influenced by the writings of Gaurius was Nicho-
las Wollick, mentioned earlier. His music texts were also read and copied by
students and theorists from all over Europe during the Renaissance; many
survive today in libraries across the world. The interest in Wollick is appar-
ent both from the mention of his works in the correspondence of Renaissance
FIGURE 11.10a. Thomas Morley, A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke
(London, 1597), 174 (Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, MT6.A2 M84, copy 1).
FIGURE 11.10b. Thomas Morley, A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke
(London, 1597), 175 (Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, MT6.A2 M84, copy 1).
FIGURE 11.11. Thomas Morley, A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke
(London, 1597), 8 (Washington, D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 18133, copy 1).
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 231

musicians, but also from the signs of use and wear in the surviving volumes.
Why? Wollick did, after all, receive an appointment as the secretary to the
Duke of Lorraine and subsequently turned his attention away from music
toward history and theology. But Wollicks contribution to the history and
theory of music did not go unnoticed. He was one of the first to describe dif-
ferences between art music and its refined singing and the artlessness of folk
song, incorporating ideas gleaned from the writings of such late fifteenth-
century German theorists as Conrad van Zabern and Adam von Fulda, and
perhaps even from the earlier writing of Hugo von Reutlingen, himself a
collector of folk songs. Wollick drew distinctions between written counter-
point and sortisatio or improvised discant. Of further interest to his read-
ers was his section on accent and text underlay. Much of his knowledge of
grammar and accent is based on the early medieval writers Priscianus and
Donatus, both of whose grammars were published ca. 1500 and became ba-
sic texts in the schools. Each of these grammarians, in turn, based their
work on ancient Greek models. Wollick was quoted by a number of writers,
mostly Italian; among them was Giovanni Maria Lanfranco, in his Scintille
di musica of 1533. Gregor Reischs encyclopedia, Margarita philosophica, bor-
rowed parts of Wollicks treatise for its later editions (those published after
1508).
Many copies of Nicholas Wollicks two music texts exhibit signs of use.
A letter from Wollick to his teacher Melchior Schanppecher reveals that the
second half of his treatise Opus aureum (Cologne, 1501)the section on men-
sural musicwas supplied by the teacher. According to Ernest T. Ferand,
Wollicks treatise is the first book on music education to be printed in Ger-
many. Although most copies of the treatise survive with blank staves, some
contain notes drawn by a variety of hands, contemporaneous and modern. A
1505 copy of the Opus aureum (now in the Library of Congress) contains notes
drawn on the empty staves that look like those we would find in a workbook
intended for students doing their exercises. Most students probably copied
the rules and the examples into their own notebooks; one reader annotated
the section on rules and several other parts of the book, but left the staves
blank. In certain copies the writing appears child-like; in others the script
appears to be more mature. In the exemplar from a 1504 edition of Wollicks
Opus aureum (shown in figure 11.12), there is, underneath a doodle of a pan-
pipe, a hexachord copied in the margin next to the text.
The reader ostensibly copied the notation from the printed image of the
Guidonian hand on the next folio, shown here in the center. Some surviving
232 Susan Forscher Weiss

FIGURE 11.12. Nicolas Wollick, Opus aureum musice (Cologne, 1504), sig. Av (Paris,
Bibliothque Nationale, Rs P-V 381).

copies of Wollicks Opus aureum contain musical notation written in on the

staves following the various rules for counterpoint in the later two sections on
mensural music supplied by Wollicks teacher at Cologne, Malcior of Worms
(Schanppecher). In the Paris copy published in Cologne in 1504, a few staves
contain notation in a hand similar to that found in the first half of the book,
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 233

a hand that appears to have familiarity with the material. In the Washington
copy published in Cologne in 1505, the reader seems to be less well-trained in
the basics of musical notation (figures 11.13ab).
What are the connections between Wollicks music textbooks and Ital-
ian music theory? In 1517, in a letter to Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, Giovanni
Spataro informs him that he is reviewing Wollicks Enchiridion musices, pub-
lished in Paris in 1512 (an expanded version of the 1501 Opus aureum). Spataro
mentions that Gaurius sent him a copy of Wollicks book, recommending
it highly; he also states that the treatise is based heavily on the writings of
Gaurius. In a letter to his student Pietro Aaron on 27 November 1531, Spa-
taro refuses to loan him the treatise of his own teacher, Bartolomeo Ramos,
because his is the only copy in Bologna and it was taken apart and annotated
by Gafurio. . . . If I could find another one I would buy it and throw this one
into the fire so that no one should ever see the comments he scribbled on my
copy. In another letter written by Spataro to Aaron and dated 30 January
1532, he mentions that he is sending him a motet based on a chant in Wol-
licks treatise, which I set for four voices and to which I added a fifth to check
for errors. A copy of Wollicks Enchiridion that is now in the Conservatory
library in Bologna is annotated in at least two hands, one of which is known
to be Padre Martinis and the other, that of Giovanni Spataro. Not surpris-
ingly, there is an annotation on the page with the chant that Spataro used for
his own motet.
Another contemporary of Spataro, the theorist Giovanni del Lago (ca.
14901544), wrote in 1541 to Fra Seraphin paraphrasing the section on accents
from Wollicks 1512 Enchiridion. The issue of accents also comes up in letters
between Spataro and Aaron. In the letter addressed to Aaron on 27 Novem-
ber 1531, Spataro berates Aaron for paying too much attention to grammatical
considerations, stating that Grammar is not our profession, and few compos-
ers observe grammatical accent in mensural music.
Spataro (and Martini later) use many of the tools in the readers toolbox.
The Bologna copy contains pointing fingers, crosses, shoulder notes, and cita-
tions of historical figures, music theorists, and composers. Names appearing
in the margins include: Guido dArezzo, Jean de Muris, Johannes Tinctoris,
Heinrich Faber, and Franchino (as Spataro and others called Gaurius). His
interest seems focused on practical matters, perhaps because of his role as
teacher (figure 11.14).
More than any other duties (as singer, composer, and theorist), Spataro
loved his teaching. He claimed that he hastily wrote a treatise on mensural
FIGURE 11.13a. Nicolas Wollick, Opus aureum musice (Cologne, 1504), sig. Gv (Paris,
Bibliothque Nationale, Rs P-V 381).
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 235

FIGURE 11.13b. Nicolas Wollick, Opus aureum musice (Cologne, 1505), sig. Giii recto
(Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, ML 171 V 67 1505 case).

music for the young Ermes (14821513), the tenth of eleven children of Ginevra
and Giovanni II Bentivoglio. This may well be the treatise Utile e breve regule
di canto composte per Maestro Zoanne de Spadari da Bologna, now in the Brit-
ish Library (Add. MS 4920) and dated 1510. According to a letter Spataro
wrote to the Venetian theorist Giovanni del Lago in 1528, he later finished
the incomplete tract, first expanding and then revising it, hoping to get it
236 Susan Forscher Weiss

FIGURE 11.14. Nicholas Wollick, Enchiridion Musices (Paris, 1512), sig. Diii (Bologna,
Museo Internazionale, B 7).

published. He believed it would be a little volume of decent size (seria meglio

questo ultimo da me finito et complecto, el quale non tanto breve, et per
essere assai magiore [sic] volume). But, on receiving del Lagos critique and
suggestions for revision, he replied that he was now seventy years old and was
too busy teaching the choirboys. He also questioned whether anyone would
still have interest in the rules of mensural music and bemoaned the fact that
few paid attention to the rules anyway.

CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS

This study of annotations in music texts is a work in progress that only

scratches the surface of a larger inquiry. The early fruits of my work suggest
that there exist dierent categories of readersfrom those who are beginning
to learn the rudiments of music to those who have a marginal knowledge of
the text, and on to a network of learned teachers and composers. Most of the
surviving music textbooks contain annotations by unknown readers, some of
whom leave little or no clue as to their identity. Unraveling the trace evidence
left by these unidentified readers can help flesh out the picture of the impor-
tance of these musical textbooks. While some marginalia have a memorial
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 237

function, others indicate how readers interacted with the words and images
in an eort to absorb the content.
Some judgments and comments in the margins are rather extensive and
reveal a writer who is learned; occasionally, the notes reveal connections that
link a community of readers. We know from letters and other documents
that the contents of some of the books stirred debates that were revealed in
contemporaneous treatises and letters. The note-taking practices of a num-
ber of well-known readers such as Gaurius, Spataro, Glarean, and Zarlino
help to inform our understanding of how certain music texts were studied.
The annotations in texts by other authors such as Ramos, Wollick, Quercu,
Ornithoparchus, Listenius, Faber, and Morleyto name only a fewreveal
information about the popularity of certain texts and, accordingly, which ma-
terials in these texts were of greatest importance. We still need to uncover
details about age of readers, place of instruction (e.g., home, school, university),
and assemble information about things sometimes studied in isolation from
each other, such as the theorists correspondences and their annotations in
treatises and textbooks. From their letters, we know that Italian musicians
and theoristsamong them, Gaurius, Spataro, Aaron, del Lagoread and
annotated the Enchiridion musices by Nicholas Wollick. This particular music
textbook sparked the interest of Germans and Italiansscholars and students
alike, if the number of annotated copies is any indication. The parts of the texts
that seem to contain the most ink are those concerned with practical topics,
e.g., the resolution of rules and canons, text underlay, rests, and mensural
notation.
Annotations also reveal patterns of borrowing. Certain musicians had
interest in the works of distinguished authors as well as in those of less cel-
ebrated writers. As we have seen, John Dygon and Heinrich Glarean bor-
rowed from the writing of Franchinus Gaurius. In Glareans case, we have
his annotations to prove it. As it becomes possible to identify more of the
annotators by their handwriting or systems of marginalia, databases of hands
and typologies of annotations can be shared and made widely available. A
comparison of the annotations in several editions of the same work can reveal
dierent approaches to the same material. Such studies may uncover traces of
annotated passages folded into the annotators own work. Publishers should
be urged to include the marginalia as a critical part of the text (instead of
erasing them before going to press), and to seek technological advice in or-
der to develop ways of deciphering annotations and of identifying specific
hands.
238 Susan Forscher Weiss

NOTES
1. This chapter builds on research that focused primarily on the materials and devices
of teaching music, particularly those aimed at introductory training in singing plainchant.
In this, I was inspired by the work and encouragement of a number of individuals, includ-
ing James Haar, Margaret Bent, David Fallows, Kristine Forney, Jessie Ann Owens, Craig
Wright, Richard Rastall, Cristle Collins Judd, John Kmetz, Bonnie J. Blackburn, Karol
Berger, Claire Richter Sherman, Jamie van Horn Melton, Natasha Glaisyer, and Sara Pen-
nell. They all encouraged my work in the history of musical learning. My interest in the in-
scribed musical hand dates to 1996 and an exhibition held at the Walters Art Museum that
led to exhibits elsewhere and eventually to a catalogue edited by Claire Richter Sherman,
Memory and Knowledge in Medieval Europe, completed in 2001. My chapter, The Singing
Hand, led to a systematic study of hands and other images intended to aid in memorizing
and learning music was published in 2005. See Susan Forscher Weiss, Disce Manum Tuam
si vis bene discere cantum: Symbols of Learning Music in Early Modern Europe, Music in
Art 30 (2005): 3574.
2. Several hands not included in previous publications were discovered in books se-
lected for inclusion in the exhibition that was organized as part of the 2005 conference
Reading and Writing the Pedagogies of the Renaissance: The Student, the Study Materials,
and the Teacher of Music, 14701650, at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity. To complement this conference, the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University
organized an exhibition of didactic books, Art, Science, Spirit, Soul: Mastering Music in
the Renaissance. The books were drawn from collections in neighboring libraries, includ-
ing the Walters Art Museum, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress,
and the George Peabody Library of Johns Hopkins University. Among those with instruc-
tional hands is an astronomy text by Peter Apian (Instrument Buch, Ingolstadt, 1533), where
the hand served as a memory aid for recalling seasonal moons; another hand in Federico
Grisones text on equestrian arts (Augsburg, 1570) displays the names of the planets, moon,
and sun, and demonstrates the interrelation between science and other aspects of Renais-
sance life such as, in this instance, horseback riding.
3. For more on Aristotle and memory, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory:
A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Claire
Richter Sherman, Imagining Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in Fourteenth-Cen-
tury France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on
Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
4. The inscribed hand dates back ten thousand years to ones discovered in rock caves
in Eastern Borneo. These hands inscribed with patterns of dots, dashes, and other markings
aided in training healers or shamans to dance, sing, and tell stories. Luc-Henri Fage, Hands
Across Time, in The National Geographic 208, no. 2 (August 2005): 3245.
5. See Weiss, Disce Manum Tuam, esp. 5055 on changing patterns of navigating
around images of the hand from the Middle Ages to Ramos to Gumpeltzhaimer.
6. In James Haars contribution to the present volume (chap. 1), he distinguishes be-
tween cantorini for children or beginners and those for adults. There are accounts of domes-
tic music-making involving the activities of families; some of the participants are parents
and some are their children.
7. Donald Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1976), 147. Howard is echoing Augustine, Confessions X.8 here: And so I come to
the fields and vast atriums of memory, where are stored the innumerable images of material
things brought to it by the senses . . . A well-known letter from Guarino Guarini to Leo-
nello dEste describes how to read by writing down lists in a notebook. He refers to Pliny
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 239

who never read without taking notes, and advises that all students use the notebook as a
means of collecting information. See Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, Humanism and
the School of Guarino: A Problem of Evaluation, Past & Present 96 (1982): 68.
8. See Suzanne Lewis, Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century
Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
9. William Slights in Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance
Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2001), 78, suggests that printers included
marginal notes as a way of making a book seem more scholarly and more like a valuable
manuscript in every detail, from layout to historiated initials to a typeface that mimics
scribal hands.
10. The one major exception is Cristle Collins Judds Reading Renaissance Theory: Hear-
ing with the Eyes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
11. Over the course of the last decade, in examining music texts in libraries all over
Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, I have assembled detailed lists of
annotated sources. Although I have looked at some manuscripts and prints of music, the
greatest focus of my study has been on annotations made by teachers and students in music
textbooks.
12. Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition, 14501600
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 83, plate 5.1: Anonymous, Music Lesson in Lati-
num ideoma Magistri Pauli Niavis (1501).
13. Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2005). The jacket illustration reproduces a medieval classroom
from a tenth-century commentary by Remigius of Martianus Capella (Paris, Bibliothque
Nationale, MS lat. 7900A. fol. 1279). Tropes survive as commentary to older sources that
were transmitted aurally and therefore committed to memory.
14. Owen Gingerich in The Book that Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus
Copernicus (New York: Walker Publishing, 2004), 6183, maintains that the notes in the
margins of Copernicuss De revolutionibus, written in the sixteenth century, actually helped
to advance the acceptance of the astronomers theory among scientists.
15. James Haar, Lessons in Theory from a Sixteenth-Century Composer, in Essays
on Italian Music in the Cinquecento, ed. R. Charteris (Sydney: Frederick May Foundation
for Italian Studies, 1990), 5181.
16. Ibid., 52.
17. Padre Martini possessed an extensive musical library, which contained more than
17,000 volumes. After Martini died, some of the books went to the imperial library at
Vienna, although the majority remained in the conservatory library in Bologna (Civico
Museo Bibliografico Musicale), now the Museo internazionale e Biblioteca della musica
di Bologna.
18. Martinis library contains numerous examples of his interaction with booksthere
are markings not only on images, but on frontispieces and flyleaves, in the margins as well
as within the text. Andreas Ornithoparchuss Musice active micrologus was first published
in Leipzig in 1517. The Bologna copy of Ornithoparchuss Micrologus, printed in 1533, con-
tains Martinis notes as well as the marginalia of at least one sixteenth-century reader. John
Dowland translated this version into English in an edition published in 1609.
19. Judd, Reading, 121, mentions a number of humanist readers; the names are based
on surviving presentation copies. Among them are professors of philosophy and theology
from Ingolstadt and Nuremberg.
20. My thanks to Ruth De Ford for sharing with me a heavily annotated copy of book
2 of the Musica of 1507 in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. The Cochlaeus is bound to-
gether with another treatise (or part of a treatise), listed in RISM but not in Grove, called
Compendium in praxim atque exercitium cantus figurabilis (see note 81 below).
240 Susan Forscher Weiss

21. Bonnie J. Blackburn, Gaurius, Franchinus, in Grove Music Online, at Oxford

Music Online: www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/10477 (ac-
cessed 21 August 2008). Gaurius also had contact with another northern theorist, Jo-
hannes Tinctoris, holding numerous conversations with him during his Naples years. For
more on the relationship with Glarean, see Iain Fenlon, Heinrich Glareans Books, in
John Kmetz, Music in the German Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 76.
22. I have seen some other annotated copies, including one in Krakow, several in Mu-
nich, and two in the New York Public Library (Gaurius, Practica musicae, 1512: Drexel
2660). A copy in the British Library contains only a few markings and these appear quite
childlike. Copies in the Walters Art Museum and in the Biblioteca Ricciardiana, presum-
ably bought for their value as incunables, are relatively free of marks.
23. Gaurius, with the help of his student Francesco Caza, undertook an Italian trans-
lation of his treatise Angelicum. In his preface to the treatise, Gaurius apologizes for the
use of Italian, explaining that its purpose was to enable the molti illiterati to read the
materials. Caza published the treatise in 1493, retaining the Latin titles in an eort to give
them more weight and respectability. See Clement A. Miller, Early Gauriana: New An-
swers to Old Questions, The Musical Quarterly 56 (1970): 38586.
24. Gauriuss annotated copy of Ramoss treatise is now in Bologna, Museo Inter-
nazionale, A 80. Although Johannes Wolf s edition of Ramoss Musica practica, published
in 1901, includes Gauriuss marginalia (and the later annotations by Ercole Bottrigari),
Millers 1993 edition only includes a few select examples.
25. Fenlon, Heinrich Glareans Books, 74102. Glareans own library has been cata-
logued, but all of his annotations have yet to be studied. See Donald W. Krummels The
Music Collections at the Newberry Library, Chicago, Fontes artis musicae 16.3 (1969):
11934. Krummel mistakenly suggests that the librarys copy of Glareans Dodecachordon
includes the authors inscription to Francesco Spinola.
26. Judd, Reading, 12425.
27. Gaurius, Practica musice, book III, chap. 3: Eight Rules of Counterpoint; shoul-
der notes and notes on the music.
28. Judd, Reading, 155. Tschudi signed his name on fol. 10v. Glareans earlier work,
the Isagoge, is a didactic work that treats the elements of music, solmization, and the eight
modes. In Basel, where Glarean taught, the curriculum included music alongside studies in
Greek (a language he felt to be superior to all others) and Latin grammar and literature. His
interests were predominantly in the classics, Greek modal theory, Roman history, grammar
(he relied on Donatus among others), mathematics, poetry, and geography. He owned a
spectacular library with volumes of classics annotated in his own hand.
29. I would like to thank the late Oscar Mischiati of the Civico Museo Bibliografico
Musicale (now the Museo internazionale e Biblioteca della musica di Bologna), and Profes-
sors Bonnie J. Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens for examining the handwriting
and confirming my suspicions about Spataro.
30. William Slights, Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance
Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2001), 6. Andrew Taylor, in Playing on the
Margins: Bakhtin and the Smithfield Decretals, describes the margins of a fourteenth-
century manuscript as evocative of the broader world of the storyteller and the common
memory. See Tobin Nellhaus, Mementos of Things to Come: Orality, Literacy, and Typol-
ogy in the Biblia pauperum, in Printing the Written Word: The Social History of the Book,
circa 14501520, ed. Sandra Hindman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 292321.
31. A copy, now in Bologna, of a Spanish music text printed in 1495 in Milan is heavily
annotated both with musical notation on the staves and text in the margins. The author,
Guillermo de Podio, was a choir director and music professor in the employ of Ludovico
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 241

Sforza, Duke of Milan, at the end of the fifteenth century. A facsimile edition of Podios
Ars musicorum was published without any marginalia. Another copy of this music text pub-
lished by Petrus Hagenbach, Leonardus Hutz, and others in 1495, now at the University of
Madrid, was digitized in 2007 and includes some annotations, but not as many as the Bolo-
gna copy. Another instance of bowdlerizing involves a manuscript of music. The publisher
of a facsimile edition of the manuscript Bologna, Museo Internazionale, Q 18, in an eort
to make the edition more presentable, erased some important evidence; in particular, signs
of a palimpsest that revealed another composition written beneath the one that presently
appears on that folio. Such examples highlight one of the obstacles encountered by those
wishing to study markings in books. A 1509 copy of Wollick, published in facsimile edition
by J. M. Fuzeau, contains none of the markings visible in the original, which is now at the
Bibliothque Nationale in Paris.
32. Bibliophiles purchased a book more for its beauty than for its contents, acquir-
ing books as they would other worldly goods, such as works of art. Henry Walters in the
nineteenth century, or Romolo Ricciardi three hundred years earlier, bought many books
for their intrinsic value and beauty. They each owned numerous books of music theory, few
of which have any marginalia.
33. Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Read-
ers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997); H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Reading Writing in
Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and Jacksons Romantic Readers: The Evi-
dence of Marginalia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). See also Anthony Grafton,
Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries, Renaissance
Quarterly 38 (1985): 61549; R. C. Alston, Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue
of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library (London: British Library, 1994); Ste-
phen Barney, ed., Annotation and its Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Robert
Evans, Ben Jonsons Library and Marginalia: New Evidence from the Folger Collection,
Philological Quarterly 66 (1987): 52128; Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, Studied for
Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy, Past and Present 129 (November 1990): 3078;
Lawrence Lipking, The Marginal Gloss, Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 60954; J. Manning,
Notes and Marginalia in Bishop Percys Copy of Spensers Works (1611), Notes and Queries
31 (1984): 22527; William Slights, The Edifying Margin of Renaissance English Books,
Renaissance Quarterly 42 (Winter 1989): 682716; Roger Stoddard, Marks in Books, Illus-
trated and Explained (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Library of Harvard University, 1985);
and Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994). Many of these authors insist that if
you want to capture how a book was packaged and what it has meant to readers who have
unwrapped it, you have to look at all the copies you can find, from original manuscripts
to cheap reprints. There is only one article that addresses some of these issues in music:
Alessandro E. Planchart, Fragments, Palimpsests, and Marginalia, Journal of Musicol-
ogy 6 (1988): 293339. Planchart examines the medieval musical repertories of tropes and
sequences, not didactic musical texts.
34. William H. Sherman, Towards a History of the Manicule (March 2005): www.livesand
letters.ac.uk/papers/FOR_2005_04_002.html (accessed 29 May 2005).
35. Jackson, Marginalia, 4.
36. Jackson, Romantic Readers, 89. Jackson states that writing in books in the modern
English-speaking world is looked upon with disdainwith some exceptions, such as the
marks made by authors or editors. On the other hand, Jackson claims that readers in nine-
teenth-century Britain were encouraged, as part of their education, to annotate books.
37. Roland Barthes, Sur la lecture, in Le bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984),
40: la lecture ne dborde pas la structure; elle lui est soumise: elle en a besoin, elle la res-
pecte; mais elle la pervertit.
242 Susan Forscher Weiss

38. Anthony Grafton, Future Reading: Digitization and its Discontents, The New
Yorker (5 November 2007): 5054. In an even more recent review of two booksBooks on
Fire by Lucien Polastron, and Burning to Read by James SimpsonGrafton refers to the
struggle between bibliophiles, like the Medici, who wish to preserve printed treasures, and
biblioclasts like Savonarola who wish to destroy them. He also comments that the mes-
sages found in the margins and on flyleaves of books must not be ignored. See also Grafton,
Violence in Words, Times Literary Supplement (25 July 2008): 35.
39. This nickname comes from manus, the Latin for hand and source of manipu-
late and manual. In Greek chiro, the word for hand, is found as the title of a number of
manuals: Enchiridion, Chirologia, etc. Hand is also the source of our handle, handbook,
handiwork, etc.
40. In his book, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 27, Grafton traces the history of the actual foot-note from a period at
least a century later than the Renaissance. Prior to the invention of printing, annotations or
glosses that were often written around the primary material found in the center of the page
of a manuscript eventually came to be seen as integral parts of the texts they explicated.
These were regularly taught with their commentaries.
41. There is a well-known image of Thomas Kempis sitting in his study surrounded by
books, copying passages from them into his manual of devotion, De imitatione Christi (ca.
1418; first printed copies in a French translation of the Latin are Toulouse, 1488).
42. See Hugo Spechtshart, Flores musicae, 1332/42, ed. Werner Gmpel, Abhandlun-
gen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse 3 (Mainz: Akademie der Wissen-
schaften und der Literatur, 1958). Many sixteenth-century German treatises reflect Hugos
influence.
43. One such example is a copy of Heinrich Fabers Compendiolum musicae pro incipien-
tibus, published in 1590, now in the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris. On the frontispiece are
the signatures of two dierent early seventeenth-century owners. Heinrich Fabers bestsell-
ing text was first published in 1548; it was reissued in more than forty-six diverse editions.
Faber cited passages from book VI of Augustines De musica and from Adam of Fuldas
Musicae pars secunda, as well as citing treatises by Johannes Tinctoris, Georg Rhaw, Nico-
laus Listenius, Andreas Ornithoparchus, Sebald Heyden, Johannes Cochlaeus, and other
important theorists of the day. See Heinrich Faber, Compendiolum music pro incipienti-
bus, ed. Olivier Trachier (Baden-Baden and Bouxwiller: ditions Valentin Koerner, 2005).
Fabers work was then expanded and edited by Johann Reusch, one of Fabers older disciples;
by M. Christoph Rid, master of a school in Schorndorf (1572); by David Wolckenstein, a
Silesian musician who remained more faithful to the original than had Rid (1596); by Adam
Gumpeltzhaimer, who translated it into German (1611); and by Melchior Vulpius (1665).
Olivier Trachier, in studying the various editions, has suggested that Faber himself may
have used Calvius and Galliculus (Leipzig, 1520) as his models. Trachiers excellent study
of the various editions of Fabers work neglects the subject of annotations.
44. La Scala di musica was one of two practical music texts written by this Cremonese
composer and teacher. Scalettas popular manual was reprinted fourteen times in various
formats from 1585 to a newly revised edition in 1685, fifty-five years after the death of the
author. It is curious to see that at least one edition of the manual includes an image of the
hand that diers from the conventional one. I discuss changes to the image of the hand in
Weiss, Disce Manum Tuam, 5055.
45. Inscription on front flyleaf: A d 9 marzo 1693 in Bologna comprai questo libro in
Piazza contro il Registro, and then in another hand, A d 13 marzo 1693 il Signor D. Gio.
Battista Diamanti impresto questo libro a me Anna Maria Pomi.
46. Carlo Schmidl, Dizionario dei musicisti, rev. edition (Milan: Ricordi, 1929), 2: 457. A
volume of sonnets, La miniera del Diamante, was published in her honor in 1697 in Modena.
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 243

47. Anna Maria de Pomi may possibly be a descendent of the well-known Jewish family
that included David de Pomi (1525ca. 1593), who published a dictionary of Judeo-Italian
in 1587 in Venice.
48. A surviving copy of Porphyris Libri artis logicae, printed in late fifteenth-century
Basel by the humanist publisher Johannes Amerbach, is a translation from Greek into Latin
that contains printed shoulder notes in Latin, as well as handwritten notes in German. The
German notes are possibly by Johannes Lapide, whose published commentary accompanies
the ancient Greek text and whose book on grammatical accents is bound together with it.
The Bern manuscript was edited by Arnold Geering (Bern: H. Lang, 1964). My thanks to
Sarah Davies for sending a photocopy of this manuscript. The shoulder notes indicate that
the scribe is referencing his Latin source.
49. Richard Charteris, Johann Georg von Werdenstein (15421608): A Major Collector
of Early Music Prints (Sterling Heights: Harmonie Park Press, 2006). Charteris does not
include the Musicae epitome among the music books owned by Werdenstein, but mentions
that two-thirds of the music books once owned by the collector are now missing. This may
be one of those books that are thought to have gone missing, but it does, in fact, reside in
the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich.
50. Clement A. Miller, Glarean, Heinrich in Grove Music Online, at Oxford Music On-
line: www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/11256 (accessed 21 August
2008). Another copy of the Musicae epitome ex Glareani Dodechordo un tum quinque melodiis
super eiusdem Glareani Panegyrico de Helveticarum XIII urbium Laudibus, per Manfredum
Barbarinum Coregiensem, also published in Basel in 1559, now in the Newberry Library in
Chicago, is covered with marginalia, interlinear notes, and music writing. I am in the process
of transcribing the annotations and hope to identify the reader.
51. A copy of Glareans Dodecachordon at the Library of Congress includes an auto-
graph presentation to Francisco Spinola. Four manuscript leaves are inserted at the end
of the volume, containing (1) a presentation note; (2) an ode: Ad ornatissimum virum p.
franciscum Pinolam Glareani Trimetri; (3) Codex Glareani manu emendatus; and (4)
Alia huius codicus errata. . . . My thanks to Susan Clermont for bringing this important
source to my attention.
52. British Library, M.K.1.g.10(1).
53. British Library, Hirsch I. 49. Banchieris Cartella, ouero regole utilissime quelli
che desiderano imparare il canto figurato, printed in Bologna in 1614, is also bound together
with a manuscript notebook containing the written-out rules and musical notation (British
Library, 7897. aaa.67).
54. Regole di contrapunto di Bartolomeo Lazari (Rome, 1639), Vatican Library, Chigi Q
IV. 22.
55. The music notebooks of Antonio Melendez, Rome, Vatican Library, Q IV. 7, Qua-
derni di essercizi, ca. 16251630; Chigi Q IV.20, Diversi essercizi di contrapunto.
56.
6. Musical notebooks border on the topic of musical scores, a huge topic that lies out-
side the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, future studies might consider an examination
of the annotations in scores. Musicians of all sorts, from composers to editors, performers,
scholars, teachers, and students, include musical notation that can inform our understand-
ing of pedagogy, of performance, and of the improvisatory traditions. The Pierpont Morgan
Library, for example, contains items as diverse as Jenny Linds embellishments for her role
in an opera and Mendelssohns violin and cello sonata with additions by famous perform-
ers of the day.
57. Simon Quercu, Opusculum musices (Landshut, 1516), Washington, Library of Con-
gress, MT 171.Q4, and a copy with far fewer markings published in Nuremberg (1513), MT
171. Q 14; another copy, published in 1509 with more substantive marginalia, is found in
Paris, Bibliothque Nationale, Res V-1577.
244 Susan Forscher Weiss

58. Several librarians and a cryptographer at the Library of Congress examined the
notation, but no one to date has been able to decipher its meaning. Musically relevant an-
notations appear in other copies of several other surviving editions, one in Paris at the
Bibliothque Nationale and another at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C; in
addition, there are two annotated copies at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
59. Theodor Dumitrescu, John Dygons Proportiones practicabiles sedundum Gaurium
(Practical Proportions according to Gaurius), New Critical Text, Translation, Annotations
and Indices (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
60. Ibid., 15. Gauriuss treatises served as models for numerous sixteenth-century
printed music texts, among them Nicolaus Wollicks treatise, Opus aureum, published in
Cologne in 1501, a continental source that appeared in Oxford along with Andreas Orni-
thoparchuss Musice active micrologus.
61. The next page in the Dublin copy of Gauriuss Practica contains horizontal and
vertical verbal marginalia in lieu of lowercase letters. The Milan copy of the 1477 edition
of the Practica also contains some red marginalia in chapter 2. Coincidentally, Gaurius
annotated his own copy of the Practica musice, now in the Ambrosian Library in Milan
(Codex H 165 inf. F. 20v); these annotations reveal his disapproval of an assertion by an
earlier theorist, as well as attributions to earlier sources, such as the treatise of Jean de
Muris.
62. Thomas Morley, A plaine and easie introdvction to practicall mvsicke (London, 1608),
Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, MT6. A2, M 86, copy 1.
63. See Weiss, Didactic Sources of Musical Learning, in Didactic Literature in En-
gland, 15001800: Expertise Constructed, ed. Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell (London:
Ashgate, 2003), 4062.
64. Thomas Morley, A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke (London: P.
Short, 1597); courtesy of the Library of Congress. Morleys treatisemuch of it borrowed
from earlier sourcescontains numerous diagrams and examples, such as a musical canon
in the shape of a cross (see figure 11.10a in the present volume). He deliberately omits the
image of the hand, commenting: Some after him (or he himself [Guido]) altered his scale
in form of organ pipes (annotations, p. 2). The last page of the treatise includes his list of
Authors whose authorities be either cited or used in this booke. He includes the names of
contemporary and ancient writers and composers, and in a separate list, his fellow English-
men. Among those at the top of his list of contemporary writers are Franchinus Gaurius,
Giovanni Spataro, Pietro Aaron, Andreas Ornithoparchus, Gioseo Zarlino, and Heinrich
Glarean. He credits Gaurius with his material from Ptolomaeus, Aristoxenus, and Guido
dArezzo.
65. We do know from a comparison of Morleys treatise with Zarlinos Istitutione har-
moniche that the English theorist copied lengthy passages from the earlier Italian work.
He himself must have either annotated a copy of Zarlinos treatise or copied the text into
his own notebook. As neither Morleys copy of Zarlinos treatise nor a notebook has been
found, we can only speculate on the means by which he cribbed the material. While Morley
fails to give credit to all of his sources, his list reads like a whos who of Renaissance theorists
and writers of music textbooks.
66. Morley, Plaine and Easie Introduction, (London: P. Short, 1597; repr. Amsterdam:
Da Capo Press, 1969), unnumbered folio following the musical examples in table format.
67. John Playfords A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick for Song and Viol, pub-
lished in London in 1654, became the model for books by Christopher Simpson and Thomas
Campion. The latters treatise, The Art of Descant or Composing Musick in Parts, with anno-
tations by Simpson, served as the model for a similar handbook penned by Henry Purcell.
68. See RISM for copies of Wollicks treatises in libraries worldwide, bearing in mind
that the list is not complete.
 Vandals, Students, or Scholars? 245

69. Ernest T. Ferand, Sodaine and Unexpected Music in the Renaissance, The Musi-
cal Quarterly 37 (1951): 1027.
70. Glarean owned and annotated a copy of Grammaticus Priscianuss Opera, published
in Venice in 1500. His edition of Donatuss Grammaticae methodus videlicet . . . de octo ora-
tionis partibus libellus, was published in Cologne in 1525. See Fenlon, Heinrich Glareans
Books, 74102.
71. Priscianus repeatedly expresses his gratitude to the third-century Greek syntac-
tician Apollonius; see Rijcklof Hofman, The Sankt Gall Priscian Commentary (Mnster:
Nodus, 1996).
72. Ferand, Sodaine and Unexpected Music, 11.
73. A copy in the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris has only a few staves filled in.
74. Stephano Vanneos Recanetum de musica aurea in the British Library (Hirsch I
589), contains an owner inscription as well as extensive marginalia in two hands. One of
the readers appears to be summarizing the text. Zarlinos handwritten notes at the end of
the Newberry Library copy of Vanneos treatise (a theorist who did not meet with Zarlinos
approval) appear to be material copied from Guillaume Guersons Utilissime musicales regule
of 1495; see Judd, Reading, 182. Zarlino also reproduced Glareans new system of modes in
the Istiutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558) without acknowledgment. These instances point to
the strong association between German and Italian musical treatises that date back to the
Middle Ages.
75. Bonnie J. Blackburn, et al., A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991), letter 2, pp. 203. Spataro refers to Wollick as Nicolao Barodu-
cense or uno francese chiamato (Spataro to Marc Antonio Cavazzoni, 1 August 1517). It
should be kept in mind that Gaurius and Spataro had engaged in a rather confrontational
correspondence since 1493. Many of Spataros letters are lists of errors he found in Gaf-
furiuss treatises. Spataros ongoing grudge against Gaurius is revealed in his letter to
Pietro Aaron, who had asked to borrow Ramoss treatise. Apparently Gaurius reviewed
Ramoss treatise and wrote some disparaging comments in the margins. Spataro refused
to loan the marked-up copy to Aaron, saying it was the only copy in Bologna (A 80 in the
Museo Internazionale, Bologna). Two years before his death Gaurius published a polemic
against Spataro, the culmination of many years of controversy between the two rivals (Spa-
taro to Aaron, 27 November 1531).
76. Blackburn et al., A Correspondence, letter 36, p. 455 (Spataro to Aaron, 27 Novem-
ber 1531). Gauriuss marginal notes are transcribed in Johannes Wolf s edition of Ramoss
Musica practica (Leipzig, 1901), but are not present in the 1993 American Institute of Musi-
cology edition of the treatise by Clement Miller.
77. Blackburn et al., A Correspondence, letter 37.6, pp. 459, 462. Spataros four-voice
motet, Hec Virgo est praeclarum vas, is included in the San Petronio choirbook A XXXXV,
folios 3'4'. It is based on the chant Hec Virgo est praeclarum vas in Wollicks Enchiridion
musices, 2nd edition (Paris: F. Regnault, 1512), fol. C4.
78. Blackburn et al., A Correspondence, letter 36.3, p. 412.
79. Ibid., 59 n. 24. Facsimile edition, ed. Giuseppe Vecchi, Johannis Spatarii Opera om-
ina, vol. 2 (Bologna, 1962). The treatise is also transcribed in Quadrivium 5 (1962): 568.
80. Blackburn et al., A Correspondence, 59, 334, 982. See also Weiss, Bologna Q 18:
Some Reflections on Content and Context, Journal of the American Musicological Society
41 (1988): 63101.
81. One of the greatest challenges involves determining the age of the annotations.
What may be helpful are radioactive carbon-14 dating and identification of pigments and
materials used in writing. Anything written in pencil can almost certainly be dated after
the eighteenth century. Over the past decade, I have kept detailed records of hundreds of
annotated music textbooks found in libraries within the United States and abroad. Recently
246 Susan Forscher Weiss

(but too late for inclusion in this publication) I have worked with a heavily annotated copy
of Cochlaeuss Musica (Cologne, 1507), one not listed in RISM. The annotations include
interleaved sheets that may contain the writing of both a student and teacher. I am also
working with Professor Ruth De Ford at the City University of New York on the treatises of
Cochlaeus, and with Dr. Inga Mai Groote and her students at the Institut fr Musikwissen-
schaft in Munich on texts annotated by other students at the University of Cologne in the
early sixteenth century, most particularly, Heinrich Glarean. I plan to publish our findings,
along with analyses and comparisons of marginalia, in the near future.
 Part Four

Music Education in
the Convent#
 12
The Educational Practices of
Benedictine Nuns: A Salzburg
Abbey Case Study#
CYNTHIA J. CYRUS

The impact of post-Tridentine educational reforms on womens convents has

not yet been adequately assessed in the literature. For education broadly
speaking, and for the more specifically musical (or liturgical) education of the
nuns who undertook the regular monastic duties of Oce and Mass, there
is not yet a comprehensive understanding of what womens monastic educa-
tion entailed, much less of how it was accomplished. An initial picture of the
educational process has begun to emerge from studies of Italian monasticism,
but studies of convents located elsewhere on the continent have yet to venture
far into the concerns of intellectual and musical achievement that were central
to lives devoted to the opus dei in the Early Modern era. German scholarship
in particular has focused more on the political, social, and financial aspects
of Tridentine undertakings than on shifts in both the knowledge base and
the musical practices that stem from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. The study presented here is an initial attempt at an intellectual
corrective which draws on my work on monasticism in German-speaking
lands. I come at this problem from the perspective of a book-lover; convent
250 Cynthia J. Cyrus

libraries do, I believe, oer concrete clues into what was taught and when.
But this research also relies heavily on convent politics as reflected in the
various documents that survive from the period. In this essay, I attempt ever-
so-briefly to place the story of Tridentine reform at one conventNonnberg
Abbey in Salzburginto the broader context of Benedictine educational
practices of the Early Modern era.
The reforms stemming from the Council of Trent itself were not directly
aimed at education, of course. Rather, they were recommendations and direc-
tives that were to shape the course of education, particularly for the women
monastics who fell under Catholic jurisdiction. Two themes in these reforms
are particularly important for the education of women monastics: first are the
liturgical reforms, comprising the tidying up of chant repertoire, redirection
of polyphonic styles and practices, and a generalized goal of making mu-
sic understandable; and second is clausura, the increased emphasis on keep-
ing women monastics apart from the world through their physical isolation
within the cloister walls. Tridentine reforms were often presented to womens
convents as a package. What makes the process so interesting is that in the
course of imposing these reforms within the convent walls, the local bishops
often commented on and attempted to improve the general level of education.
Thus, this time of reform mirrors the previous rounds of convent renewal of
the fifteenth century, in that educational improvements are often coextensive
with the reform-impulse, happening at the same time and with the same ends
as the formal incorporation of more intense and ascetic practices.
Much ink has been spilled on the musical impact of the Council of Trent.
We all know of the stories of the kinds of music that were deemed suitable,
and have at least a rough understanding of the revisions to chant repertoire
and the shift of musical aesthetic that accompanied and followed the work
of the Council. This kind of information directly intersects with womens
monastic experiences, since most womens convents, like their male counter-
parts, adopted the Tridentine liturgy over the course of the period extending
from 1560 to 1640. Moreover, we have from our fellow scholars who work on
Italian monasticism a picture of the rise of womens virtuosic musical achieve-
ments in specific convents during this same period; I think here particularly
of the work of Craig Monson and Robert Kendrick. Such stories of musical
changes will form a part of the investigation undertaken here, for the Nonn-
berg nuns were immersed in this culture of liturgical worship and enjoyed the
benefits of musical enhancement for special occasions. Moreover, they had a
particular, and not very flattering, view of the Tridentine reforms.
 The Educational Practices of Benedictine Nuns 251

The concerns of clausura are also reasonably well understood. Elizabeth

Makowskis book, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, only takes us up to
1545 but provides a solid juridical backdrop to the decisions of the Council
of Trent regarding womens enclosure. And, indeed, the Council itself cites
Periculoso in its directives:

Renewing the constitution of Boniface VIII which begins Periculoso, the

holy council commands all bishops . . . to ensure that the enclosure of
nuns in all monasteries . . . should be diligently restored where it has been
violated, and preserved most carefully where it has remained intact; they
should coerce any who are disobedient and refractory by ecclesiastical
censures and other penalties, setting aside any form of appeal, and calling
in the help of the secular arm if need be.

In the Tridentine iterations of clausura, nunsincluding abbessescould

not leave the convent under any pretext, nor could any non-monastic enter
the enclosure without the permission of the bishop, obtained, as the Council
points out, in writing. This led to a need for special permission for the entry
of physicians, barbers, carpenters, [and] dressmakers, as Makowski enu-
merates. To this list should be added the special permission accorded to mu-
sic teachers, who entered the convent with permission to teach both vocal and
instrumental arts. At Nonnberg, for instance, both a general music teacher
and an organist had permission to enter the cloister by the 1620s. As we shall
see, however, the conjoined introduction of liturgical reform alongside clau-
sura aected the response of convent women to Tridentine educational ideals.
The Nonnberg nuns used their own educational practices at first to resist, and
eventually to adapt and even co-opt, the Tridentine agenda.

NONNBERGS EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH

Nonnberg Abbey had a long history as an educational institution, and the

abbeys pedagogical agenda forms an important part of the history of the
convent. The schooling of the daughters of local citizens at Nonnberg Abbey
extends back into the twelfth century; a document from Archbishop Konrad
of 3 November 1144 provides a donation to the convent and adds the proviso,
everything is held or will be held for the rearing of the girls. Although the
numbers of girls who were educated at the abbey cannot be determined from
readily accessible records, the Nonnberg necrology lists four puellae in its fif-
teenth-century layer and lists an additional schoolgirl, Veronica Mautnerin,
252 Cynthia J. Cyrus

in a sixteenth-century hand, demonstrating that education was an ongoing

facet of the Abbeys mission.
We can get a glimpse into turn-of-the-century educational practice from
the library volumes copied after the disastrous fire of 1423. The reforming ab-
bess Agatha Haunsperger (abbess from 1446 to 1484) took charge of build-
ing the library collection, commissioning copies of writings of the Church
Fathers as well as a collection of Vitae. Moreover, the convent library of the
mid-sixteenth century already contained a handful of manuscripts explicitly
aimed at the Novizen or the Kloster iunkchfrawn. These self-identified educa-
tional books with their audiences of monastic aspirants, range from interpre-
tations of the Rule of Benedict and a treatise on consecration to books that
will develop the novices spiritual lives such as a volume of Gute lehre for the
novice. The A B C of Godly Love (Das A B C der gttlichen Myny), for instance,
instructs the reader in the path to take in order to lead a holy, good life in God.
At the end of the volume is appended a spiritual explanation of the material
aspects of the liturgythe vestments, altar, furnishingsand the parts of
the Mass as well as the role of the Celebrant. Female students at Nonnberg at
the turn of the sixteenth century, then, were learning their tasks as members
of a convent community. They would have been given an underpinning of the
writings of the Church Fathers, instruction in basic biblical teachings, and
would also have acquired an interpretative toolkit for understanding their
liturgical actions.
The content of the nuns education at Nonnberg was largely undertaken
in German, and Haunspergers manuscripts, like the vast majority of the non-
liturgical manuscripts from her generation, were in German. The texts of
the Church Fathers, for instance, appeared in translation, as did the numer-
ous collections of Vitae. Standard liturgical prayers likewise made their way
into non-liturgical manuscript collections in translated copies, presumably
so that the nuns could better consider the meaning of the words they spoke
during liturgical ceremonies. Intellectual heavy-liftingthe consideration
of things holyalso largely took place in the vernacular. Nevertheless, the
generous accompaniment of additions and emendations in a variety of hands
in nearly all of the liturgical resources of the collection, demonstrates that the
nuns were taught at least some basic familiarity with Latin and with details
of the liturgy. Nonnberg Abbey, then, presumably followed the same educa-
tional model as the sister convents of Ebstorf and Marienberg at Helmstedt,
in which the novices studied Latin, grammar, and other school topics with
 The Educational Practices of Benedictine Nuns 253

the novice mistress. That practical immersion in the learning process would
be extended into later life through the careful program of reading and con-
templation that was mandated by the Benedictine Rule.

THE SALZBURG SY NODS OF , , AND

For Nonnberg, the first rumblings of resistance to the Tridentine reforms

came in 1569, during the Salzburg Synod. Three synods were called in short
order by Archbishop Jakob Khun von Bellasy (archbishop 15601586), and
were charged with three main tasks. They attempted to implement the de-
crees of the Council of Trent; they facilitated a revival of Catholicism (and
reduction of Protestant influence) in the Salzburg region; and they grappled
with the many grievances and petitions that emerged in the years immediately
following the Council from the various chapters, monasteries, and individual
priests in the Salzburg region. Formal sessions first began on 14 March 1569
and extended through much of the year, and subsequent conclaves took place
in 1573 and 1576. A number of reforms emerged from discussions of the
many complaints presented in session, and the synod eventually adopted the
Sixty-Four Constitutions that codified their recommendations.
Among the details addressed by the synod were several aspects of musical
practice, as Karl Fellerer pointed out in 1953. For instance, constitutions 4 and
54 both emphasized liturgical practice within prescribed ecclesiastical cer-
emonies, while constitution 23 discussed the chief singers role in correcting
the other singers. In grappling with such details of musical practice, the
Sixty-Four Constitutions demonstrate the Provinces generally supportive
outlook toward a sophisticated musical practice. For this, the nuns of Non-
nberg might have been grateful; just as with their educational practices, the
nuns were passionate about their musical traditions. They would have been
less happy, however, about the decisions to shift toward a more unified liturgi-
cal practice. Thus, it was in the details of grievances that the Nonnberg nuns
position regarding the Tridentine reforms came to the fore.
The Nonnberg nuns petitioned the Synod to ask that the severe clau-
sura be made milder; they appealed principally on the grounds of financial
needs, arguing that clausura would have a negative impact on the cloisters
prosperity. Implicit here, but unstated, is a concern over the educational
outreach that had been a lucrative part of the convents activities. To lose
access to this portion of the convents income would be a hardship, particu-
254 Cynthia J. Cyrus

larly since these events came at a time when the convent was facing a serious
burden of debts.
Although the synod took no action to alleviate the strictures of enclo-
sure, the situation seems to have been left in a sort of status quo for over a
decade. In short, during the 1560s and 1570s, the Nonnberg nuns went about
their business without particular regard to the new rules. It would take out-
side pressure to convince the nuns to change their practices.

THE VISITATION OF AND MARGARETHA

VON KUENBURGS PETITION

The Council of Trent had stressed increased supervision of convents by local

bishops, and the Salzburg Synod had likewise emphasized diocesan control.
The first of the post-Tridentine visitations, then, marked the beginnings of the
local bishops attempts to enforce the Tridentine rules. This visitation, which
took place in 1581, left the nuns dismayed. Strict clausura, he said, applied not
just to the nuns but also to the abbess; no worldly wives were to enter the
cloister (but maidens were evidently allowable); the washing should be done
by the nuns or the lay sisters. Moreover, the Bishop dictated that the printed
breviary should be used.
More or less instantaneously, the Nonnberg nunsperhaps spearheaded
by the cantrix, Margaretha von Kuenburgresponded with a petition
against the imposition of these reforms. Almost as an aside, this petition
included another plea that they not be required to observe strict clausura. In
a savvy shift of focus, however, the nuns who wrote this petition singled out
the liturgy as a focus for resistance. They wished to retain their old handwrit-
ten breviaries, for they had not been instructed in the new song as contained
in the printed editions. Services would suer because the chaplains and the
choir nuns would be inadequate to the task. The new service books also omit-
ted so much of the traditional service that it would be much work to bring
them up to date. In short, they had neither been taught how to use the new
books, nor had they learned the new service. What is interesting here is that
the Nonnberg nuns cite their own absence of education in order to resist
the new practices. They adopt the pose of the ignorant nuna veritable
clich in visitation recordsin order to sidestep compliance with what they
consider to be an unattractive set of liturgical practices. They also expect to
have been taught the (notated) songs, suggesting that a practice of learning
repertoire by ear rather than by eye was normative for the cloister.
 The Educational Practices of Benedictine Nuns 255

And, indeed, the sixteenth-century manuscript chant-books from Nonn-

bergincluding the half-dozen liturgical books owned by von Kuenburg her-
selfshow no visible signs of liturgical reform, though seventeenth-century
hands appear therein. There were, with a small handful of exceptions, no
chants, prayers or readings hatched out, nor were special substitutions reflec-
tive of the reformed chant added to these older books. Likewise, new books
that were copied in the last two decades of the centuryafter the abortive
reforms of the 1560s and the 1581 enforcement of those reformsalign quite
closely with the readings of the earlier chant-books, with this exception: they
appear to be more detailed. There is an occasional extra prayer in one service,
and cues to extra chants in another. In the liturgy for the convents patron
saint and founder, St. Erintrude, for instance, the oce expands from five
chants (plus some cross-references) in an antiphonal from 1570, to twenty-
three musical numbers in the copy dating from 1619. In other manuscripts,
navigation is cleaned up: it is easier to use these manuscripts after the layers of
additions than it originally was, since cues get expanded to full sections, and
repetitions are spelled out rather than left implicit. But practical reforms
shifts of feast, omission of tropes and sequences, simplification of liturgical
practices overallsimply are not evident.

REFOR M IN THE S

Not until an entire generation had passed were Tridentine reforms success-
fully imposed upon Nonnberg, these early reform attempts notwithstanding.
By the 1620s, however, the expectations of the nuns and of their surrounding
community had shifted. The new nun of the seventeenth century was evi-
dently prepared for the stricter observances and increased external control
over liturgical content. In the 1620s, in short order, the bishop reassigned
the chaplaincy to university-trained priests, undertook several visitations of
the abbey, oversaw the bricking-up of an oending window, and imposed the
use of the new liturgy. Perhaps as an olive branch, however, the bishop also
approved a whole array of regular visitors who could enter the cloister in or-
der to teach. The convent walls were, like those of their southern neighbors,
porous.
Thus, in the 1620s it was Magdalena Schneeweiss, author and abbess, who
led the abbey into a period of true renewal; during her five years as abbess,
from 1620 to 1625, the number of professions soared and the convent shifted to
a new fiscal footing. Schneeweiss herself focused her book acquisitions around
256 Cynthia J. Cyrus

prayer books, but she also may have overseen the copying of Form und Weiss,
an early seventeenth-century instructional booklet intended as a preparatory
guide for profession. This quaint and remarkably legible handwritten volume
contains twenty-four questions and answers on the postulants person, on the
meaning and validity of profession and vows, and on religious duties, as well
as a beginners guide to the Benedictine Rule. Significantly, the guide contains
two questions explicitly on practices of clausura: the convent was now firmly
in the Tridentine orbit, and the novices were instructed in a form of religious
life that was demonstrably uncomfortable to their predecessors.
Yet this shift in convent aliation does not seem to have limited the
Nonnberg nuns as much as von Kuenburg and her ilk had feared. After
the acceptance of the Tridentine reforms, Abbess Schneeweiss established
a room that served as library and schoolroom. Instruction at the abbey
now focused on Latin, on chant, on breviary prayer, and, with the assistance
of a city-dwelling Mahlerin, on the painting of miniatures and of coats of
armspresumably an expansion of the handcrafts that had always been
part of convent activities. Under Schneeweisss leadership, the convent also
introduced both a singing teacher and an organist to provide more advanced
musical instruction to the convent nuns. Two large teaching-antiphonals,
the Pharetra manuscript volumes of 1622 and 1625, provided a basic intro-
duction to the elements of the service. Moreover, die Schueler are named in
manuscript rubrics of this era, suggesting that the educational mission of the
abbey remained unimpeded by the version of Tridentine clausura that was
imposed; and by the second half of the century, the convent had established
a reputation for instrumentally accompanied polyphony. A Tridentine re-
form that could accommodate the educational mission of the convent met
the cloisters needs and was acceptedeven embracedby the members of
the community.

NONNBERG IN CONTEXT

Nonnberg Abbey is similar to the many other Benedictine womens houses

in German-speaking lands in that the nuns concerns over education were at
once philosophical and fiscal. Benedictine monastic practice privileged edu-
cation; Benedictine womens houses in Admont, Bassum, Buxtehude, Lam-
springe, Vilich, and elsewhere were devoted to the education not just of their
own novices, but also of other girls from noble or wealthy families. Though
often described as charitable work, in fact such teaching was a major source
 The Educational Practices of Benedictine Nuns 257

of income; for the Neukloster in Buxtehude, for instance, the income and do-
nations of the mid-fifteenth century are presumed to be directly related to the
education of daughters of wealthy Hamburg families. Indeed, in the face of
post-Tridentine clausura, a number of womens houses cited the income from
schooling as a central financial underpinning; they faced significant financial
hardship in letting that source of income go.
Nonnbergs story of resistance and eventual acceptance of Tridentine
reform, then, is shaped by the educational goals and practices of Benedic-
tine womens monasticism as practiced in Germanic lands. The nuns of the
abbey had a twofold educational mission: they needed to train their own
novices and teach them the ways of convent life and its liturgical practices;
and the Benedictine nuns also taught members of the external community.
To achieve either goal, the nuns needed a flexible clausura that could accom-
modate the visits of specialists in some crafts (particularly art and music).
Basic educational needs, howeverthose of Latin, chant, and other school
subjectswere handled in-house. In the sixteenth-century account put for-
ward by a musically literate member of the Nonnberg circle, the music of the
liturgy was learned by most nuns by ear, and needed to be taught by someone
who knew the repertoire. The purchasing of new chant-books did not in and
of itself create a new body of knowledge; von Kuenburg cited the need for
study as a reason for not adopting the Tridentine reforms. But eventually
and, notably, after von Kuenburgs deaththe nuns did choose to follow the
Tridentine practices and began to use the new, printed chant-books. They
also obtained instructional musical manuscriptssuggesting a rise in actual
musical literacyand learned to negotiate the square notation that was the
norm for later chant-books. The nuns of this Tridentine era opted as well for
an emphasis on elaborate ceremonial. In these changed circumstances, they
had a demonstrable need for new instructorsprofessional music teachers
who came from outside the convent walls.
The shift from pre- to post-Trent, then, correlates to a shift in the prac-
tices of musical learning within the Nonnberg Abbey. We witness a shift from
an aural environment to a literate one, and from an emphasis on traditional
and localized plainchant to a supplemented liturgy in which instrumental
music and vocal polyphony moved to the fore. Hence, in winning the tussle
over the imposition of a simplified chant, the bishop may have lost the battle.
The nuns, who had treasured and staunchly retained their own luxuriously
melismatic practices of plainchant during the sixteenth century, found their
joy in the seventeenth century not in the simplified chants of the Tridentine
258 Cynthia J. Cyrus

era, but in substitutions of an elaborate and polyphonic nature. In short, the

Nonnberg nuns used their education first to sidestep learning the Tridentine
chants and then to replace them altogether.

NOTES
This work was supported in part by a Vanderbilt University Research Council Summer
Award and Direct Research Grant and by the Blair School of Music. I would like to thank
the sta of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library (HMML) in Collegeville, Minnesota, for
their assistance in this project.
All of the manuscripts discussed in this study were consulted through microfilms held
at HMML, with the exception of the Nonnberg processional sold in 1988 by the Antiquariat
Klittich-Pfannkuch and cited in Fumiko Niiyama-Kalicki, Quellen zu Musik und Liturgie
im Stift Nonnberg im Mittelalter, in Musica Sacra Mediaevalis: Geistliche Musik Salzburgs
im Mittelalter, Salzburg, 69 Juni 1996: Kongressbericht, ed. Stefan Engels and Gerhard Wal-
terskirchen, Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner
Zweige 40 (St. Ottilien: EOS-Verlag, 1998), 60. For information about the manuscripts
themselves, I have relied heavily on the card files at HMML. Gerold Hayer is undertaking
an index of the Nonnberg manuscripts to be titled Die Handschriften des Benediktinerin-
nenstiftes Nonnberg, as part of the collection of catalogues of medieval manuscripts from
Austrian libraries in the series Kommission fr Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters (der
sterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften); see www.ksbm.oeaw.ac.at/_k3.htm.
1. Particularly important contributions regarding womens monastic culture in the
Early Modern era have been provided in Craig Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and
Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995),
which focuses on Bologna; Robert L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in
Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Colleen Reardon, Holy Concord
Within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 15751700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002). Each of these major contributions speaks in important ways of the kinds of train-
ing that were available to monastic women; as does, for example, Garry M. Radke, Nuns
and their Art: The Case of San Zaccaria in Renaissance Venice, Renaissance Quarterly 54
(2001): 43059. The focus of most currently available historical studies, however, is on Ital-
ian monastic experiences, and the broader range of educational practice across Europe has
not yet been addressed in a systematic way.
2. Exceptions that treat monastic education of German women in the Early Modern
period include Charlotte Woodfords important study, Nuns as Historians in Early Mod-
ern Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); and, for a slightly earlier period, see Anne
Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late
Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); and Werner Wil-
liams-Krapp, Ordensreform und Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert, Jahrbuch der Oswald von
Wolkenstein Gesellschaft 4 (19861987): 4151. In contrast, for an earlier period, studies of
medieval German womens monasticism through the fourteenth centuryby scholars such
as Gertrud Jaron Lewis, Jerey Hamburger, and Eva Schlotheuberare rich in educational
detail. Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, For Women, About Women: The Sister-Books of
Fourteenth-Century Germany, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Studies and Texts
125 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996); Jerey F. Hamburger, Art,
Enclosure and the Cura Monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript, Gesta 31
(1992): 10834; Eva Schlotheuber, Klostereintritt und Bildung. Die Lebenswelt der Nonnen
im spten Mittelalter. Mit einer Edition des Konventstagebuchs einer Zisterzienserin von
 The Educational Practices of Benedictine Nuns 259

Heilig-Kreuz bei Braunschweig (14841507), Sptmittelalter und Reformation, Neue Reihe

24 (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004).
3. For an important corrective to our understanding the actions of the Council of
Trent regarding polyphony, see the article by Craig Monson, The Council of Trent Revis-
ited, Journal of the American Musicological Society 55 (2002): 137. Monson points out that
the issue of textual intelligibility did not appear in the final findings of the Council. He also
draws attention to a more central issue for women monastics: the attempts in 1562 and 1563
to restrict polyphony in womens houses. As Monson demonstrates, the Council opted for
local control over such matters. Likewise, Richard Agee addresses the mechanisms and the
politicking involved in these late sixteenth and early seventeenth century liturgical reforms;
see Ideological Conflicts in a Cinquecento Edition of Plainchant, in Music, Dance and Soci-
ety: Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Memory of Ingrid G. Brainard, ed. Ann Buckley and
Cynthia J. Cyrus (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, forthcoming).
4. See for instance Monsons Disembodied Voices and his The Crannied Wall: Women,
Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Civi-
lization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); and see also Kendricks Celestial
Sirens.
5. Chapter (5), session 255 of the Council of Trent (1563), as quoted in Elizabeth Ma-
kowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and its Commentators (Washington,
D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 128.
6. Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, 99.
7. Franz Esterl, Chronik des adeligen Benedictiner-Frauen-stiftes Nonnberg in Salzburg
(Salzburg: Franz Xaver Duyle, 1841), 113.
8. Quidquid habent vel habiturae sunt ad puellarum educationibus. Regintrudis
Reichlin von Meldegg, Stift Nonnberg zu Salzburg im Wandel der Zeiten (Salzburg: Anton
Pustet, 1953), 20. Esterl provides the text of this letter; see Chronik, 204206.
9. Godfried Edmund Friess lists the Nonnberg Educandinnen (puellae) in his index
to Das necrologium des Benedictiner-Nonnenstiftes der heil. Erentrudis auf dem Nonnberge
zu Salzburg, Archiv fr sterreichische Geschichte 71 (Vienna: Carl Gerolds Sohn, 1887),
195. According to Friesss entries for each girl, four of the girls must have come from the
fifteenth century or earlier, for they were listed by the fifteenth-century scribe who prepared
the initial layer of the necrology. These girls are named Anna (d. 27 August), Beatrix (d.
11 November), Katharina (d. 22 November), and Veronica (d. 11 September). One of the
many later scribes for this manuscript subsequently added the name of an additional girl,
Veronica Mautnerin (d. 29 November), in what appears to be a sixteenth-century hand.
10. Susanne Lang discusses the role of the abbess Agatha Haunspurger in building
the Nonnberg library in her conference paper, Monastic Reform and Manuscript Produc-
tion at the Nunnery of Nonnberg during the Fifteenth Century, presented at the Thirty-
Seventh International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, Michigan (2002). See also her Die
mittelalterliche Bibliothek des Benediktiner-Frauenstifts Nonnberg: Untersuchungen zur
historischen Entwicklung, Zusammensetzung und thematischen Gewichtung des Bestan-
des bis 1600 (Ph.D. diss., University of Salzburg, 2004), esp. 3443.
11. The earliest manuscripts for novices that have been identified for the current study
are Nonnberg 28 D 3, Auslegung . . . Regel hl. Benedikt/Regel fur kloster iunkchfrawn (which
also includes a rule of St. Jerome), dated 1490; Nonnberg 23 E +14 (HMML 10952), Gute
Lehren fr einen Novizen (15th16th c.); and Nonnberg 23 E 23 (HMML 10927), Das A B C
der gttlichen Myny (15th c.). Several later volumes can also be added to the list, including
Nonnberg 23 D 17 (HMML 10887), Pharetra (1622); Nonnberg 23 D +35 (HMML 10907),
Pharetra (1625); and Nonnberg 23 D +27 (HMML 10899), Form und Weiss . . . Novizin (17th
c.). This information stems from the HMML card files and from an examination of the
various manuscripts in microfilm.
260 Cynthia J. Cyrus

12. On the mix of German and Latin within womens convents, see Peter Ochsenbein,
Latein und Deutsch im Alltag oberrheinischer Dominikanerinnenklster des Sptmittel-
alters, in Latein und Volkssprache im deutschen Mittelalter 11001500: Regensburger Collo-
quium 1988, ed. Nikolaus Henkel and Nigel F. Palmer (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 4251;
see also Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, Puellae litteratae: The Use of the Vernacular in
the Dominican Convents of Southern Germany, in Medieval Women in Their Communities,
ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 5253.
13. On education at Ebstorf, see Conrad Borchling, Litterarisches und geistiges Leben
im Kloster Ebstorf am Ausgange des Mittelalters, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins fr
Niedersachsen 4 (1905): 361420. See also the more recent studies by Helmar Hrtel, Die
Klosterbibliothek Ebstorf: Reform und Schulwirklichkeit am Ausgang des Mittelalters, in
Schule und Schler im Mittelalter, ed. Martin Kintzinger (Cologne: Bhlau, 1996), 24558;
Karl-Werner Gmpel, A Didactic Musical Treatise from the Late Middle Ages: Ebstorf,
Klosterarchiv, MS V, 3, in Music in the Theater, Church, and Villa: Essays in honor of Robert
Lamar Weaver and Norma Wright Weaver, ed. Susan Parisi, Ernest Harriss, and Calvin
M. Bower (Warren: Harmonie Park Press, 2000), 5164; and Eva Schlotheuber, Ebstorf
und seine Schlerinnen in der zweiten Hlfte des 15. Jahrhunderts, in Studien und Texte
zur literarischen und materiellen Kultur der Frauenklster im spten Mittelalter: Ergebnisse
eines Arbeitsgesprchs in der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbttel, 24.26. Febr. 1999, ed.
Falk Eisermann, Eva Schlotheuber, and Volker Honemann, Studies in Medieval and Ref-
ormation Thought 99 (Boston: Brill, 2004), 169221. The reform endeavors, including Latin
training, brought by Tecla and two other sisters from Brunnepe in reforming the convent of
St. Marienberg during the fifteenth century, are described in various places, including Anne
Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late
Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 107; and Wybren
Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries: The Modern Devotion, The
Canonnesses of Windesheim, and their Writings, trans. David F. Johnson (Woodbridge: Boy-
dell Press, 2004), 12628.
14. The best summation of the work of the Salzburg synods can be found in Gerhard
B. Winkler, Die nachtridentinischen Synoden im Reich: Salzburger Provinzialkonzilien, 1569,
1573, 1576 (Vienna: Bhlau Verlag, 1988).
15. Karl Gustav Fellerer, Church Music and the Council of Trent, Musical Quarterly
39 (1953): 591 n. 67; he cites Johann Friedrich Schannat, Concilia Germaniae J. F. Schannat
magna ex parte primum collegit, dein J. Hartzheim plurirum auxit, contiuavit, notis, disgrgres-
sionibus criticis, charta, et dissertatione chorographics illustravit (Cologne: Simon, 17591796),
VII, 360.
16. Fellerer, Church Music, 591 n. 66; citing Schannat, Concilia, VII: 276. The details
on singers performances come in constitution 23, chap. 4.
17. Esterl, Chronik, 97.
18. Ibid., 111.
19. Margaretha von Kuenburg (Khienburg, Kenburg) identifies herself as having been
born into the Kuenburg family in the note of ownership to Nonnberg 23 B 14 (HMML
10835), a manuscript of Die sieben Tagzeit that she had copied in 1578. In an earlier manu-
script, a breviary copied for her in 1558, she records her profession on St. Veits Day (15
June) in 1563; see Nonnberg 23 B 5 (HMML 10828), fol. 12b. She also owned a psalter and
obsequial, Nonnberg 23 A +12 (HMML10806) from 1587; a separate Ocium defunctorum
of 276 folios, Nonnberg 23 A +13 (HMML 10810), copied by her brother Sebastianus and
willed by Margaretha to Cordula on the inscription to the manuscript; the processional sold
by Antiquariat Klittich-Pfannkuch (cited in note 1, above); and a prayer book, the Bruder-
schaftsgebete zur seligen Jung frau Maria, Nonnberg 23 A +11 (HMML 10805) from 1591. The
Nonnberg necrology records her death on 24 September 1594 (Friess, Das necrologium, 137).
 The Educational Practices of Benedictine Nuns 261

Further details on von Kuenburgs manuscripts can be found in Lang, Die mittelalterliche
Bibliothek, 7885, 24065.
Margaretha was presumably a member of the influential Kuenburg family, many of
whose names are likewise recorded in the Nonnberg necrology and in other convent records.
The Domkantor Johann von Kuenburg (b. 1530) for instance, was presumably the younger
of the Johann von Kenburg senior and junior who helped with the 1552 election of Ab-
bess Anna Paumann at the convent; see Esterl, Chronik, 95. Also, the HMML files note
that Margarethas coat of arms in Nonnberg 23 B 5, fol. 1and also found in Nonnberg
23 B 14, fol. 1are identical with those of Archbishop Georg von Kuenburg (archbishop
15861587) as found in the Codex Seminarii Dioecesani Salisburgensis Hn 808, f. 135,
Saec. 16 (1587).
Margaretha may well have served as Nonnberg Abbeys cantrixa Sngerin, in the
terminology of the abbeythough in the absence of further documentary evidence, this
supposition must remain conjectural. She owned (or signed the flyleaves of) four liturgical
manuscripts, and also had two prayer books of the same meditative flavor as Anna Pau-
manns. It was Margaretha who would have been charged with instituting the liturgical
details of the Tridentine reforms in the later 1560s, and it was she who would again have
been tapped in the early 1580s to undertake reforms. By the 1580s, she had been a member
of the convent for some twenty years and was invested in the status quo.
20. I have not been able to consult the petition directly and rely here on the summary
in Esterls Chronik (1841).
21. Compare, for instance, the readings in Nonnberg, Antiphonal s.s. (HMML 10961)
to the more expansive version of Nonnberg, Codex 23 C 6.
22. Irmgard Schmidt-Sommer and Theresia Bolschwing, Salzburg, Nonnberg, in
Germania Benedictina III/3: Die benediktinischen Mnchs- und Nonnenklster in sterreich
und Sdtirol, ed. Ulrich Faust and Waltraud Krassnig (St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 2000
2003), 244.
23. On polyphony and instrumental music in Nonnberg, see Gerhard Walterskirchen,
Musica figuralis est in bonu statu: Musik im Benediktinen Frauenstift Nonnberg in Salz-
burg, in Musik in den geistlichen Orden in Mitteleuropa zwischen Tridentinum und Jose-
phinismus, ed. Ladislav Kacic (Bratislava: Slovensk Akadmia Vied, Slavistick Kabinet,
1997), 2533; Schmidt-Sommer and Bolschwing, Salzburg, Nonnberg, 224; the forth-
coming study by Barbara Lawatsch Melton, Loss and Gain in a Salzburg Convent: Triden-
tine Reform, Princely Absolutism, and the Nuns of Nonnberg (16201682) (which details
the activity of seventeenth-century Nonnberg nuns as string players, for instance); and, for
the very end of the period in question, Eric T. Chafe, The Church Music of Heinrich Biber,
Studies in Musicology 95 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), esp. 2224; and Ernst
Hintermaier, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber von Bibern (16441704) und das Benediktinen-
Frauenstift Nonnberg, in Deus CaritasJakob Mayr: Festgabe 25 Jahre Weihbischof von
Salzburg, ed. Hans Paarhammer (Salzburg: Thaur bei Innsbruck Dr.- & Verl.-Haus Thaur,
1996), 20731. Bibers daughter Anna Magdalena, who took the name Maria Rosa Heinrica
upon entry to Nonnberg, became one of the convents central musicians at the beginning
of the eighteenth century.
24. Charlotte Woodford provides the most accessible overview of women monastics ed-
ucation; see Woodford, Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 130. Further details on schools and schooling within individual con-
vents can be gleaned from Matrix Monasticon, http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu/monasticon/,
a website edited by Lisa Bitel, Katherine Gill, and Marie Kelleher.
25. June Mecham, Buxtehude, Neukloster, in Matrix Monasticon at http://monastic
matrix.usc.edu/monasticon/index.php?function=detail&id=1467 (accessed 7 September
2008); see especially under Assets Property and Other Economic Activities.
 13
Nun Musicians as Teachers and
Students in Early Modern Spain%
COLLEEN BAADE

Francisco Pachecos Libro de descripcin de verdaderos retratos de ilustres y mem-

orables varones (Seville, 1599) makes reference to two female musicians who,
according to Pacheco, were students of Francisco de Peraza (15641598), the
esteemed but short-lived organist of the Seville cathedral. Perazas disciples,
Pacheco informs us, held organists posts at the best churches in Spain; fur-
thermore, two Berber girls who were students of Peraza went on to distin-
guish themselves as teachers at Sevilles Convento de San Leandro. These
two berberisca organists are the only pupils of Peraza mentioned specifically
in Pachecos account, and one wonders why Pacheco remarks about them at
all. Had music-making by Augustinian nuns at one of Sevilles oldest houses
of female religious captured public attention, or were these North African
nun musicians merely a curiosity? Whatever the case, this fascinating vignette
aptly illustrates the dual focus of the present essay on Spanish nun musicians
as both teachers and students.

NUNS AS STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

OUTSIDE AND INSIDE THE CLOISTER
Pachecos eulogy for his musical contemporary and co-citizen brings to our
attention the fact that it was not uncommon for girls who became nun musi-
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 263

cians to have studied music prior to their entry into religious life, instruction
that was frequently carried out under the tutelage of Spains most prominent
music professionals. Humanist author Juan Luis Vives (14921540), who was
generally opposed to the idea of girls studying music, nonetheless approved of
teaching something of the organ to young women who intended to become
nuns. Francisco de Salinas (15131590) claimed to have given music lessons in
exchange for instruction in Latin to a noblewoman who stayed at his boyhood
home; the woman, he says, wanted to learn to play the organ so that she could
become a nun (presumably with the benefit of a musicians dowry).
Music lessons were often a requisite part of the formation of girls who
were destinedwhether of their own volition or someone elsesfor the
cloister, or so suggests the biographer of Doa Mara Vela (15611617), singer,
organist, and mystic at the Cistercian Monasterio de Santa Ana at vila:
She was, of course, educated to become a nun, and she learned to read, and
write very wellso well that no one would judge her handwriting to be that
of a woman; she learned music and keyboard, and in all kinds of handwork
and embroidery, she was very skilled. Teaching private music lessons to girls
who intended to become nuns was likely an important source of supplemen-
tary income for Spains professional church musicians. Juan Ruiz Jimnez has
documented how organist Jernimo de Peraza (ca. 15501617), elder brother of
the aforementioned Francisco de Peraza, was hired to give music lessons to a
teenage girl named Blasina de Mendoza, who subsequently entered Sevilles
Monasterio de Santa Clara. Whether Doa Blasina intended from the start
to become a nun is uncertain, though plausible. She entered religious life af-
ter giving birth to Jernimo de Perazas illegitimate son and later transferred
from Seville to the Monasterio de Santa Clara at Marchena where, according
to one witness, she was known as an accomplished keyboard player. Doa
Blasinas son, Jernimo de Peraza II (ca. 1577ca. 1636), would become organ-
ist at the Granada cathedral.
In the past, music historians have often overlooked female members
of musical dynasties. In my own work on nuns music in seventeenth and
eighteenth-century Toledo, I have seen that the citys convent musicians in-
cluded daughters, sisters, and nieces of organists, chapel masters, singers,
and instrumentalists employed at the local cathedral and at churches in other
parts of the country. For example, Joaqun Martnez de la Roca (ca. 1676ca.
1756), who was succeeded by his son Joaqun Martnez Serrano (d. 1764) in
his post as second organist at the Toledo cathedral, also supplied two organ-
ist daughters for Toledos Cistercian Monasterio de San Clemente: Mara
264 Colleen Baade

Alberta Martnez Serrano (17071775) and her sister Luca (17111771), were
succeeded as organists at San Clemente by Isidora (17331788) and Mara San
Martn y Martnez (17391780), daughters of Miguel San Martn, maestro de
capilla at Calatayud. Doubtless, these and countless other Spanish nun musi-
cians were trained by their musician parents, who were aware that providing
musical education for their daughters could pay o in the form of a dowry
waiver. It is dicult, however, to know what role mothers might have played
in their childrens musical education.
For girls who became convent musicians, music education was not nec-
essarily limited to instruction prior to entering the cloister. When Doa
Francisca Gonzlez de Guzmn entered Toledos Dominican Monasterio de
Santo Domingo el Real in 1726, the agreement to grant her a dowry waiver in
exchange for her services as a singer included a clause mandating that during
her year in the novitiate, she would be provided a male teacher (un msico)
who would train her and perfect her musical skills. Doa Franciscas teacher
was to be paid for by her guardian, not by the religious community; in this
case, because the convent had found her musical ability to be somewhat lack-
ing, the novice musician and her parents or guardians were held financially
responsible for improving her ability to the convents satisfaction. But female
monasteries did sometimes lay out money to provide musical training for their
members. Monastery account books record occasional payments to outside
teachers who came to give music lessons to nuns. An example of this practice
includes a payment registered in an account book from Madrids Francis-
can Monasterio de la Madre de Dios de Constantinopla to an unidentified
man (uno que ensea) who was teaching one of the nuns at Constantinopla to
play the bajn. Accounts for the Augustinian Monasterio de San Torcuato
at Toledo record payment to a Maestro de cantar who gave liciones de canto
de rgano y contrapunto at the convent during the period 15971600. Most
outside music teachers who gave lessons to nuns were probably men, though
the accounts for Constantinopla contain an intriguing reference to a woman
identified only as Doa Francisca (a nun from another monastery?) who
had come to the convent to teach the singers (estuvo en el convento enseando
a las cantoras). Perhaps female teachers were not as uncommon as we think,
since a ban against outside music teachers in the 1662 Constitutions for vilas
Carmelite Monasterio de la Encarnacin prohibits both men and women from
entering the monastery to teach.
A significant number of payments to outside music teachers recorded
in account books from Castilian female monasteries are for teachers of the
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 265

bajn (dulcian or curtal, the precursor of the modern bassoon). At Segovias

Franciscan Monasterio de Santa Isabel, a ministril named Bidal (probably
Pedro Vidal Arce, who played sackbut and bajoncillo at the Segovia cathedral)
was paid for one and one-half years worth of bajn lessons provided to a nun
named Doa Laurencia; the same nun also received singing lessons during
this time from an unnamed teacher. Payments for bajn lessons at Santa
Isabel as well as at various Franciscan monasteries in Toledo are recorded
between the years 1618 and 1621, during which time purchases of the bajn
and bajoncillo are also being recorded in the accounts of the same monaster-
ies. Although the evidence comes from only a few monasteries, one gets
the impression that Franciscan nuns were making a conscious eort to keep
pace with musical developments in sister monasteries, as well as with general
trends in Spanish churches staed by male musicians.
Interestingly, I have encountered in account books no record of any pay-
ments made for organ lessons or for outside organ teachers. This probably
indicates that, by the seventeenth century (and surely even earlier), there was
a well-established tradition inside the cloister of nun organists teaching other
nuns. Witness the example of Mara Surez de Robles, who having entered
Toledos San Clemente as a toddler, at the time of her profession was unable
to pay her dowry (presumably because her father had died in the interim).
She oered to serve as convent organista skill she must have acquired as a
child growing up in the cloisteruntil such time as she would be able to come
up with the money to pay o her dowry (which she didnt manage to do until
twenty-four years later).
Overall, music education inside Spanish cloisters probably depended
more on the eorts of nuns who taught their sisters than on the hiring of
outsiders. Indeed, nuns biographies and autobiographies often make a point
of the important work of nuns as educators. One particularly enthusiastic
example appears in a brief vida of a sixteenth-century nun named Sor Isabel
de la Encarnacin, the first Vicaress at Madrids elite Monasterio de las Des-
calzas Reales, who appears to have known how to do just about everything:
She was exceptionally skilled in everything pertaining to the Divine Oce
and the choir. She knew Latin very well, and was so well read in many sacred
books and in history, that to speak with her was to converse with one of the
ancient holy hermits, or with one of the eminent learned ones. In the convent
she was the teacher of everyone in all things, because in everything that had
to do with religion, and in everything pertaining to the decorum and beauty
of the convent she was highly accomplished. Therefore, everyone consulted
266 Colleen Baade

her as a teacher, in order to take lessons from her. To some she taught the
rules of praying the Divine Oce, to others the ceremonies of the religion, to
others the tone that they must use for the Psalms and verses in the choir, to
others to spin thread, to others the cutting and sewing of habits. In conclu-
sion, of all the things it is important for a good and perfect female religious
to know, there was nothing in which she was not a remarkable teacher.

In most convents, basic instruction in chant must have formed part of

the musical education of novices, and provisions for the musical instruction
of novices often appear in the written constitutions that governed life in reli-
gious communities. One set of constitutions for Franciscan nuns orders that
all young nuns who have a good voice attend two half-hour singing lessons
to be given each day by the Vicaress of the Choir or the Mistress of Novices.
Fray Antonio Arbiols eighteenth-century instruction manual for nuns rec-
ommends daily one-hour lessons in solfge for novices at convents where the
Divine Oce was sung in plainchant. Most constitutions entrust the Mis-
tress of Novices with the job of teaching prospective nuns what they needed
to know in order to fulfill their daily liturgical obligationsthe Psalter, the
chant and the ceremonies, and the other things pertaining to the oce of the
Church, as one constitution enumeratesbut music education is seldom
mentioned specifically. In requiring that the Mistress of Novices also be the
Vicaress of the Choir, the constitutions for Madrids Las Baronesas imply
that knowledge of music was an important asset for the nun to whom the
education of novices was entrusted.
Religious constitutions seldom address specifically whether nuns learned
to sing vocal polyphony or to play musical instruments inside the cloister,
though (as we have already seen) other sources confirm that they did. Doa
Mara Pinels manuscript account of life at vilas Monasterio de la Encar-
nacin during the seventeenth century tells about the music education of
twin girls Doa Mariana Rosa and Doa Isabel de Velasco, who having been
orphaned of their mother, were brought by their father to La Encarnacin
as educandas at age four. Both girls received instruction in plainchant and
polyphony and also learned to play various musical instruments, including
organ, harp, guitar, psaltery, and bajn. By the age of eight the two little girls
reportedly had begun teaching reading and singing to women in the commu-
nity who were considerably older than they were, a job they continued to do
after taking the novices habit at age seventeen and throughout their lives as
regular members of the community.
Documentation for nuns as music educators also comes from the recep-
cin and profesin agreements drawn up for female religious who were granted
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 267

dowry waivers on the basis of their musical ability. It is clear that nun musi-
cians were valued inside the cloister, not only as players and singers but also as
teachers. This is especially true from the mid seventeenth century onwards: in
documents from this period, nun organists, harpists, and players of the bajn
are routinely required to teach their respective instruments to other nuns.
Nun organists in particular were responsible for teaching singingboth po-
lyphony and (perhaps more commonly) plainchant. During the eighteenth
century, the overwhelming majority of nun organists who were granted dowry
waivers at Toledo convents were also responsible for teaching plainchant. At
Toledos Monasterio de San Clemente, nuns who served as organist during
the eighteenth century were also routinely charged with teaching other nuns
to read. For example, the escritura de profesin for Mara de San Martn y Mar-
tnez (one of two musician daughters of Calatayud maestro de capilla Miguel
San Martn) states that her duties included teaching organ, plainchant, and
reading Latin.
The requirement that nun musicians teach is curiously absent from all
of the recepcin and profesin contracts I have examined dating from before
1650. Additionally, none of the account books I have consulted records pay-
ments to outside music teachers after 1621 (when bajn teachers were being
hired in Toledo and Segovia). Elsewhere, I have proposed that the enforce-
ment of the Council of Trents decrees on clausura might have been related
to nuns greater involvement in music teaching. However, it may be that
female monasteries were simply more likely to hire outside teachers in the
face of new musical developments, such as the introduction of the bajn. Once
a community had well-trained musicians of its own, as would have been the
case early on for the organ, there would have been no need to hire secular
teachers. The extent to which hired nun musicians (those granted dowry
waivers in exchange for musical service) were expected to teach during the
first half of the seventeenth century and before is not certain. An increasing
demand from the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth
for nun organists who would teach plainchant to their sistersa job which,
according to religious constitutions, should have fallen to the Novice Mistress
or perhaps to the Vicaress of the Choirmay hint at a decline in the level of
musical education of the general population inside the cloister.

NUNS MUSICAL COMPETENCY

Surely the best-known music publication associated specifically with Span-

ish nuns is Juan Bermudos El arte tripharia. Published in the mid sixteenth
268 Colleen Baade

century, the treatise is addressed to Doa Isabel Pacheco, abbess of the Mon-
asterio de Santa Clara at Montilla (about forty kilometers south of Crdoba),
and purports to have been written for the instruction of the abbesss niece,
Doa Teresa Manrique. Thus, Robert Stevenson has called the work the first
treatise designed specifically for female use. El arte contains three main
sections: the first deals with the rudiments of plainsong, the second with
vocal polyphony, and the third discusses keyboard playing, which subject
matter, says Bermudo, is sucient to give in some manner knowledge of
music, especially for female religious who are studious and do not aspire to
know anything more than the Divine Oce. A quick glance at Bermudos
little treatise might give the idea that the musical training of Spanish nuns
was quite limited. Indeed, it has been proposed that the disparity between the
subject matter of El arte and that of the first edition of Bermudos weightier
Declaracin de instrumentos musicales, printed just eight months prior to El
arte, reveals the gender bias in womens musical instruction.
There is no question that discrepancies existed between mens and
womens education in early modern Spain, though writers such as Juan Luis
Vives and Juan de la Cerda disagreed about how much musical knowledge a
woman ought to possess. It is uncertain, however, whether El arte provides
direct evidence of inequities in the respective music training of females and
males. In fact, it seems that Bermudo did not actually write El arte (at least
not initially) with a female audience in mind: Wolfgang Freis has argued
convincingly that the chapters that compose El arte were extracted from an
earlier, unpublished version of the Declaracin. Furthermore, Freis observes,
the contents of El arte reappear in book II of the second published edition of
Declaracin, where it is not referred to as a book designed for nuns, but rather
as a primer for those having no knowledge of music. Clearly, the contents
of El arte would have been suitable for the instruction of any musical novice,
male or female, religious or secular. However, Bermudos putative selection
and editing for use by female religious (evidenced by the inclusion of chants
for the oce of Saint Clare in El arte, where chants for Saint Francis are used
in Declaracin) of material specifically designed for beginners, does raise the
question of whether nuns musicianship was ever expected to rise above the
level of the amateur.
Not quite two centuries after the publication of El arte, another Fran-
ciscan theorist, Pablo Nassarre, issued a large, two-volume music treatise in
which he discusses, albeit briefly, the music curriculum for girls who were
preparing to become convent organists. Nassarre was organist at the Real
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 269

Convento de San Francisco at Saragossa and teacher of many organists in

his day. His Escuela msica segn la prctica moderna, though published in
the second decade of the eighteenth century, is believed to have been written
much earlier, and thus is considered to be representative of Spanish musical
practices during the seventeenth century. Organist at the Real Convento de
San Francisco at Saragossa, Nassarre purports to advise organ teachers on
the particulars of instructing girls who are preparing to become convent musi-
cians. His instructions occupy only about one and a half pages, following brief
remarks about problems associated with teaching the blind and preceding
his comments on teaching music to amateurs, or those who are learning for
fun. It would be simplistic, however, to conclude from the arrangement of
subject matter that Nassarre relegates girlsalong with amateurs and the
blindto an inferior status as musicians, particularly since Nassarre him-
self was blind from birth. Rather, in this chapter Nassarre addresses some
of the particular diculties he associates with teaching these three types of
students.
Significantly, Nassarre consistently refers to his female pupils as nias
(little girls) rather than doncellas (maidens or young women). His frequent
references to what he calls the inconstancia (capriciousness, fragility, instabil-
ity) of the female sex reflect views that were, of course, not uncommon in his
day. However, Nassarres comments suggest that many of the diculties he
associated with teaching little girls owed at least as much to their physical and
psychological immaturity as to their sex:
The teaching of little girls who are learning [for the purpose of becoming
nuns] is scarcely any less work [than teaching the blind], although for dier-
ent reasons: it is because of the inconstancy of their sex, their young age,
and their small hands. Their young age and their sex are the reason for their
disinclination to study; their small hands add more work for the teacher
because it is necessary to accommodate the music to fit them so that it is
easy for them to play it. The treatment of them must be very gentle and
without any harshness because otherwise they do not benefit, since they are
by nature excessively timid and pusillanimous.

Nassarre emphasizes that, in particular, girls voices ought to be trained

when they are muy nias. This instruction accords with what Nassarre has
to say elsewhere in his treatise, where he explains that the training of girls
voices should begin during what he calls the first stage (which lasts up to
about age eleven), rather than during the second stage (from age eleven or
twelve until puberty), at which age girls voices tend to be unstable. Girls
270 Colleen Baade

voices, Nassarre asserts, are therefore best trained the younger the better.
Boys voices, on the other hand, should be trained during the second stage,
which falls between ages eight or nine to fourteen. It appears, then, that
in early modern Spain, girls who were destined to become nuns began their
music studies even younger than the age at which boys initiated their musical
formation. Nassarre does not say precisely how many years of training are
required of a girl preparing to become a convent musician, but one gets the
impression that it must have been common for girls to begin their studies as
early as age six or seven.
For Nassarre, the basic skills necessary for nun organists consist pri-
marily of a good keyboard technique and the ability to sing plainchant and
polyphony. Knowledge of plainchant is necessary, says Nassarre, because the
convent organist is often the person who oversees the choir, and even if she
does not have this obligation, it is useful for her to be able to teach plainchant
to the other nuns in the community. (And as we have seen, recepcin and
profesin agreements witness the demand for nuns as teachers of plainchant
during this time.) Knowledge of polyphonyin particular, the ability to sing
ones part at sightis also useful since, as Nassarre tells us, there were many
female monasteries in which polyphony was sung. Nassarres remarks make it
clear that in many such monasteries, the organist functioned as both as head
cantora and maestra de capilla; as the convents principal musician, she was
the one responsible for determining what the nuns would sing, for teaching
them how to sing it, for making sure they knew their parts, and for correcting
them when they made mistakes. Nassarres catalogue of the duties expected
of convent organists is consistent with the qualifications outlined in a letter
from Martin de Barasoain (organist at the Pamplona cathedral from 1673 to
1683) to Miguel de Irzar (then chapel-master at the Segovia cathedral). Ba-
rasoain writes of an (unidentified) womens convent in search of a musician;
the ideal candidate, he says, should have a good voice, be trained as organist
and harpist, serve as music teacher for the other nuns and be responsible for
special music sung at fiestas.
Nassarre likewise mentions that a nun organist ought to have a good
voice and be skilled enough to sing her part and to accompany simultaneously,
a practice facilitated, he remarks, by writing the singers part and the accom-
paniment on the same page. And Nassarre emphasizes that is important for
girls to learn to accompany on the harp as skillfully as on the organ, since
the harp is especially well suited for accompanying high voices. Concerning
nun organists ability at the keyboard, Nassarre maintains that girls small
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 271

hands are more flexible than boys and that therefore, girls are able to acquire
agility more easily than boys; however, he says, girls also have a tendency to
play too fast, and need to be taught to keep a steady beat. Girls should learn
to play from memory, Nassarre maintains, so that they will be able to variar,
that is, to improvise glosas, or ornamented variations. Finally, nun organists
should also know how to improvise free compositions so that they are able to
lengthen or abbreviate organ versets when necessary.
As in Bermudos El arte, Nassarres instructions for the teaching of future
convent organists emphasize the acquisition of basic, practical skills. Indeed,
Nassarre says that teachers of female pupils need only to see to it that their
students acquire la habilidad necesaria (the necessary or fundamental, basic
ability). Nassarre tells teachers they should instruct female students who are
learning acompaamiento (continuo accompaniment) according to the rules
his treatise provides for non-composers, since composition is not a necessary
skill for nuns to learn. Nassarres reservations about teaching composition
to girls appear to have little to do, however, with whether or not he believes
girls are capable of learning to compose music. Rather, he says, if girls are to
become composers, their studies will take longer, postponing their entrance
into religious life, which is not recommended because of certain reasons ow-
ing to the fragility of their sex; the implication seems to be that it is best to
get them o to the convent before puberty. Besides, Nassarre adds, in the end
girls will benefit little from having studied composition because as nuns they
will have little opportunity to apply their compositional skills.
Bermudos El arte and Nassarres instructions for teaching girls in Escuela
msica give an idea what two respective Franciscan friars thought female re-
ligious needed to study in order to fulfill the duties of a nun musician. How-
ever, neither Nassarre nor Bermudo ought to be taken at face value as proof of
what Spanish nun musicians actually learned or knew; indeed, other sources
may inform more accurately as to what the musical capabilities of Spanish
nuns really were. Descriptions of the musical abilities of women and girls
who served as Spanish convent musicians are raremost contracts for nun
musicians dowry waivers include only a cursory statement about prospective
nuns musical qualifications. One of the most informative documents I have
discovered is a petition to the Papal Nuncio (shown in figure 13.1), attached
to the escritura de recepcin for a girl named Mara de Mirandaapparently
a student of Jos Solana (16431712), first organist of the Toledo cathedral at
the turn of the seventeenth century. In a written request for permission to
grant a dowry waiver to the eleven-and-a-half-year-old candidate, the nuns at
272 Colleen Baade

FIGURE 13.1. (page 1) Dowry Petition for Mara de Miranda (Toledo, Archivo Histrico
Provincial, Prot. 416, fol. 163r163v).

Toledos Monasterio de Santa Clara described Doa Maras qualifications

as follows: [She] knows how to play the organ admirably well for her age, to
compose in five parts, and to accompany all parts; she plays the harp, and she
can skillfully sing her own part.
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 273

FIGURE 13.1. (page 2) Dowry Petition for Mara de Miranda (Toledo, Archivo Histrico
Provincial, Prot. 416, fol. 163r163v)

Mara de Mirandas credentialsimpressive for a girl her ageare echoed

in descriptions found in extant written correspondence (which letters, inci-
dentally, show that prospective nun musicians relied on a network of profes-
sional musicians for recommendations to monastery posts). A letter from
Antonio de la Cruz Brocarte, organist at the Zamora cathedral, solicits the
274 Colleen Baade

assistance of Valladolid chapel-master Miguel Gmez Camargo in finding

a post for a fellow countrywoman who plays double harp extremely well,
knows [how to construct] four-part counterpoint over a bass or tenor, plays
the organ, and is a skillful singer and accompanist. Similar qualifications
are attributed to a student described by Barasoain in his letter to Irzar: the
girl was able to play (and probably to improvise) versos and tientos de medio
registro alto and de medio registro bajo (organ versets and pieces for divided
keyboard with solo in the right or left hand) as well as tientos llenos (pieces
for undivided registration); she could realize accompaniments on both the
organ and the harp, sing her part in vocal polyphony, devise counterpoint and
conciertos in three and four parts with a supplied bass or treble, and compose
free compositions in five parts.
The qualifications possessed (or expected to be possessed) by girls like
Mara de Miranda and the other nun musicians cited above are generally con-
sistent with Nassarres instructions about the kind of training a nun organist
should receive. (Even the young age at which Mara de Miranda entered the
Monasterio de Santa Clara accords with Nassarres advice that girls begin
their musical formation very early.) In early modern Spain, a community
seeking a girl to serve as convent organist could probably expect to find, at a
minimum, a candidate who could play (and likely, improvise) the organ rep-
ertoire typical of the period, realize continuo accompaniments on organ and
harp, sing plainchant and sight-sing her part in vocal polyphony.
There is some indication that girls music education occasionally went
beyond what Nassarre recommends, for despite his objections there appear
to have been Spanish nun musicians who studied composition (including the
girls whose musical abilities are discussed above). It is dicult to determine
exactly what kind of instruction Nassarre intended his female students to do
without when he said that it was not important for nuns to be composers.
Although Nassarre was writing late in the seventeenth century, his use of
the terms composicin and contrapunto harkens back to that of Renaissance
theorists who argued over the supposed distinction between contrapunctus/
contrapunctizarecounterpoint improvised over a preexistent melodyand
compositio/componereoriginal, written-down composition not based on
chant or another preexisting melody. Like his predecessors, Nassarre ap-
plies the word contrapunto to counterpoint devised over a plainchant cantus
firmus: contrapunto suelto refers to two-part counterpoint, and contrapunto
a concierto to counterpoint involving three, four, or even five voices. Cer-
tainly, Nassarres students were taught to invent contrapuntos without hav-
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 275

EXAMPLE 13.1. Gracia Baptista, Conditor alme.

ing to write them down: Gracia Baptistas Conditor alme (shown in example
13.1)the only published musical work known to have been composed by a
Spanish woman, and an example of what Nassarre would have called a conci-
erto a tresis the kind of piece the pupil described in Baraosains letter would
surely have been able to improvise.
Whether Spanish nun musicians were trained with any sort of regular-
ity in the art of what Nassarre calls composicin is hard to know. It remains
uncertain what was required, for example, of the nun named Sor Ana de la
Cruz Ribera (16061650), who writes in her spiritual autobiography that
her religious community required her to learn to compose music. In fact,
very little is known about Spanish nuns as possible composers of music that
276 Colleen Baade

was actually written down for performance by their sister musicians. We

do know that Spanish nuns often solicited compositionspolyphonic vil-
lancicos in particularfrom maestros de capilla for important festivals such
as Christmas, Corpus Christi, or nuns profession ceremonies. Some nuns
may well have written their own compositions for these celebrations, but
occasional music such as this was often not preserved. To the extent that
the word composicin refers to the writing down of polyphonic vocal works,
Nassarre was probably correct when he noted that girls who knew composi-
tion would have little opportunity to use their ability in the convent, since
the number of feast days at which polyphony would have been sung by any
capilla of nun singers was likely far less than such occasions at cathedrals and
royal chapels.
Doubtless, the caliber of nuns musicianship varied from one institu-
tion to the next, but the most prestigious among Spanish womens monas-
teries must have been able to demand a high level of competency of the girls
who were granted dowry waivers in exchange for their services as musicians.
These hired convent musicians were subject to a formal examination of their
skills in much the same way as were male candidates for positions at secular
churches. In 1698, for example, seventeen-year-old Doa Mara Ibez de
Isaba, candidate for a position at Madrids Monasterio de Santa Mara de los
ngeles, was examined in the presence of an ocial from the Royal Chapel.
A petition requesting permission to grant a dowry waiver to Doa Mara
relates that she executed everything that was proposed of her with such great
dexterity and skill that, the examiner concluded, she should not have been
asked anything by way of dowry because of the excellence of her ability.
The petition does not provide any details about Doa Maras examination,
though she must have proved her ability on harp, organ, and violn, all of
which she is reported to have played excellently. The answers to questions
about exactly what girls studied in preparation for a post as a convent musi-
cian await further discovery of documents like those that describe the abili-
ties of Mara de Miranda and her sisters.

NOTES
1. Francisco Pacheco, Libro de descripcin de verdaderos retratos de ilustres y memo-
rables varones (Seville: [s.n.], 1599), ed. Pedro M. Piero Ramrez and Rogelio Reyes Cano
(Seville: Diputacin Provincal de Sevilla, 1985): . . . sus discpulos, por serlo, ocuparon los
mejores de las iglesias de Espaa, y dos berberiscas que lo fueron, llamadas las Alcares,
merecieron ser maestras de muchas monjas en el convento de San Leandro de esta ciudad.
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 277

A facsimile edition of Pachecos Libro de descripcin is now available online via the library
of the Universidad de Sevilla: http://fama2.us.es//fde/ocr/2006/libroDeDescripcion
.pdf.
2. Juan Luis Vives, De Institutione Feminae Christiane (Antwerp: Michel Hillen, 1524),
Spanish trans. Juan Justiniano, Instruccin de la mujer cristiana (Valencia: [s.n.], 1528), ed.
Elizabeth Teresa Howe (Madrid: Fundacin Universitaria Espaola, 1995), 155: . . . yo no
permito, ni es de mi voto que las doncellas aprendan de msica, ni menos que se huelguen de
orla en ninguna parte, ni en casa, ni fuera, ni a puerta, ni a ventana, ni de da, ni de noche,
y esto no lo digo sin causa . . . Con todo yo otorgar que la virgen cristiana, si quisiese aprender
algo de rgano para monja, que aprenda mucho de enhorabuena (my emphasis).
3. Francisco de Salinas, De musica libri septem (Salamanca: Mathias Gastius, 1577),
trans. Ismael Fernndez de la Cuesta, Siete libros sobre la msica (Madrid: Alpuerto, 1983),
25: . . . debo decir que cuando era nio vino una mujer de noble linaje a mi patria, y, para
hacerse religiosa, quiso aprender a tocar el rgano. Como ella saba bien el latn y viva en
nuestra casa, me ense gramtica a la vez que yo le daba lecciones de rgano.
4. Miguel Gonzlez Vaquero, La mujer Fuerte, Por otro ttulo La Vida de Doa Mara
Vela, monja de San Bernardo, en el convento de Santa Ana de vila (Barcelona: Pedro Laca-
vallera, 1640), fol. 3v: Crise desde luego para monja, y aprendi a leer, y a escrivir muy
bien: de manera que su letra nadie lo jugara ser de muger; aprendi msica, y tecla; y en todo
gnero de labores, y bordado, fue muy aventajada. English translation and all subsequent
translations mine unless otherwise noted.
5. On the Peraza family of musicians and Blasina de Mendoza, see Juan Ruiz Jimnez,
La dinasta de los Peraza. Nuevos datos para la biografa de Jernimo Peraza II, Cuadernos
de Arte 26 (1995): 5363.
6. On dowry waivers for nun musicians in Spain, see Colleen Baade, Hired Nun
Musicians in Early Modern Castile, in Thomasin Lamay, ed., Musical Voices of Early Mod-
ern Women: Many-Headed Melodies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 287310.
7. Escritura de recepcin for Francisca Gnzalez de Guzmn at the Monasterio de Santo
Domingo el Real, Toledo, 29 July 1726 (Toledo, Archivo Histrico Provincial, Prot. 735, fol.
166r): . . . Don Benito de San Martn se obliga a que asistir un msico a la dicha Da Francisca
Gonzlez de Guzmn por su cuenta y costo para que la adiestre y ensee perfectamente en la
msica hasta que lo est y capaz para asistir a ella y a satisfaccin de dicho real convento.
8. Madrid, Archivo Histrico Nacional, Clero, libro 7445, unnumbered folio
(4.ix.1596).
9. Madrid, Archivo Histrico Nacional, Clero, libro 14872, fol. 27r.
10. Ibid., unnumbered folio (4.iii.1597).
11. Constituciones, y decretos para . . . el convento de la Encarnacin de Monjas de N.
Seora del Carmen de la Ciudad de vila (Salamanca: Ioseph Gmez de Cubos, 1662), 40:
Iten ordenamos, que ninguna persona as hombre, como mujer, Eclesistico, Seglar pueda
ir al Monasterio a ensear canto llano, ni canto de rgano, y para que aprendan a cantar las
que no lo supieren, podr una Religiosa diestra, y antigua a una hora competente ensear
a las dems (my emphasis).
12. Madrid, Archivo Histrico Nacional, Clero, libro 12583, fol. 110v (2.iv.1620). Pedro
Vidal Arce was employed at the Segovia cathedral from 1601 to at least 1628; see Jos Lpez-
Calo, Documentario Musical de la Catedral de Segovia, vol. 1: Actas Capitulares (Santiago de
Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1990), 7172, 7677, 9293.
13. In Toledo, the bajn purchases appear at two Franciscan monasteriesSanta Clara
and Santa Isabel de los Reyes; see Madrid, Archivo Histrico Nacional, Clero, libro 15794,
fol. 85r, and libro 15887, fols. 198v and 236r, respectively.
14. See, for example, Michael Noones observation of a growing musical requirement
during the first two decades of the seventeenth century for the use of the bajn at San
278 Colleen Baade

Lorenzo del Escorial, in his Music and Musicians in the Escorial Liturgy under the Hapsburgs,
15631700 (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1988), 12425.
15. Licencia for release from duties for Mara Surez de Robles, Monasterio de San
Clemente, Toledo, 25 March 1674 (Toledo, Archivo Histrico Provincial, Prot. 182, fol. 38r):
. . . por cuanto Doa Mara Surez monja profesa en el Imperial Convento de San Clemente
de esta dicha ciudad por peticin del Cardenal mi Seor diciendo como se dot a el tiempo
de su entrada en mill y trescientos ducados y que habiendo al tiempo de su profesin impo-
sibilitdose de pagarlos y hallndose con la habilidad de rgano ofreci servir de organista
mientras no satisficiese el dicho dote; que ha cumplido por espacio de veinte y cuatro aos
que ha que profes.
16. Vida of Sor Isabel de la Encarnacin in Fray Juan Carrillo, O.F.M., Relacin histri-
ca de la Real fundacin de las Descalas de Santa Clara de la villa de Madrid (Madrid: Luis
Snchez, 1616), fols. 92r92v: Era habilsima en todo lo que tocava al Oficio Divino y coro.
Saba muy bien Latn, y era tan leda en muchos libros santos, y de historia, que tratar
con ella, era conversar con alguno de los santos padres del yermo, o con alguno de los muy
eminentes letrados. En el convento era maestra de todas en todas las cosas; porque en todo
quanto se trata en la religin, y quanto pertenece al decoro y hermosura de un convento, era
consumada: y as todas acudan como a maestra comn, para tomar licciones della. A unas
enseava las reglas de rezar el Oficio Divino, a otras las ceremonias de la religin, a otra el
tono que avan de dar a los Salmos y versos en el Coro, a otras a torcer el hilo, a otras, cortar
y coser los hbitos. Finalmente, no ava cosa de quantas importa saber a una buena y perfeta
religiosa, de la cual ella no fuese singular maestra.
17. Regla de las Sorores, y Monjas de la Gloriosa Madre Santa Clara . . . Con las Consti-
tuciones del muy Religiossimo Convento de San Iuan Evangelista, de la Orden de Santa Clara
de la villa de Cienpouelos. . . . (Madrid, 1624), fols. 37v38r: Ordenamos, que la Vicaria de
Coro d leccin de cantar, o la Maestra dos vezes al da, una en saliendo de Prima, y otra de
Vsperas, por espacio cada vez de media hora; y estas lecciones mandamos acudan todas
las Monjas moas que tuvieren voz.
18. Fray Antonio Arbiol, La religiosa instruida con doctrina de la Sagrada Escritura,
y Santos Padres de la iglesia catlica, para todas las operaciones de su vida regular (Madrid:
Thoms Rodrguez Fras, 1734), 75: Las Novicias del Coro, en los conventos donde se dice
el Oficio Divino con el Canto Gregoriano, han de tener hora sealada para aprender la solf
con perfeccin.
19. Regla y Constituciones de las Religiosas, y Monias del Sagrado Orden de Nuestra Se-
ora de la Merced Redempcin de Cautivos. . . . (Burgos: Pedro de Huydobro, 1624), fol. 23v:
En el ao del noviciado, aprendan el psalterio, el canto, y ceremonias, y las otras cosas to-
cantes al oficio de la Iglesia. See also the Constituciones y estatutos ordenados . . . por el Illmo.
Seor Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Roxas . . . para las Religiosas del Monesterio de S. Bernardo
(Madrid: Luis Snchez, 1625), which state that the Mistress of Novices should teach her
charges to leer, escrivir y contar [sicshould read cantar?] muy bien (fol. 27v).
20. Regla, y constituciones de las religiosas Carmelitas Descalzas del Convento de nuestra
Seora de la Natividad y S. Joseph, que la Baronesa Doa Beatriz de Silveyra fund en la calle
de Alcal de esta Villa (Madrid: Imprenta de Domingo Morras, 1662), 391: Porque se escuse
el aumento de oficios en diferentes sugetos, y la Maestra de Novicias puede con ms como-
didad, y asistencia industriar a sus Religiosas, y governarlas en el Coro, sea Vicaria de Coro
la Maestra de Novicias.
21. Doa Mara Pinel, Retablo de Carmelitas, ed. Nicols Gonzlez (Madrid: Editorial
de Espiritualidad, 1981), 18788: Desta edad las falt su madre, y su padre las trajo seglares
al convento santo de la Encarnacin, para que se criasen a la santa enseanza y ejemplo de
la venerable doa Mara de Len . . . Esmerse la sierva del Seor en su crianza, y enselas
desde luego a cantar canto llano, y canto de rgano, porque tenan buenas voces, para dedi-
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 279

carlas a las divinas alabanzas. Y doa Mariana aprendi a tocar rgano, arpa, guitarra y
ctara. Doa Isabel empez a deprender bajn pero no tuvo fuerza en el estmago para ello.
Desde luego empezaron las nias a seguir el coro, sirviendo en todo como religiosas, por no
hallarse su padres con caudal para darlas el hbito. Desde ocho aos enseaban a leer y can-
tar a otras, que las llevaban muchos aos, y en este santo ejercicio perseveraron hasta morir,
porque decan que ellas alababan a Dios con todas aquellas almas, a quien enseaban.
22. Escritura de profesin for Mara de San Martn y Martnez at the Monasterio de
San Clemente, Toledo, 29 July 1754 (Toledo, Archivo Histrico Provincial, Prot. 847, fol.
114v): . . . la dicha Da Mara San Martn se obliga que . . . tocar por su persona el rgano,
ensear canto llano y leer latn, canto llano [sic] y rgano a las dems religiosas de dicho
ymperial combento, todo ello con el mayor esmero y formalidad que est de su parte . . .
The teaching of reading is specified among the duties of all seven of the nun organists who
entered San Clemente between 1700 and 1775, but is not mentioned in the contracts of the
four nun organists who professed after 1775.
23. See Baade, Hired Nun Musicians, 305. Clausura, the strict confinement of fe-
male religious to the physical enclosure of the cloister, was decreed at the 1563 meeting of
the Council of Trent.
24. Contracts for dowry waivers of hired nun musicians for whom teaching is speci-
fied as part of their duties uniformly state that they are required to teach any of the other
nuns who might want to learn (ensear a las dems religiosas que quisieran aprender, or
similar wording). One also gets the sense that some of the teaching required of hired nun
musicians may have served as a form of recreation for aristocratic nuns; see Baade, Hired
Nun Musicians, 298.
25. Juan Bermudo, El arte tripharia (Osuna: Juan de Len, 1550); henceforth, El arte.
26. Robert Stevenson, Juan Bermudo (The Hague: Martinus Nijho, 1960), 44.
27. El arte, fols. 3v4r: Acord de hazer tres artezicas breves, una de canto llano, otra
de canto de rgano, y la tercera de taer rganos. Todo quanto se pudieron abreviar, se
abreviaron. Suficientes son para dar en alguna manera noticia de la msica: mayormente a
religiosas, que son estudiosas, y no pretenden saber, sino el oficio divino.
28. Maria T. Annoni and Kathleen E. Nuccio, Gender as Text and Subtext: The Case
of Renaissance Music Pedagogy, Revista de Musicologa 16 (1993): 2228. The first edition of
Bermudos Declaracin was printed on 17 September 1549 (Osuna: Juan de Len), El arte
on 20 May 1550.
29. While both Vives and de la Cerda (Libro intitulado vida poltica de todos los estados
de mujeres [Alcal de Henares, 1599]) favored teaching women to read, de la Cerda was op-
posed to their learning how to write. On attitudes in early modern Spain toward women and
music, see Pilar Ramos Lpez, Music and Women in Early Modern Spain: Some Discrep-
ancies between Education Theory and Musical Practice, in Musical Voices of Early Modern
Women, 97118. On womens education generally in early modern Spain see Maril Vigil, La
vida de las mujeres en los siglos XVI y XVII, 2nd edition (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de Espaa
Editores, 1994), 3961; and Margarita Ortega Lpez, El perodo Barroco (15651700), in
Historia de las mujeres en Espaa, ed. Elisa Garrido Gonzlez (Madrid: Editorial Sntesis,
1997), 29095.
30. Wolfgang Freis, Becoming a Theorist, Revista de Musicologa 18 (1995): 11112. For
an earlier example of a comparable revision, see Francesco Cazas Tractado vulgare di canto
figurato (Milan, 1492), an abbreviated vernacular translation of material later published as
book II of Gauriuss Practica musice (Milan, 1496).
31. Ibid., 45. The second edition of Bermudos Declaracin de instrumentos musicales
was published in 1555 (Osuna: Juan de Len).
32. Freis asserts that El arte was not written expressly for nuns use (Becoming a Theo-
rist, 4445), nor was there necessarily any correlation between the content of El arte and
280 Colleen Baade

music practiced at the Montilla monastery (personal communication); rather, he proposes

that for Bermudo, the works publication may have been simply an attempt to get another
one of his books into print, and that Bermudos dedication of El arte to Isabel Pacheco,
daughter of Marquis of Priego, and his mention of her niece, daughter of the Count of Os-
orno, were likely made in hopes of obtaining some kind of financial contribution from the
womens wealthy relatives (Becoming a Theorist, 6061). Nonetheless, Freiss statement,
Liturgical music [in the Franciscan order] consisted only of plainchant, while polyphonic
or instrumental music was not performed (ibid., 35), does not hold true for many houses
of female Franciscans, as my own research amply demonstrates. There is even evidence that
polyphony was sung at Montilla; see note 55, below. The same richness of musical practice is
seen in Clarissan houses elsewhere in Europe; see for example Mary Natvig, Rich Clares,
Poor Clares: Celebrating the Divine Oce, Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and
Culture 4 (2000): 5970.
33. Pablo Nassarre, Escuela msica segn la prctica moderna, 2 vols. (Saragossa: Here-
deros de Diego de Larumbe, 17231724), facs. edition, ed. Lothar Siemens Hernndez (Sara-
gossa: Institucin Fernando el Catlico, 1980).
34. The title of the section reads: De el orden que se ha de guardar en ensear a los que
no tienen vista, nias para Religiosas, y a sugetos que aprenden por diversin.
35. According to Juan de la Cerda (Libro intitulado, 8), a girl was considered a nia up
until about age ten, and from then until her marriagewhich should occur by age twenty
she was called a doncella.
36. Escuela msica, Segunda parte, 483: Los principios de la nias que aprenden, es
muy poco menos el trabajo de su enseana, aunque por diferente causa: y es por la incon-
stancia de el sexo, la poca edad, y la mano pequea. La corta edad, y el sexo, es motivo de
la poca aficin al estudio; la mano pequea, aade trabajo al Maestro; porque es preciso
averles de acomodar la msica, de modo, que les sea fcil su execucin. El trato con ellas,
ha de ser muy apacible, y sin nada de aspereza; porque de ser contrario no aprovechan: por
la razn de ser sobradamente tmidas, y pusilnimes naturalmente . . . Elsewhere in his
treatise, Nassarre also notes that young boys have flexible nerves and are naturally timid
and pusillanimous (Escuela msica, Segunda parte, 463), so it would appear that a good
deal of the diculty Nassarre associated with teaching young girls had to do with age as
much as gender.
37. Ibid., 484: Conviene tambin, que se les haga exercitar la voz quando son muy
nias, por tenerla muy atenuada ordinariamente, porque con el exercicio se aumenta.
38. Escuela msica, Primera parte, 45: La tercera especie de sugetos . . . en quien se
hallava la voz aguda, o de tiple, es en las mugeres, en las que devemos considerar la voz en
tres estados. El primero es hasta la edad de los onze, u doze aos . . . El segundo estado, en
que tienen la voz, es desde los onze, o doze aos, hasta que las purifica la naturaleza. Y las
que huvieren de aprender msica, es el tiempo menos bueno este, para entrar en semejante
exercicio, por dos razones principalmente. La primera, porque como la voz est tan incon-
stante, con dificultad comprehenden fixamente la entonacin. La segunda es, que estn
rebueltos los humores con la mutacin, de donde nace alguna falsedad en los sentidos, y
como uno de ellos es el odo, y ms principal para el asunto, aumenta mucho la rudeza, y la
tardanza de la comprehensin . . . y as para entrar en este exercicio, es la mejor edad de ms
nias (my emphasis).
39. Ibid., 43: En los muchachos, o nios se deve considerar en dos estados, el uno en
el tiempo de la infancia, que es desde que nacen, hasta los siete, u ocho aos. El segundo
estado, y en el tiempo de la puericia, que es de los ocho, o los nueve, hasta los catorze poco
mas, o menos, que es quando la naturaleza hace la mutacin. . . . En la segunda edad se halla
la voz con ms perfeccin, por hallarse la naturaleza con ms rigor, y fueras, y es sta la
mejor edad, para dar principio al estudio de la Msica. . . .
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 281

40. Escuela msica, Segunda parte, 48384: En lo que han de aprender, tan solamente
deve poner el Maestro la eficacia en que tengan la habilidad necesaria; la qual consiste en
tener soltura de manos con toda la execucin posible: en que sean diestras en cantar Canto
Llano, y Canto de rgano. Canto Llano, porque es preciso que rija el Coro en muchos Con-
ventos: y quando no entre con esta obligacin, por lo menos, conviene que sea diestra, para
poder ensear a otras Religiosas.
41. Ibid., 484: En el Canto de rgano, lo ha de ser de modo que pueda cantar su parte
de repente; porque son muchos los Conventos donde cantan a Canto de rgano: y en los
ms, es la Organista la Msica principal; a cuya cuenta corre, as el disponer lo que se ha
de cantar, como el ensear a otras Religiosas, y cuydar de que canten con firmeza su parte;
corrigindoles lo que erraren.
42. Letter from Martn de Barasoain to Miguel de Irzar, 1 February 1674, in Jos
Lpez-Calo, Corresponsales de Miguel de Irzar (II), Anuario Musical 20 (1965): 218:
Este correo recib una carta de fray Domingo Olavarre, que trata en orden a la nia que est
propuesta, donde me dice ha de tener voz, organista, arpista, ha de ensear algunas de esas
seoras, y las fiestas o lo que se canta ha de correr por su cuenta. Estos son muchos oficios
para una mujer. . . . Another portion of this letter is quoted in note 51, below.
43. Ibid.: Si tuviere voz, conviene que sea muy diestra, porque pueda cantar su parte,
y acompaar a un tiempo. . . . [I]mporta mucho que toquen Arpa, y acompaen con ella de
el mismo modo que con el rgano; por ser Instrumento ms acomodado para acompaar
vozes agudas. Si la voz es suficiente para cantar su parte, ser bien que se impongan en que
a un tiempo acompaen, y canten; que a ms de ser muy conveniente, imitarn en esta a
Santa Cecilia; que segn la Iglesia, en su Oficio dize, cantava al Seor con el rgano. Y para
facilitarse, importa que se les ponga en el mismo papel de la voz el acompaamiento.
44. Ibid., 48485: En quanto a la execucin, generalmente sueltan las manos a menos
trabajo que los varones, por tener ms flexivilidad, as en ellas, como en los nervios. . . . Y es
la causa el ser ms pequeos, y por esto ms prontos a la agilidad: y este es el motivo porque
he dicho, que a menos trabajo en el estudio que los muchachos, consiguen el soltar las manos.
Pero se deve tener mucho cuydado con ellas en que taan a espacio, porque naturalmente son
ms fogosas, por ser de complexin hmeda, y clida . . . y la misma fogosidad, como tienen
facilidad en los movimientos de los dedos, es causa de apresurarse en la msica que tocan, no
dndole el ayre que se le deve dar, y faltando muchas vezes al comps . . . No es lo que menos
importa el que sepan sacar la msica ponindola de el papel en la memoria; pues sabindolo
hazer, podrn variar. Tambin es conveniente que se les imponga en tocar de suyo, para que
puedan ms cmodamente alargar, u abreviar los versos, quando fuere necesario.
45. See note 42, above.
46. Escuela msica, Segunda parte, 484: Quando tienen ya las manos suficientemente
sueltas, y son ya diestras en el cantar, conviene, que se les ensee a acompaar, dndoles las
reglas que dexo escritas en la Primera Parte, Libro 3. Captulo 20. que son para los que no
son Compositores; y para Religiosas importa poco que no lo sean. The chapter to which
Nassarre refers is a guide to continuo accompaniment for players who have not studied
composition. As for organists and harpists who have studied the rules of composition, ac-
cording to Nassarre, they will already know how to realize a proper accompaniment; see
Escuela msica, Primera parte, 35359.
47. Ibid.: Porque si han de ser Compositoras, es preciso que se les dilate el tiempo de
tomar estado, y no es muy conveniente por algunas razones que trae consigo la fragilidad
de el sexo. Y tambin, porque acostumbran a no tener provecho de averla estudiado, quando
son Religiosas, por su poca aplicacin al trabajo de componer, y valerse de qualquier modo
de trabajos agenos.
48. See Jos Solanas last will and testament, reproduced in Louis Jambou, Jos So-
lana (16451712). Trayectoria de un organista compositor, Revista de Musicologa 4 (1981):
282 Colleen Baade

62112, which includes a bequest to Da Mara de Miranda religiosa en el convento de Santa

Clara de esta Ciudad (p. 110).
49. Undated petition (1700) from nuns at the Monasterio de Santa Clara, Toledo, re-
questing permission to grant a dowry waiver to organist Mara de Miranda on the basis of
her musical ability (Toledo, Archivo Histrico Provincial, Prot. 416, fol. 163r): M.R.P.N. La
Abadesa y religiosas de este convento de . . . Santa Clara de esta ciudad de Toledo dicen que
. . . se han hecho diferentes diligencias en busca de persona que sirva de organista as en
dicha ciudad como en otras partes, y se a hallado a Doa Mara de Miranda, natural de dicha
ciudad de Toledo de edad de doce aos poco ms o menos, hija de Don Fliz de Miranda
y Doa Mara Cercadillo sus padres vecinos de ella, la cual sabe tocar dicho rgano con ad-
miracin para su edad y componer a cinco y acompaar cualesquier papeles, y dems de ello sabe
tocar arpa y cantar diestramente su parte, y se a ajustado con la susodicha y sus padres entre
por religiosa de choro y velo en dicho convento con cargo de tocar rgano para los divinos
oficios y cantar por todos los das de su vida sin que pague dote alguno ni propinas de en-
trada y profesin ni la pueden obligar a hacer oficios ningunos solo a que ensee a cualquiera
que quisiere dedicarse a estudiar msica y rgano (my emphasis).
50. Letter from Antonio de la Cruz Brocarte to Miguel Gmez Camargo, 24 March
1678, in Carmelo Caballero Fernndez-Rufete, Miguel Gmez Camargo: correspondencia
indita, Anuario Musical 45 (1990): 8990: . . . es que tengo en casa una paisana ma que
me la dej encomendada un beneficiado to suyo de Nuestra Seora de Palacio, de Logroo,
hasta que saliera una buena comunidad. . . . Las habilidades son las que voy a decir: ella toca
excelentsimamente arpa de dos rdenes, sabe contrapuntos sobre bajo y sobre tiple a 4 muy
bien; toca rgano tambin. La voz no es de mucho cuerpo, pero sola es buena para capilla.
No es abultada; [es] diestra en el cantar y en el acompaar.
51. Letter from Martn de Barasoain to Miguel de Irzar, 1 February 1674, in Jos
Lpez-Calo, Corresponsales de Miguel de Irzar (II), 218: . . . La nia tae sus obras de
partidos altos y bajos, as bien de lleno, versos de todos los tonos; acompaa cualquiera cosa
en pasando el papel unas cuantas veces; as bien tae sus pasitos de fantasa, que los saca de
un da para otro, que con el ejercicio y tiempo se adquiere esto. En el arpa tae los sones de
palacio y algunas otras cosas curiosas. Acompaa como en el rgano. De msica canta su
parte, echa sus contrapuntos, conciertos a tres y a cuatro sobre bajo y sobre tiple, y compone
a cinco suelto, que es lo que basta para que ella sea buena taedora.
52. See Ernest T. Ferand, Sodaine and Unexpected Music in the Renaissance,
Musical Quarterly 37 (1951): 1027. A number of the theorists Ferand discusses make the
point that the rules governing the making of counterpoint and composition are, in fact,
the same.
53. See Nassarres discussion of the various kinds of contrapunto in Escuela msica,
Segunda parte, Libro segundo, 140261.
54. See Nassarres discussion of composicin in Escuela msica, Segunda parte, Libro
tercero, 262374.
55. Sor Ana de la Cruz Ribera, Quaderno Principal, in Mara Victoria Trivio, O.S.C.,
ed., Escritoras clarisas espaolas (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1992), 220:
Mandme la obediencia aprender a taer harpa (que el rgano lo aprend de nia) y tam-
bin mand que aprendiese a componer msica (my emphasis). Sor Ana de la Cruz Ribera
was a nun at the Monasterio de Santa Clara at Montilla, the same monastery in which Isabel
Pachecho and her niece, Teresa Manriquethe two nuns to whom Bermudos El arte is
addressedresided.
56. Undated petition (1698) from the nuns at Monasterio de Santa Mara de los ngeles,
Madrid requesting permission to grant dowry waiver to Mara Ibez de Isaba on the basis
of her musical ability (Madrid, Archivo Histrico de Protocolos, Prot. 13384, fol. 1256r): La
abadesa y discretas de este convento de . . . Santa Mara la Real de los ngeles de esta corte
 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain 283

dicen que habiendo dado cuenta a Vuestra Reverendsima del deseo que tenan y necesidad
de recibir una religiosa msica y que tenan noticia de una con grandes habilidades como es
tocar arpa, rgano y violn siendo excelente en todas tres instrumentos y habiendo man-
dado que se examinase, se ejecut asistiendo al examen el apuntador de la Capilla Real . . .
y habiendo ejecutado todo cuanto se le propuso con gran primor y destreza y asegurando
el dicho apuntador de la Capilla Real que en conciencia no deba pedrsele nada por va de
dote por lo insigne que es en sus habilidades.
 Part Five

The Teacher!
 14
Isaac the Teacher: Pedagogy and
Literacy in Florence, ca. 1488
BLAKE WILSON

Twenty-five years ago, the late Howard Mayer Brown wrote about emula-
tion, competition, and homage in Renaissance music. I was surprised to
recently rediscover that his opening pages were essentially about pedagogy;
surprised, because I had remembered the article to be about compositional
process and theories of imitation. But Browns first example of emulation
in fact illustrated a basic principle of pedagogy in that era: it centered on an
inexperienced composers attempt, sometime during the second decade of
the sixteenth century, to write a three-part chanson based on a model. This,
I think, is a familiar experience to those of us who work in historical periods
that predate the rise of formal pedagogical materials: we must turn to the mu-
sic itself as the best evidence for how the craft of composition was taught and
learned. Yet by the time we have moved beyond the scant surviving examples
of student work and are looking at, for example, Isaacs parody of Martinis
Martinella, we are looking at how mature composers practiced their craft, and
not at how young ones learned it.
Our topic, then, is an elusive one, and there are reasons for this. In most
of fifteenth-century Europe, composition was not a formalized craft or pro-
fession, and much of the time the term did not apply very well to what was
actually being performed and heard. One of the most well-known musicians
288 Blake Wilson

TABLE 14.1. Feo Belcaris Genitrice di Dio and its Giustinian models.

Giustinian secular song: Giustinian lauda: Belcari lauda:

Regina del chor mio Regina del cor mio Genitrice di Dio,
non ti par tempo anchora, a te con mente pia chi con buon cor tadora
che mi socchora recorro tutavia, sanza dimora
al mio tormento rio? che me face de te sentire. adempiel buon disio.

O tu, che gi gran tempo O tu che z gran tempo in Tu se fornace ardente di

in dolce focho dolce focho quell foco
mantien lanima mia, tu tien lanima mia, dogni carit santa,
per dio ti prego esti miei ormai te piaa sto mio del Paradiso gaudio, festa
canti un pocho canto un pocho e gioco
audir per chortesia! aldir per cortesia. tuttol ciel per te canta.
O fior di leadria, O lume delanima mia, sottombra di tal pianta
a tte vegno cantando, a ti vegno cantando, trionfa ciascun alma,
mer chiamando mercede chiamando portando palma
al mio tormento rio. chio possa de te gaudere. desto mondo rio.
[cantasi come: Regina del
mio cor]

in fifteenth-century Florence was the improvisatory singer Antonio di Guido

(14181486), who represented the apex of a highly developed craft that was
widely practiced on the Italian peninsula. He certainly created and arranged
his own musico-poetic materials, but in 1449 a contemporary said of him
that he was a master of music and singing . . . but I dont know if he really
knows about musicthat is, written music. A few years earlier, a similar
comment was made about the citys other leading musician, the organist An-
tonio Squarcialupi (14161480), who was equally steeped in oral tradition; he
struggled and ultimately abandoned the eort to set a ballata text in the style
of Binchois, because he doesnt have a head for that sort of thing. We have
not a note of either mans music, for musical notation and the kind of literacy
it presupposes were neither congenial nor relevant to their craft.
The nature of Florentine musical life as understood by most Floren-
tines is revealed even more clearly in the citys widespread devotional singing
practice. Over ninety surviving manuscripts and prints spanning the late
fourteenth to early sixteenth century record thousands of sacred poems
bearing the rubric cantasi come (sing it like . . .), followed by textual inci-
pits of the songs to which they were to be sung. Around 1,800 unique links
between sacred poems and their singing models detail a vast panorama of
music and poetry actually known to and sung by many Florentines. One
 Isaac the Teacher 289

example will suce to show how the process worked in its earlier stages (see
table 14.1).
The first two texts in table 14.1 show the refrain and first stanza of a
ballata grande by the Venetian statesman and poet Leonardo Giustinian (ca.
13831446), set first as a secular song, and then as a Giustinian lauda directly
modeled upon the secular text. This direct relationship is especially evident
in the stanza where identical phrases are employed. The third text is a lauda
by Feo Belcari (14101484), the most important author of devotional texts in
fifteenth-century Florence, and someone familiar with all styles of secular
music then circulating in the city. Genitrice di Dio was composed prior to
1464, and it appears in twenty-two sources bearing the rubric, cantasi come Re-
gina del cor mio. A close look reveals which of Giustinians two Regina poems
is the actual model for Belcaris lauda. The refrain of Genitrice di Dio keeps
much closer to the rhyme scheme of Giustinians secular song than did even
Giustinians own lauda, but Belcaris strophe shows a more complex model-
ing, and looks like a refraction of the analogous secular strophe. Enough
of Giustinians language is retained (for example, key words like foco, canta,
rio) to leave no doubt about a relationship, but Giustinians courtly language
is muted, his imagery recast (Mary herself becomes the source of the foco,
and the fior di leadria is exchanged for a palm), and a troubadours solitary
love-complaint is transformed into a congregational vision of a Palm Sunday
procession unfolding beneath an eternal scene of the Regina coeli (in an indi-
rect allusion to Giustinians first line). Unlike Giustinians lauda, Belcaris is
not a poem created directly from the materials of the original poem, but one
conceived in the refracted light of Giustinians melody. To the extent that a
melody, especially a Giustinian melody conceived in close relationship with its
text, became encoded with certain formal and sonic qualities of that text, a
new text conceived with this melody in mind might freely absorb or embody
elements of the original text. Such a melody, in other words, might assume
something of the function of a model for the lauda text. This proposes a
very dierent creative process from the one we usually imagine, in which a
poem is modeled on another poem, and a passive melody follows suit.
Music is here essential, not ancillary, to the creative process, which ex-
plains in part why oral melody pervades these devotional anthologies. Its
technical features are not autonomous, however; rather they are an out-
growth of the poetic text, which is the real focus of the act of composition.
For Belcari, as for Antonio di Guido, the technical foundation as creator of
songs was in the formal, sonic, and semantic properties of poetic language,
290 Blake Wilson

and the primary site for the creation, inscription, and performance of those
songs was not the written page, but their trained memories. As Paul Gehl
has shown in his study of Florentine grammar schools of the Trecento, for
middleclass Florentines of Belcaris and Antonios generation the pedagogi-
cal basis for these skills was inculcated from youth. From childhood, they
would have learned that the physical book . . . was merely an introduction
to truth, whereas a greater prestige attached to the spiritually internalized,
memorized text.
By the time both Belcari and Antonio di Guido had died in the 1480s,
however, there are signs of a sea change in musical literacy in Florence. Here
one might cite the usual evidence for the increased presence of polyphonic
scores and their composers and singers: the establishment of a polyphonic
chapel in 1438 to serve the citys leading institutions, the gradual (if uneven)
crescendo of northern musicians and, beginning in the late 1470s, the hir-
ing of maestri at some churches and convents to teach polyphonic singing to
novices. There is also the impressive collection of nine extant chansonniers
beginning with the modest mid-century manuscript Vatican City, Urbinas
latinus 1411, and culminating in the monumental Banco rari 229 of the early
1490sthe very collection that inspired Browns meditations on emulation,
competition, and homage.
But very little of this evidence tells us whether polyphonic literacy had
moved much beyond the circles of a few patricians, clerics, and imported
musicians during the previous decades. For this we might note the increase in
polyphonic chapels in the citys confraternities and churches, particularly the
polyphonic choir at Santissima Annunziata, which I believe must have played
a central role in the exposure of young Florentine musicians to polyphonic
repertoire, scores, and performance. This kind of learning by doing, with
its exposure to models for emulation, may have been the most common edu-
cation in composition for some young Florentines, while others progressed
to private lessons with the northern composer/singers who performed in the
choir. This must have been the case for the thirteen-year-old Bartolomeo degli
Organi, who joined the choir in 1487 and rubbed shoulders with a number of
northern musicians. Bartolomeos later works show that he learned the craft
from a master composer, and he in turn became a tutor to young Florentines;
in 1527 he was teaching singing, playing, and three-part counterpoint to the
young son of Niccol Machiavelli. The cantasi come repertoire of the sec-
ond half of the fifteenth century charts a spectacular rise in the penetration
of polyphonic repertoire into the citys oral singing traditions: first French
 Isaac the Teacher 291

TABLE 14.2. Feo Belcaris Poi che l cor and its secular model.

Secular model Belcaris lauda

Poi che vivo sopra la terra Poi che l cor mi stringe e serra
con tam mala e trista sorte, per la crudel pena mia,
Dio volesse che la morte priego te, dolce Maria,
sola me facesse guerra. ponga fine alla mia guerra.

La mia prima ioventute La mia mala gioventute

se consuma a poco a poco: mi consuma a poco a poco,
mer, pace n salute se da te non ho salute
non trovo, posa n loco son condotto in mortal foco:
[] Fammi grazia in questo loco,
ch i non mora per tal via;
Priego te, dolce Maria,
ponga fine alla mia guerra.

chansons in the 1450s and 1460s, then carnival songs beginning in the 1470s,
Neapolitan strambotti in the 1480s, north Italian frottole beginning in the
1490s, then on to the madrigals of Verdelot and Arcadelt in the early six-
teenth century.
The changes these new models brought to this oral tradition reflect the
broader transformation of what many Florentines understood to be music.
Prior to Belcaris death in 1484, he composed the lauda, Poi chel cor mi stringe,
which he modeled upon the secular poem Poi che vivo sopra la terra (see
table 14.2).
This latter text, in fragmentary state, survives in only one source: the
contemporaneous Pixrcourt Chansonnier (Paris, Bibliothque Nationale,
MS f.fr. 15123), where it comes with a three-part setting that in some form
Belcari sought to appropriate through his modeling. When Belcari mod-
eled his earlier lauda on Giustinians Regina del cor mio, the entire process
was governed by an oral tradition: Giustinians poem and music were flexible
templates that served many other lauda texts besides Belcaris, and his lauda
was sung to other melodies as well. It was a process Nino Pirrotta aptly
called the work of transferring tunes and adjusting lines. But in the case
of laude like Poi chel cor that drew on poems with extant polyphonic settings,
the modeling was invariably customizedPoi chel cor was designed specifi-
cally to access the music of Poi che vivo.
The same was true of Non fu mai pena maggiore, a lauda by Belcaris
younger contemporary Francesco dAlbizo. DAlbizos well-known lauda was
292 Blake Wilson

TABLE 14.3. Francesco dAlbizos Non fu mai pena maggiore and its secular model.

Garca lvarez, cancin Francesco dAlbizo, lauda

Estrebillo A:
1. Nunca fu pena mayor
2. Ni tormento tan estrao
3. Que yguale con el dolor
4. Que rreibo del engao
Sestina 1:
Non fu mai pena maggiore
N si aspra n crudele
Quanto mirra, aceto e fele
Ber fu dato al Salvatore

Mudanza B:
5. Y este consosimento
6. Faze mis dias tan tristes
7. En pensar el pensamiento
8. Que por amores, me distes.
Per ciascun peccatore
Pianger debbe amaramente.
Sestina 2:
Stette in croce alto pendente
E di spine coronato

Vuelta A:
9. Y me faze por lo major
10. La muerte con menor dao
11. Que el tormento y el dolor
12. Que sali del engao.
E le mani e pi chiovato
E battuto crudelmente
Sopporto tantumilmente
Per far noi nel ciel salire.
[cantasi come: Nunquam fuit poena major]

modeled upon the most famous of fifteenth-century Spanish songs, Nunca fue
pena mayor, and the two songs are exclusively linked to one another in all ten
cantasi come sources of this lauda. The poem is attributed to Garca lvarez
de Toledo, Duke of Alba; the text was known throughout Spain and Italy,
but survives primarily in music sources with a three-part setting by Johannes
Wreede. Seven of ten sources of the main version are Florentine, and it was
the works particular popularity in Florence that must have led dAlbizo to
model his own work upon it. While dAlbizo retained the octosyllabic lines,
incipit (both lines translate as, Never was there greater pain), and anguished
mood of the original secular song, he chose to cast his vision of Christs pain
on the cross into a pair of sestinas, rather than the three quatrains of the
original (see table 14.3).
In the bipartite form of Wreedes music, the first quatrain (the estrebillo)
was set in the first musical section (A), the second quatrain (the mudanza) to
the second musical section (B), and the third quatrain (the vuelta) to a repeti-
tion of the A section. The twelve lines of dAlbizos two sestinas could be fit
to this music exactly as were the twelve lines of the originals three quatrains,
with the only discomfort being the asymmetrical distribution of the sestinas
 Isaac the Teacher 293

across this musical form (the two sestinas begin in dierent parts of the musi-
cal setting).
Given the Florentine popularity of Wreedes setting, the exclusive cou-
pling of the texts in the cantasi come sources, and the relatively unusual poetic
form dAlbizo was compelled to adopt, it is clear that dAlbizos lauda was
designed specifically to take advantage of Wreedes music. Even clearer in
this case is that in the process of adapting his two sestinas to the tripartite
musico-poetic form of the model, dAlbizo must have had access to the music
in some form in order to understand how the poetry was distributed and
underlaid.
The point of both these examples is to briefly chart the dramatic incur-
sions of non-Florentine polyphonic song into the citys traditional oral song
culture. In contrast to the adaptable aere of Giustinians songs and Florentine
improvisatory formulas for the singing of balli and strambotti, this was music
that no longer circulated easily among multiple texts, and Belcari, DAlbizo,
and their readers now had to know something about the polyphonic language
of their models. This was a situation that increasingly stretched the limits of
oral tradition, but in so doing it still sidestepped a crucial aspect of musical
literacy and pedagogythe notated music.
I would now like to turn to a group of letters that has recently come to
light in the Florentine state archives. These were all written by a young
Florentine named Ambrogio Angeni to an even younger friend, Antonio
da Filicaia, during the 1480s and early 1490s; and thirteen of them, written
during the years 14871489, contain some remarkable passages concerning
their shared passion for music. Before turning to those which are most rel-
evant to the issues of literacy and teaching, a brief summary of the contents
of the letters will provide a bit of context. In 1487, the twenty-two-year-old
Antonio was living in Brittany, in the city of Nantes, where he was engaged
in the cloth business of his old patrician family. It becomes clear in the course
of the letters that he was the patron of a brigata, a Florentine social circle
characteristic of Antonios age group, which in this case nurtured a particular
interest in music and music-related projects. The brigata included a local
composer by the name of Ser Zanobi who was probably also a priest, and
Ambrogio, a middleclass Florentine who possessed a very modest education
and came from a family of stonemasons. He coordinated and facilitated the
brigatas projects, and seems to have functioned as a kind of factotum for An-
tonios interests in Florence. On the Florentine side of the correspondence,
Ambrogio obtained manuscripts, copied them, and mailed them via the fam-
294 Blake Wilson

ilys courier network to Antoniosome of the music was composed by Ser

Zanobi, but most of it was music by nostro Arigo, that is, Heinrich Isaac,
music which Ambrogio variously described as novel, newly composed,
and highly regarded here in Florence. Early in the correspondence, Am-
brogio tells Antonio about a new piece by Isaac, in which I understand he
has demonstrated great fantasia. The work turns out to be one of Isaacs
most well-known extant works, Alla battaglia. It was planned for carnival
of 1488, and since the secrecy surrounding it had been compromised (a friend
obtained a copy of the work), Ambrogio promised Antonio that he would
obtain a copy and send it to him. He did, in fact, lay hold of the manuscript
and begin copying it, but in the end did not send it because, we are told, it
is very long, and in my hasty copying of it I made many errors. Besides, he
went on to report, the work was a novelty that in the end did not please the
connoisseurs (i.e., the Medici).
On the other side, Antonio (whose correspondence has not survived),
was friendly with a group of musicians in Nantes, including a maestro with
whom he studied composition, and from whom he obtained music. Antonio
mailed several three-part secular songs to Ambrogio in Florence, including a
setting of a poem written by Antonio, as well as a setting of the Stabat mater,
and a small book of songs by the Nantes maestro. This latter was acquired by
Antonio, at Ambrogios suggestion, after Antonio had asked his advice about
what he could send to Lorenzo de Medici to please him. When the music was
received by Ambrogio, it was immediately copied, either by him or a trusted
scribe by the name of Ser Bandone. Ser Zanobis opinion of the music was
frequently solicited, but the most telling evaluation of the pieces happened in
a prova, a read-through by singers organized by Ambrogio. In two cases the
singers are specified, and they are Isaac, singing tenor, and two of his profes-
sional colleagues from the Cathedral chapel, the contralto Bartolomeo de
Castris and the soprano Ugo di Parisetto di Champagnia. On several occa-
sions, copies of the music were also sent to Lorenzo de Medici, and to Anto-
nios father Alessandro, a politically prominent Florentine who was married
to a distant relative of Lorenzos. Several times Ambrogio got involved in
trying to recruit musiciansincluding, on one occasion, a composerfrom
Nantes to Florence through Antonio, apparently so that the brigata could
have someone in Florence with whom to collaborate. On another occasion,
after hearing of the defections of two professional northern singers from the
Florentine polyphonic chapel, Ambrogio wrote:
 Isaac the Teacher 295

Let me say that if there was some good bass, tenor, or contralto voice over
there, they would be well-received here in Florence, because Niccol di
Lore has left here. He quit the chapel and made an agreement with the
King of Hungary, and Bartolomeo [de Castris] has done the same. Their
departure without Lorenzos knowledge has displeased him very much. I
tell you all of this so that if I can, I shall help any of your friends.

The musical projects of the brigata were concerned primarily with carni-
val and Lent. During the summer of 1488, Ambrogio sent Antonio his ideas
for a carnival song on the topic of grafters. He then asked Antonio to use his
fantasia to fashion a poem, and then have his composer friend in Nantes set
it to music. Who would imagine that a carnival song could be outsourced to
France! For the Lenten season, besides the imported Stabat mater, the brigata
was also involved with a locally commissioned setting of Lamentations.
From this summary alone it should be clear that Antonio and his young
Florentine colleaguesa brigata which at its core consisted of a merchant, a
priest, and a friend/factotumhad by 1487 attained a remarkable degree of
musical literacy. How had they learned to copy, read, and covet manuscripts
of polyphonic music? We can speculate that Zanobi may have learned this
in a clerical setting, and that Ambrogio through his good connections may
have been instructed by a maestro as was Antonio in Nantes; clearly they
were captivated by the possibilities of a medium that I suspect was still a
novelty among young Florentines. Two documents in particular, however,
shed some light on their pedagogical environment, as well as a likely source
of the brigatas inspiration. Both describe the prova of a three-part piece by
Antonios Nantes composer. The first is described by Ambrogio in a letter of
April 1488:

. . . the person who set your poem to music is very given to delights, because
I tried it out with the singers over herethat is, Arigo, Bartolomeo, and
Ugowho praised it very much. And moreover, Arigo asked of me a favor;
he would like to add a fourth voice to this [music] to make it sweeter and
better. If you and the maestro agree, I would like you to ask the maestro to do
the same [i.e., fare a quattro], and to send me a copy in order to compare [and
see] which one knows [better] how to compose. (Appendix, document 1)

And then Ambrogio wrote in the following September:

In your letters you mentioned Ser Zanobi, that you were making a canzona
for his appraisal. To all [of your letters] I responded and begged forgive-
296 Blake Wilson

ness for my past errors. Then you sent the said canzona, and with it a motet,
which things you sent to Lorenzo [de Medici]. I made a copy right away,
and gave Alessandro the letter so that he could follow your orders, and
likewise I copied [all the pages?], and for now was unable to place [it] in the
hands [of Ser Zanobi] because he was with his father at the fortress in Pisa.
I had to await his return, and during that time I had tried [it] out, and found
it good, and it was much praised, especially by Arigo, who wanted to add
a bass part, and I promised to give it to him. But in order not to [compli-
cate?] everything, I copied it before giving it to him. And then [Ser Zanobi]
returned [and] I did as it was my duty and his desire [ . . . ?], and he thanked
me and showed me that he was very thankful. (Appendix, document 2)

In these two extraordinary passages we see Isaac entering into the proj-
ects of Antonios brigata, a group of young Florentines with a keen interest
in composition. They are musically literateable to copy, read, and evaluate
notated polyphonic musicand they have had access to the music of Isaac
and other northern maestri. Those two directly involved with composition
Antonio and Ser Zanobiwould have already tried their hands at compos-
ing in three parts, the pedagogical foundation still in place in 1527 when
Bartolomeo was teaching Machiavellis son. Having tried the brigatas music
by singing through it with his colleagues, Isaac stepped forward, apparently
unbidden, and said to them, in eect, let me show you how to make these
pieces pi dolce e buono by adding a fourth, bass part. Isaac here appears to
be spontaneously engaged by compositional process with and among the
brigata, and to be acting for their benefit. He cannot have been proprietary
about the actual compositional results; Ambrogios schemeto have the
Nantes composer also fashion a bass part so that the eorts of the two north-
ern maestri could be comparedclearly indicates that he had a copy of Isaacs
added part, and the freedom to pass it around and evaluate it within the
brigata. Although we learn in a subsequent letter that the Nantes composer
did not agree to this, the exercise suggests that we may want to reconsider
the motivation behind some of the many added and si placet parts found
in works from just this period. In any case, Ambrogio cannot have been
proposing an idle game, given the reputation of the composers involved, the
seriousness of the brigatas musical interests, and the particular skill being
demonstrated.
As Banco rari 229 and the other Florentine sources of this period dem-
onstrate, four-voice composition was still an emerging technique in Florence
of the 1480s. The summit of this technique was to be seen and heard in those
 Isaac the Teacher 297

pieces in which all four parts were simultaneously conceived and coordinated,
and each part occupied its own comfortable stratumwhat we have come
to call harmonic composition. Florentines had heard such a piece in 1488
when Alla battaglia was premiered, and Ambrogio may have recognized those
qualities when, after examining the music that had been leaked to a broader
public, he described the piece to Antonio as maravigliosa e singnorile e degna
e idnia e chongiugha (marvelous, refined, worthy, masterful, and well-put-
together). That Alla battaglia was finally judged to be a work not only of
masterful craftsmanship but of excessive novelty, suggests that the technique
it exhibited was relatively new to Florence. Nor can there have been more than
a few composers in the city at this time, and none more prominent than Isaac,
who had attained mastery of such a technique. Is it a coincidence that the first
person to describe harmonic composition was the theorist Pietro Aaron, a
Florentine by birth who was probably living in Florence during Isaacs tenure
there? Aaron cites as his models of the new art Josquin, Obrecht, Isaac, and
Agricola, with whom, he says, I had the greatest friendship and familiarity
in Florence. Of these four, Josquin and Obrecht are not known ever to have
visited Florence (though if they did, they are likely to have sojourned from the
Ferrara court during their early sixteenth-century tenures there), and Agri-
colas residence in Florence was only a matter of months from October 1491
to June 1492. If Florence was where Aaron first learned of the new technique,
then Isaac is likely to have been Aarons primary source for it.
But for inexperienced composers, the logical pedagogical approach to
four-part composition would have been the one demonstrated by Isaac to the
brigata, the extension of an older successive compositional method through
expansion of a three-part texture. A good example of how an added bass can
transform a three-part model is shown in Colinet de Lannoys Cela sans plus, a
work especially well-represented in Florentine chansonniers, and transmitted
in a Ferrarese source with a bass part attributed to Johannes Martini. Marti-
nis added bass does not really layer in more counterpoint, rather it was clearly
designed to fill out triads, expand harmonic dissonance, and generally en-
hance the works euphony. As Isaac clearly understood with his oer to make
the composition of the Nantes maestro pi dolce e buono, this retrofitting of a
bass part to three-part work was the next best way to achieve the harmonic
sweetness that Aaron praised as the hallmark of the modern pieces.
These two vignettes, among the others in Ambrogios letters, present
us with a concept of music and musical literacy that is utterly familiar to
us. But in the Florence of 1488, where oral song traditions and the work of
298 Blake Wilson

transferring tunes and adjusting lines retained their vigor, it is dicult to

appreciate how novel and exciting to young Florentine musicians the world
of polyphonic works and their composers must have seemed. The new pri-
orities of this world were clearly represented in Isaacs purely musical and
compositional response to the prova; his first impulse was to adjust the sound
fabric, which for him was autonomous and invested with its own technical
qualities and possibilities. By 1488 these young Florentines had fully entered
into this new musical literacy. For them, the creative site of music-making had
shifted from memory to the written endeavor, which in turn had made pos-
sible the long-distance collaborations of the brigata. Ambrogios letters bear
witness to the host of new preoccupations and possibilities that came with
this literacy: the vulnerability to loss or premature discovery by others of an
artifact no longer stored in memory; the possibilities for study, revision, and
elaboration of a notated piece that now served as a relatively objective frame
of reference for these activities; an entirely new status attached to the person
and activity of the composer, who is now distinct from the performer; and
new possibilities for the transmission, collecting, and ownership of music. In
Ambrogios first letter to Antonio concerning music (27 December 1487), we
find him awaiting the arrival of a polyphonic manuscript with great desire;
the preoccupation with collecting and copying which is evident in subsequent
letters suggests that the score had become for Ambrogio and his compan-
ions a coveted object that both encoded and revealed new modes of musical
thought and creativity.
Within the fluid social environment of Ambrogios Florence, the ap-
proaches to transmitting and acquiring this new musical literacy were as yet
unformed and unfixed; on the spectrum from self-taught emulation to sus-
tained apprenticeship with a maestro, we unexpectedly find Isaac conducting
ad hoc workshops in four-part composition with a group of young Floren-
tines. Given his evident willingness to engage younger composers, as well as
his fertility and versatility as a composer, it is perhaps no coincidence that
Isaac is the first musician who is consistently and in varied venues perceived
primarily as komponist and compositore. In the course of his initial ten-year
residence in Florence he married a Florentine woman, had close contact with
local musicians, allowed his secular works to circulate freely, and enjoyed the
patronage of the Medici. It seems likely that he exercised a singular influence
on the Florentine musical environment of the late fifteenth century, model-
ing to an emerging generation of native composers not only the novel craft of
composizione but the profession of compositore.
 Isaac the Teacher 299

APPENDIX: LETTERS FROM AMBROGIO ANGENI

TO ANTONIO DI ALESSANDRO DA FILICAIA
(FLORENCE, ARCHIVIO DI STATO, CORPORAZIONI
RELIGIOSE SOPPRESSE DAL GOVERNO FRANCESE,
78 [BADIA FIORENTINA], VOL. 319)

DOCUMENT 1 (FOL. 274R)

APRIL 1488

. . . che chonpose la tua chanzona molto atirato ale diluze, perch fatto
provare a chantori di qua cio a Arigho e Bartolomeo e Ugho la quale lodorno
molto. E pi che Arigho in piaciere mi richielse che la voleva fare aquatt[r]o
sarebe asai pi dolce e buono. Vorei parendo a tte che volendo il ma[e]stro la
facessi fare anchora a lui e di questa me ne mandassi chopia per fare di loro
chonparazione quale pi sa < . . . inlo> chonporne.

DOCUMENT 2 (FOL. 257R)

20 SEPTEMBER 1488

E in tutte alchun motto di Ser Zanobi e che facevi a suo chontemplatione

fare una chanzona. A ttutte diei risposta ischusandomi de chomesi erori. Di
poi mandasti detta chanzona e chon eso uno mottetto, il quale dirizasti a
Lorenzo. Chopialo subito e diei a Alisandro letera a ci che seguissi tuo ordine
e simile chopiai piegho fino a le foglie e non pote per alora dartin mano il
perch [es]sendo lui a Pisa chon suo padre in rocha. Mi fu forza aspetare sua
tornata, in tal tempo fe provare e trovai essere buona, e molto fu lodato, da
Arigo pi forte che voleva farli in chontroabasso, e promisili darle. Ma per non
<empirne?> tutto prima che la dessi in prop[r]ia mano li chopiai. Di poi tor-
nato feci tal quali fu mio debito e suo disederio a lui < . . . an>do di tuo essere
il quale su nostro nuovo ringraziandami mostrando averlo molto a grato.

NOTES
1. Howard Mayer Brown, Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and
Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance, Journal of the American Musicological Society
35 (1982): 142.
2. On the late fifteenth-century appearance of the terms compositio (composizione) and
compositor (compositore), see Rob C. Wegman, From Maker to Composer: Improvisation
and Musical Authorship in the Low Countries, 14501500, Journal of the American Musi-
cological Society 49 (1996): 40979, esp. 43339. Jessie Ann Owenss chapter on Teaching
Composition in Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 14501600 (Oxford:
300 Blake Wilson

Oxford University Press, 1997) reveals how little evidence survives from before 1500 for how
music was taught, and in fact bears out Browns earlier observation that no treatises on free
composition, no books that tell the budding composer precisely how to go about his craft,
were written so early as the first half of the sixteenth century (Emulation, Competition,
and Homage, 910).
3. Michele del Giogante: . . . nobili viro Maestro Antonio di Musica e di canto . . .
quatunque della musica non sappia se n intendente; cited in Lirici toscani del 400, 2 vols.,
ed. Antonio Lanza (Rome: Buolzoni, 1973), 1: 681; trans. and discussed in Blake Wilson,
Cicero Domesticated: the Arte della memoria and the Improvisatory Singers of Renais-
sance Florence, paper delivered to the national meeting of the American Musicological
Society in Columbus, Ohio, in 2002.
4. Ugo della Stufa: . . . poi che vego non na il capo a mparare quella; cited, translated,
and discussed in James Haar, The Vatican Manuscript Urb. Lat. 1411: An Undervalued
Source, in Manoscritti de polifonia nel Quattrocento europeo, Atti del Convegno internazio-
nale de studi, Trent, 1819 October 2002, ed. Marco Gozzi (Trent: Provincia Autonomo
di Trento, 2004), 8286; for a more recent assessment of Squarcialupi, see James Haar
and John Ndas, Antonio Squarcialupi: Man and Myth, Early Music History 25 (2006):
10568.
5. See my database and accompanying study of this repertoire, Singing Poetry in Renais-
sance Florence: The Cantasi Come Tradition ca. 13751550 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2009).
6. Giustinians secular text is edited in Berthold Wiese, Poesie edite ed inedite di Lio-
nardo Giustiniani (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1883), 22528; his lauda text is edited in
Francesco Luisi, Laudario giustinianeo, 2 vols. (Venice: Fondazione Levi, 1983), 1: 28586.
Belcaris text is edited in Gustavo C. Galletti, Laude spirituali di Feo Belcari [et al.] comprese
nelle quattro pi antiche raccolte (Florence: Molini e Cecchi, 1863), 8.
7. Nino Pirrotta invokes the priority of melody in the poets creative process when he
imagines Giustinian, troubadour-like, composing his poems not by aligning the syllables
on paper but by trying, with the help of his voice and his instrument, to adjust the rhythm
of the words to that of the melodic phrases and to match the rhymes to the cadences of the
music. See Ricercare and Variations on O rosa bella, in Music and Culture in Italy from the
Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 147.
8. The Florentine improvisatory singing culture is discussed at greater length in my
Cicero Domesticated.
9. Paul F. Gehl, A Moral Art: Grammar, Society, and Culture in Trecento Florence (Ith-
aca: Cornell University Press, 1993), chap. 1.
10. Ibid., 28.
11. On this development, see Frank DAccone, The Singers of San Giovanni in Flor-
ence during the 15th Century, Journal of the American Musicological Society 14 (1961):
30758; and Some Neglected Composers in the Florentine Chapels, ca. 14751525, Viator
1 (1970): 26388. On the development of polyphonic chapels in the Florentine confraterni-
ties, see Blake Wilson, Music and Merchants: the Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
12. For an edition and study of this source see Howard Mayer Brown, A Florentine
Chansonnier from the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Cen-
trale, MS Banco rari 229, 2 vols., Monuments of Renaissance Music 7 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983). The other eight chansonniers are: Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbiblio-
thek, Kupferstichkabinett, MS 78.C.28 (early 1470s?); Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Cen-
trale, Magliabechiano XIX.176 (late 1470s); Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 2356 (ca.
1480); Paris, Bibliothque Nationale, f.fr. MS 15123 (early to mid 1480s); Florence, Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale, Magliabechiano XIX.178 (early 1490s); Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana, MS Cappella Giulia XIII.27 (ca. 14921494); and Bologna, Museo Internazion-
 Isaac the Teacher 301

ale, MS Q17 (mid 1490s). On the dating of these sources see David Fallows, A Catalogue
of Polyphonic Songs, 14151480 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 638; but on the
recent redating of the Berlin MS, see Sean Gallagher, The Berlin Chansonnier and French
Song in Florence, 14501490: A New Dating and Its Implications, Journal of Musicology
24 (2007): 33964.
13. In 14781479, the duties at Santissima Annunziata of Arnolfo Giliardi, a north-
erner appointed as a cathedral singer in 1473, included instruction of the convents novices in
figural music (i.e., the principles of reading, writing, and performing polyphony); DAccone,
Some Neglected Composers, 265. One of the early Florentine polyphonists, Alessandro
Coppini, entered the priesthood at Santissima Annunziata in 1475, and probably studied
with Giliardi at this time. For a fuller biography of Giliardi, see Die Musik in Geschichte
und Gegenwart, 2nd edition, s.v. Greban, Arnoul. A teacher of figural music to novices is
also recorded at Santo Spirito in 1486 and 1488; DAccone, Some Neglected Composers,
276. By 1436, the laudesi company of Orsanmichele began hiring such a teacher; Wilson,
Music and Merchants, 8486.
14.
4. Frank DAccone, Alessandro Coppini and Bartolomeo degli Organi: Two Floren-
tine Composers of the Renaissance, Analecta Musicologica 4 (1967): 53. Baccios musical
education is also addressed in Richard Trexler, Newly Identified Works by Bartolomeo
degli Organi in the MS Bologna Q17, Journal of the American Musicological Society 23 (1970):
10718. On composing in three parts, see also Bonnie Blackburn, On Compositional Pro-
cess in the Fifteenth Century, Journal of the American Musicological Society 40 (1987):
21084, esp. 259, 276.
15. The three-part setting of Poi che vivo is found on fols. 98v99r of the Pixrcourt
Chansonnier, and is edited in Edward Pease, An Edition of the Pixrcourt Manuscript:
Paris Bibliothque Nationale, Fonds. Fr. 15123 (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1959), 28386.
Belcaris text is in Galletti, Laude spirituali, 53. On the polyphonic song, see also Fallows,
Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 556.
16. Regina del cor mio was a cantasi come model for nine other laude, including Antonio
di Guidos Donna in cui venne il sole, while Belcaris Genitrice di Dio was sung to the music
of two other secular songs by Giustinian.
17. Nino Pirrotta, Ricercare and Variations on O Rosa Bella, in Music and Culture in
Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1984), 147.
18. See Fallows, Catalogue of Polyphonic Song, 62425 (where a number of reworkings
are cited, as well), 725 (for a brief biographical sketch of Wreede, a northern singer in the
employ of the Duke of Alba in 1476). The music is edited and briefly discussed in Leeman
Perkins, Music in the Age of the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1999), 49294. DAlbizos
lauda text is edited in Galletti, Laude spirituali, 7576.
19. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Corporazione Religiose soppresse dal Governo Fran-
cese, 78 (Badia Fiorentina), vol. 319 (hereafter BF 319). For a more extended discussion of
these and other Angeni letters, see my Heinrich Isaac Among the Florentines, Journal of
Musicology 23 (2006): 97152.
20. On Florentine youth brigades, see Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Flor-
ence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 22533, 38799; and, with particular relevance to
the time and musical activities of Antonios brigata, William F. Prizer, Reading Carnival:
the Creation of a Florentine Carnival Song, Early Music History 23 (2004): 185252, esp.
19293.
21. BF 319, fol. 232r [July 1489]: . . . in deta schatola e fuse mandato uno quade[r]nucio
di pi nuove dArigho e molta stimate qui.
22. Ibid., fol. 282v (29 December 1487): . . . nuova alchuna chonposizione dArigho,
ove intendo v dimostro in essa avere gran fantaxia . . .
302 Blake Wilson

23. On this piece, see Tim McGee, Alla battaglia: Music and Ceremony in Fifteenth-
Century Florence, Journal of the American Musicological Society 36 (1983): 299302; my
Heinrich Isaac Among the Florentines presents revisions to McGees thesis, and further
analysis and discussion of the work.
24. BF 319, fol. 211v (5 February 1487 [1488]): . . . perch chosa lungha, e la fretta di
chopiarla fatto molti erori . . .
25. The Florentine careers of these singers and those mentioned below are documented
in DAccone, Singers of San Giovanni, passim.
26. Dizionario biografico degli italiani, s.v. Filicaia, Alessandro da.
27. BF 319, fol. 258v [20 September 1488]: Avisandoti che quando chost fusti alchuna
voce di chontroabaso buona, e di chontralto e tenoriste arebono qui buono richapito. Il per-
ch Nicholo di Loro s di qui partito, lasciato la chapella ed esi achoncio chon Re dUngeria,
e simile Bartolomeo che molto dispiaciuto Lorenzo la loro partita sanza sua saputa. Tutto
a tuo aviso perch posendo far bene alchuno tuo amicho posi.
28. See Stephen Self, The Si Placet Repertoire of 14801530, Recent Researches in Mu-
sic of the Renaissance 106 (Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, 1996).
29. Blackburn, On Compositional Process, 211.
30. BF 319, fol. 211v.
31. Blackburn, On Compositional Process, 21219.
32. Edited with bass part by Helen Hewitt, Ottaviano Petrucci: Canti B, Number
Cinquanta, Monuments of Renaissance Music 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1967), no. 16. The relationship of this piece to shifting compositional processes in late fif-
teenth-century Florence is discussed in greater depth in my Heinrich Isaac Among the
Florentines.
33. It is tempting to regard as closely related Ambrogios use of the term congiuga (well
put together) to describe Alla battaglia, and Aarons use (or at least that of his Latin trans-
lator, Giovanni Antonio Flaminio) of concinniorem (more fitly joined together, appro-
priately arranged) to describe harmonic composition. On the latter, see Blackburn, On
Compositional Process, 21314.
34. Documents referring to Isaac as komponist and compositore are discussed in Frank
DAccone, Heinrich Isaac in Florence: New and Unpublished Documents, Musical Quar-
terly 49 (1963): 477; Martin Staehelin, Die Messen Heinrich Isaacs, 3 vols. (Bern: Paul Haupt,
[1978]), 2: 19; and Rob C. Wegman, From Maker to Composer, 43436, 465. The Isaac of
Ambrogios letterscongenial and ever ready to composeappears to be confirmed later in
the famous report of Duke Ercole dEstes talent scout, Gian de Artiganova, who described
Isaac as good-natured and companionable, and he will compose new works more often
[than Josquin]; cited in Lewis Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1984), 204.
 15
Zacconi as Teacher:
A Pedagogical Style
in Words and Deeds&
RUSSELL E. MURRAY, JR.

The act of teaching is an ephemeral one, in many ways held for only a moment
by teacher and student. While it can be witnessed, and its contents and meth-
odology can be chronicled, in the end it evaporates with the passage of time.
The challenge of recovering such an act from the past is thus a formidable one.
And yet, as the studies in this volume ably demonstrate, we do have indirect ac-
cess to these moments through various types of sources, objects, and images. By
investigating the materials used and the manner of their employment, we can,
to a limited degree, recreate the conditions of this teaching and gain insight into
the teachers and their students. The goal, of course, is elusive. Jon R. Snyder
discusses this in the context of his study of the Renaissance dialogue. He notes
that in these works, what can be called the scene of speaking is a mimetic
fictionwe are not witnessing an actual conversation, but a fictional one that
mirrors both the subject and the form. Yet careful reading of these texts can
provide real insight into both ideas and epistemology. Renaissance treatises,
like the other evidence presented in this volume, can likewise oer us similar
insight into the scene of teachingboth its practice and its philosophy.
304 Russell E. Murray, Jr.

The focus of this essay is the overarching concept of pedagogical phi-

losophythat is to say, how a teacher viewed his craft and how he saw his
approach as distinct from that of others. I will explore this by focusing on the
teaching of Ludovico Zacconi (15551627), and specifically on his manner of
teaching counterpoint as outlined in the second part of his Prattica di musica.
Zacconi (perhaps more than most) seemed interested inand articulated
clearlywhat he thought constituted good and bad teaching, and by word
and deed put that pedagogical philosophy into practice.
Before looking in detail at Zacconis text, it will be helpful to explore the
role of such texts in our understanding of pedagogy. Musical treatises can tell
us many things about musical learning. First and foremost, these works tell
us from their tables of contents something of the boundaries and the focus
of learning. They also tell us something about the context of learning, and
perhaps even the location. Take, as an initial example, Gioseo Zarlinos
Istitutioni harmoniche (1558). Here is the classic textbook, written in the form
of a disquisition. Examples are illustrative, carefully crafted or chosen, and
designed to be perused at leisure. It is encyclopedic, and one can infer that
Zarlino assumed that this knowledge would be gained by the reader through
long, solitary study.
Other treatises suggest dierent approaches to learning. Giovanni Maria
Artusis Arte del contraponto (1586) takes Gioseo Zarlinos huge work and
reduces it in tabular form as an outline of the materialalmost like modern
lecture notes. Similarly, Valerio Bonas Regole del contraponto et compositione
(1595) is briefly collected from diverse authors. Its purpose is to present a
condensed version of others workin Bonas words, to provide food that
the stomach can digest. In many ways, these two works are really formal-
ized versions of the Renaissance commonplace book. Other sorts of teaching
materials (broadsides, manuals, anthologies) provide dierent approaches
to learning and inhabit dierent cultural strata. While all of these seem to
promise a shortcut to learning, the material presented and the mode of learn-
ing are little dierent from what is found in their larger cousins.
These examples generally represent a passive approach to learning and
teaching as a whole. The student learns by reading and digesting the mate-
rial, and the author/teachers job is to put the material in appropriate form.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the various theoretical dialogues of
the time. The outward conceit of a dialogue, of course, is that we are listening
in on a conversation, which allows to us to watch the process of teaching and
learning as it unfolds. The student attempts the challenges that the master
 Zacconi as Teacher 305

presents and his successes (and even his failures) provide object lessons for
the reader. Even the settings of dialogues provide information about musi-
cal learning, while at the same time setting a distinctive tone. For example,
Thomas Morleys A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke (1597) is
set as a chance encounter between a learned musician and a student seeking
to learn music as an important social skill. The setting is casual, and there
is a clear demarcation of student and teacher, as befits the basic subjects be-
ing discussed.
Pietro Pontios two treatisesboth dialoguesgo beyond the pragmatic
approach of Morley to articulate a larger pedagogical approach. The Ragiona-
mento (1588) is a beginners introduction to practical music and, like Morleys
text, is set as a chance encounter between a master and an eager student
as the former waits to meet with the renowned ridotto of Mario Bevilacqua
(to whom the volume is dedicated). Pontios Dialogo (1595), on the other
hand, deals with more advanced and intellectual issues; here the setting is a
conversation in the Veronese Accademia Filarmonica (to which this volume,
in turn, is dedicated). One of the most famous members of the Accademia,
Count Alessandro Bevilacqua, leads two Veronese noblemen, Giordano Sar-
ego and Marco Verit, in their discussions. In the Dialogo we overhear an
elevated conversation among equals, and from our privileged vantage point
we can listen and learn.
It is easy to assume that such conversations are reliable sources for look-
ing at the act of teaching, but these glimpses into the teaching world need to
be taken with a grain of salt. For example, if we believe Morley, the student
Philomathes is the epitome of the diligent self-starter. After only the most
basic instruction, he set himself

diligently to apply my pricksong book that in a manner I did no other thing

but sing, practising to skip from one key to another, from flat to sharp, from
sharp to flat, from any one place in the scale to another, so that there was no
song so hard but I would venture upon it, no Mood nor Proportion so strange
but I would go through and sing perfectly before I left it; and in the end I
came to such perfection that I might have been my brothers master . . .

Morley here evokes the diligent student; in the Ragionamento, on the

other hand, we might believe the author to be the infallible teacher, for seldom
is even the most dicult concept explained without the student respond-
ing, I truly see it to be as you say, or I have understood these reasons of
yours very well, and believe in truth that it is so. While much of this can be
306 Russell E. Murray, Jr.

explained in terms of the norms of dialogic writing, such exchanges also can
be viewed as encouragement to the putative student, in eect saying, if you
apply yourself in this manner, you, too, may succeed.
Other writers provide an insight into the realities of actual teaching,
and even how students reacted to the instruction they received. They can
provide us with an understanding of who was taught, and what they learned.
According to Adrianus Petit Coclico, for example, Josquin believed in limit-
ing the teaching of composition to those who were drawn to this delightful
art by a special natural impulse. We know as well that there were accepted
approaches to the daily routines of teaching, and that, as always, students
reacted negatively to change. Pontios real-life students, for example, com-
plained bitterly about the fact that he spent little time in one-on-one instruc-
tion, and that he didnt teach like the former maestro.
Such examples, especially those from dialogues, oer a seemingly direct
view into the world of teaching. Zacconis treatise oers another, perhaps
sidelong, glimpse into this world of musical pedagogyone that is less ideal-
ized than the writings of the dialogist, and perhaps more reflective of actual
practice.
In his Prattica, Zacconi takes on a conversational toneone in which
the author famously comments on his contemporaries. He likewise turns
a critical eye toward teaching and teachers, and pointedly draws attention to
what he views as bad pedagogy. For example, while lauding the methods of
his own teacher, Andrea Gabrieli, he complains about teachers who do not
guide their students, who instead teach a few principles of counterpoint,
and then give the student complete liberty so that, as musicians are wont to
say, they simply string notes together. Zacconi also complains about those
who, in presenting a problem to the student, badger him by saying things
such as, What would you do over these four notes? Think carefully in your
mind what you want to do here, and let me hear it before you write any notes
on the cartella . . .
These sorts of comments on teaching provide a unique and natural view
of the process that may be more valuable than the unnaturally perfect world
of the dialogue. But beyond the description of the behavior of other teachers,
Zacconi provides us clues to his own pedagogical agenda in the materials that
he provides his readers, and the way in which they are utilized. This is perhaps
most evident in his discussion of counterpoint. As will be shown, Zacconi
provides a distinctive approach, but one that proves to be firmly grounded in
the musical realities of the day.
 Zacconi as Teacher 307

Contrapunto was an important part of Renaissance musical life and en-

compassed a wide range of practice. On one hand, it was a technique for
creating simple polyphony (usually liturgical), either in improvised or writ-
ten form. In this sense, it was primarily a performance practice, a skill to be
learned. On the other hand, it was a technique of intervallic manipulation,
used in the composition of formal polyphony. Here it became a discipline to
be mastered step by step on the cartella or on the written page. The fullest
realization of this is in the species method of counterpoint that eventually
became the staple of musical instruction. However, much of the pedagogy of
this time inhabited a middle ground, and that is the use of sung counterpoint
as a transitional stage leading to composition. Pietro Pontio expresses this
view in his Ragionamento when he states that counterpoint is the beginning
and the road that leads to composition, since from there come later many
beautiful and varied compositions. Zacconi echoes that ideal in his intro-
duction, where he suggests that his intended reader is a young musician who
wishes to become a composera task that can only be accomplished by way
of counterpoint: I am moved to create this work for no other reason than
to shed light and help those eager youths who take great delight and joy in
practicing music and singing it, and who desire to learn to become perfect
composers. And this will not be done except by way of counterpoint.
Zacconis definition of basic counterpoint reflects this performance-ori-
ented approach, defining it as a melody above a subject with the following
important elements:

1) The subject must be complete and unchanged (i.e., a borrowed chant).

2) The subject will preferably be in even note values.
3) The counterpoint will serve as a decoration to the chant.

That Zacconi viewed counterpoint through a performative lens is also set

out in his introduction to the volume. Here he points to composer Costanzo
Porta as a model for the reader to aspire to, describing him as among the
most rare of modern contrapuntists. Although Zacconi discusses a num-
ber of types of counterpoint (including multiple performers singing on the
book), he concentrates in this treatise on the simple two-voice style.
In many Renaissance treatises, instruction in counterpoint typically
begins with a detailed discussion of what interval can pass to what other
interval, and how. Turning back to Pontios Ragionamento, we see a good
example of this as he begins his discussion with a systematic investigation of
each interval. His strategy is straightforward: defining the interval and then
308 Russell E. Murray, Jr.

EXAMPLE 15.1. Pietro Pontio, Ragionamento di musica (Parma, 1588), 53.

Passage from a minor sixth to a fifth.

stating how many passages it hasthat is, to what other interval it can pass.
His introduction to the minor sixth is typical:

The minor sixth, which comprises three sesquioctave tones and two semi-
tones, will have seven passages. The first will be made from the sixth to the
fifth, the second from the sixth to the third, the third from the sixth to the
octave, the fourth from the sixth to the unison, the fifth from the sixth to
the tenth, the sixth from the sixth to the second, and the seventh from the
sixth to the fourth.

For each passage there is an example, such as the one for the passage
from the minor sixth to a fifth on the strong beat (see example 15.1). This
process is repeated for all the intervals. Each example uses a dierent tenor,
demonstrating a mix of canto plano and canto figurato. Some are clearly in the
style of cantus firmus-based counterpoint, while others follow more the style
of the equal-voice composed duo. In short, they exhibit that ground between
counterpoint and composition and provide the widest possible variety.
Pontio asks the student to learn by written example, and seems to con-
centrate on the internalization of discrete principles by exposure to good and
bad examples. In this, his approach echoes Zarlino. He deals with abstract
musical techniques, and his method suggests that the student would first
learn these rules, and then learn to apply them in other situations.
If we look again at example 15.1 with this in mind, we see that there is
really only one crucial thing to learnthe passage marked with asterisks.
The remainder is superfluous, and it is hard to tell whether the examples are
intended to be sung or are merely there for study. The latter seems the most
probable. As sung examples, they are too short to provide real experience for
the contrapuntist. Instead, they seem to serve the needs of the contrapuntist
as budding composer by teaching discrete rules and putting them in the con-
text of a longer passage.
Zacconis approach is markedly dierent. Like Pontio, he begins with
definitions of counterpoint (though in much more detail) and a brief discus-
 Zacconi as Teacher 309

EXAMPLE 15.2. Ludovico Zacconi, Prattica di musica . . . seconda parte

(Venice, 1622), 108. Counterpoints made from four Kyries.

sion of consonance and dissonance. However, his discussion of intervals is

more generalized, listing allowable movements (e.g., moving from a perfect
to an imperfect consonance by contrary or oblique motion) or prohibited
movements (e.g., consecutive perfect intervals). The discussion of intervals is
followed by a discussion of dierent types of counterpoint and some examples
of specific principles to follow. This leads into the most extensive section,
which begins with a brief discussion of how to learn counterpoint, focusing
on three principles:
310 Russell E. Murray, Jr.

1) Learn to use consonances and dissonances.

2) Use the same cantus firmus for each new counterpoint.
3) Never create counterpoints without obligations.

Here, then, is the heart of his pedagogical programa systematic ap-

proach in which increasingly sophisticated obligations are used to create
counterpoints over a common cantus firmus that would serve as a model for
the students own work. This is followed by a formidable collection of exam-
ples that follow the last two dicta, especially the use of obligations. What is
interesting is that the obligations mainly consist of fitting well-known musical
incipits over a chant tenor. The scope of this endeavor can be appreciated by
referring to table 15.1, which lists the various contrapuntal combinations. The
compilation is at once encyclopedic and problematic. Many of the examples
contain errors in typesetting, and others produce counterpoints that are,
at best, awkward. In general, the examples are more valuable as a guide to a
technique than as a satisfying realization of that principle.
In chapter 53 of the Prattica, for example, Zacconi begins a lengthy process
of demonstrating various obligations on a single cantus firmus, the incipit to the
Salve Regina. He begins with expected obligations such as the hexachord and
the notes of the cantus firmus in various types of imitation. In chapter 61, how-
ever, he takes an interesting turn, and shows the reader how to sing dierent
plainchants over the Salve Regina, beginning with four dierent Kyriesthe
Kyrie de glApostoli (IV), Kyrie della Domenicale (XI), Kyrie della Madonna
(IX), and Kyrie de morti (Requiem). Example 15.2 shows these counterpoints.
This begins a stream of such combinative counterpoints, concluding with
a demonstration in chapter 66 of the four Marian antiphons combined with
each other in sixteen dierent permutations. Figure 15.1 shows the first four
of these counterpoints. Here the melodies for Regina Caeli, Alma Redempto-
ris Mater, and Ave Regina Caelorum are to be sung individually against the
tenor, which is taken from Salve Regina. The final counterpoint on the page
combines the incipits of all three to be sung against the Salve. The other twelve
counterpoints presented in this section repeat this process, rotating the chant
used as the cantus firmus (see table 15.1).
Chapter 67 presents a culmination of this process. Here, Zacconi com-
bines abstract patterns, chant incipits, and madrigal incipits to create a coun-
terpoint, all against the drone of church bells as imitated by the tenor (see
figure 15.2). In the next chapter he repeats the process with a two-note Cucu
as the cantus firmus in the upper voice.
 Zacconi as Teacher 311

TABLE 15.1. Ludovico Zacconis counterpoints on Salve Regina.

Chapter 53: On the obligation to sing continually ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.
Above the subject
Below the subject
Chapter 54: On the obligation, over the same subject, to sing continually la, sol, fa, mi, re, ut.
Above the subject
Below the subject
Chapter 55: On the liberty that contrapuntists may take with the rules because of obligations.
Chapter 56: On the obligation to continually sing the same [notes as the subject].
Above the subject
Below the subject
Chapter 57: How in the same manner this can be done in other ways, and with the same part.
After one beat
After two beats
After three beats
After four beats
Chapter 58: On the obligation of singing the same notes as the subject in counterpoint, in reverse.
The subject in retrograde
The subject in retrograde inversion
The subject in inversion
Singing la sol fa re mi
Singing la sol fa re mi in inversion
Chapter 59: On the obligation of singing continually la, sol, la, re, which are the first four
notes of the subject.
Chapter 60: On the counterpoint to be made on the same subject of the Salve Regina by
means of the proportion of inequality of the measure as well as the saltarello.
Chapter 61: On obligating oneself, or being obligated to sing in counterpoint over this canto
fermo the first Kyrie of the Apostles, of Domenica, of the Madonna, and for the dead.
Counterpoints made from:
Kyrie IV
Kyrie XI
Kyrie IX
Kyrie from the Requiem Mass
Chapter 62: On some other obligations more famous and unusual.
Counterpoints made from:
Ad caenam Agni providi
Ave maris stella
Iste confessor
Veni creator spiritus
(continued on next page)
312 Russell E. Murray, Jr.

TABLE 15.1. (continued)

Jesu nostra redemptio

Exsultet caelum
Te Deum laudamus
Magnificat
Requiem aeternam
Chapter 63: On two and more subjects in a single obligation.
Counterpoints made from:
Da pacem and Requiem aeternam
Gaudeamus omnes, Salva nos, Veni sponsa Christi, Asperges me, Libera me Domine,
and Salve sancta Parens
The incipits of the Magnificat in the festal tones
Chapter 64: On obligations pertaining to the subjects of figured song.
A counterpoint made from the incipits of Vestiva i colli, Ancor che col partire, Io son
ferito ahi lasso, Nasce la pena mia, Il bianco e dolce cigno, and Liquide perle Amor
Chapter 65: Reminders and specific advice about the obligations of fugues that can be given
to a contrapuntist, or that he himself wishes to choose.
Real and tonal answers
Chapter 66: A universal demonstration of how, and by exchange, four subjects are placed on
or combined with the first subject.
Counterpoints made from:
Regina caeli, Alma Redemptoris Mater, Ave Regina caelorum, and the three
combined on the subject Salve Regina
Regina caeli, Ave Regina caelorum, Salve Regina, and the three combined on the
subject Alma Redemptoris Mater
Salve Regina, Alma Redemptoris Mater, Regina caeli, and the three combined on
the subject Ave Regina caelorum
Ave Regina caelorum, Alma Redemptoris Mater, Salve Regina, and the three
combined on the subject Regina Caeli
Chapter 67: How, over the continuous sounding of the bell, placing it in one voice in place of
the canto fermo so that it sings the same note, and in a continuous voice, and on this one can
make all the obligations that a man could wish.
Counterpoints made from:
The hexachord, Salve Regina, and a saltarello
Kyrie IV and Kyrie IX
Kyrie XI, the Kyrie from the Requiem Mass, and Liquide perle Amor.
Gaudeamus omnes, Salva nos, Libera me Domine, Vestiva i colli, and Ave maris stella
Ad coenam Agni providi, Veni creator spiritus, Iste confessor, Veni sponsa Christi, and
Anchor che col partire
Magnificat on the 1st, 6th, 8th, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 7th tones
Jesu nostra redemptio, Exsultet caelum, Te Deum laudamus, and Io son ferito ahi lasso
Requiem aeternam, Salve sancta Parens, Il bianco e dolce cigno
 Zacconi as Teacher 313

Chapter 68: A Catholic protestation, necessary and specific, concerning some combinations
and obligations that I wish to choose, in order to make my ideas clear to the student.
Counterpoints on the subject Cucu made from:
The hexachord, Te Deum laudamus, Veni sponsa Christi, and Alma Redemptoris
Mater
Kyrie IX and Kyrie XI
Salve Regina, Salva nos, and Gaudeamus omnes
Magnificat on the 8th tone and Asperges me
Regina caeli, Exsultet caelum, Ave Regina caelorum, and Requiem aeternam
Kyrie IV, Salve sancta Parens, Da pacem, and Requiem aeternam
Ave maris stella, Ancor che col partire, Nasce la pena mia, and Libera me Domine
Liquide perle Amor, Kyrie from the Requiem Mass, and Veni creator spiritus

Counterpoints on the subject O spazza camin made from:

The hexachord, Requiem aeternam, Te Deum laudamus, and Magnificat on the 5th
tone
Salve Regina
Ave Regina caelorum, the Kyrie of the Requiem Mass, and Gaudeamus omnes
Regina caeli, Da pacem, and Requiem aeternam
Veni creator spiritus, Jesu nostra redemptio, and Exsultet caelum
Il bianco e dolce cigno, Salva nos, and Liquide perle Amor
Alma Redemptoris Mater
Sancta Parens and Ad coenam Agni
Kyrie IV
Kyrie XI and Nasce la pena mia
Ave maris stella, and Requiem aeternam
Libera me Domine and Kyrie IX
Iste confessor, Veni sponsa Christi, and Asperges me
Magnificat in the 8th tone

What do these examples tell us about larger pedagogical principles, and

what exactly is Zacconi attempting to accomplish with them? While other
theorists explored the use of obligations, they did so in a very dierent way.
Typically, these obligations served the purpose of creating challenges and
diculties for the advanced student, such as invertible counterpoint, counter-
point limited to specific kinds of intervals or rhythmic passages, etc. They are
often the culmination of contrapuntal study, and tied closely to the techniques
of canon. Here the intent seems just the opposite; that is, Zacconi makes
the act of singing a counterpoint an easier matter, and thereby allows the
student to take what he knows and apply it in practice in order to internalize
a technique.
FIGURE 15.1. Ludovico Zacconi, Prattica di musica . . . seconda parte (Venice, 1622), 115
(Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton
University Library). Four counterpoints made from the Marian antiphons.
FIGURE 15.2. Ludovico Zacconi, Prattica di musica . . . seconda parte (Venice, 1622), 120
(Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton
University Library). Four counterpoints made on il suono della Campana.
316 Russell E. Murray, Jr.

EXAMPLE 15.3. Ludovico Zacconi, Prattica di musica . . . seconda parte

(Venice, 1622), 112. Counterpoint made from Da pacem and Requiem
aeternam incipits.

With that in mind, we can look at one of Zacconis simplest examples

(see example 15.3). As can be seen, the opening notes of two chants, Da pacem
and the introit of the Requiem Mass, are repeated over and over in alterna-
tion to form a counterpoint. Zacconi hints at the pedagogical underpinnings
of this example when he addresses the question of whether the words of his
examples should be sung, especially when the sacred and secular are mixed.
I dont pretend to adopt the words, he said, but simply those musical notes
on which these melodies are based, and simply to employ them so that the
melodies and types may be heard.
The words, then, serve a distinct purpose. The notes of the quoted melo-
dies are obligations, just like ut, re, mi, or any other abstract subject. In the
present example, they are simply rising and falling figures, and the exercise
could aptly be labeled How to create a counterpoint using only upper and
lower neighbor tones. But the intervals are from well-known chant incipits
and the words serve as a quick reference to what would have been well-known
melodic patterns. They are not abstract combinations of notes; rather, they
are internalized melodic formulas, and using them frees the singer from
searching for notes, instead allowing him to focus on the skill of moving from
consonance to consonance.
Looking again at the first counterpoint in example 15.2, we can imagine
how easily the notes of the well-known Kyrie would have flowed from the
young singer. In this we recognize techniquesused by many in teaching
(and performing) jazz improvisationof quoting snippets of popular tunes
where they fit a specific portion of the changes being played.
 Zacconi as Teacher 317

In these examples of simple counterpoint, Zacconi satisfies his core prin-

ciples. A single cantus firmus is used, over which increasingly sophisticated
obligations are placed, all designed to allow the student to make a connection
between the melodic movement of the tenor and a wide variety of melodic
formulas in the counterpoint. It is an active approach to learning, easily rep-
licated by the reader of the treatise, and amenable to easy expansion. We can
look at it and see teaching (or maybe more accurately, learning) in action.

Having made the case that Zacconi articulates a coherent and eective strat-
egy for the teaching of counterpoint, a few nagging questions remain. Zac-
conis work exists in the semi-vacuum of the dilettante. Nobody would doubt
the credentials of any of the other theorists cited in this chapter: Zarlino,
Pontio, and Morley; their accomplishments as teachers, writers and compos-
ers place them in a position of authority. But Zacconi, with an unfocused
musical career, no identifiable students, and no musical compositions hasas
James Haar has noted in his essaylittle to place him in this echelon.
Likewise, the pedagogical ecacy of the exercises stand in stark contrast
to the aesthetic poverty they often represent. In many cases the constant
repetition of an idea, the incessant use of quotation, and awkward rhythms
needed to shoehorn the melodies into the patterns of the tenor might ini-
tially make us doubt that these pieces reflected anything approaching ac-
tual practice. But two musical sources testify to the authenticity of this
practice. The first is Costanzo Festas many counterpoints on La Spagna.
That these pieces had a pedagogical purpose is clear in a letter from Festa to
Filippo Strozzi, in which the composer writes that it would be well to include
his counterpoints in a print of Hymns and Magnificats because sono bone per
imparare a cantar a contrapunto a componare et a sonar di tutti li strumenti.
Festas counterpoints explore various techniques, and many use vari-
ous obligations to create at least one of the voices. But of immediate interest
are counterpoints 9395 and counterpoint 115, all of which use paraphrased
plainchant for one of the voices. Also of interest is number 98, in which
Festa quotes the incipits of ten madrigals from Arcadelts Primo Libro. While
less dense in quotation (and more elegant in composition), it is of a piece with
Zacconis combinatorial examples.
Festas examples testify to the widespread nature of the practice of using
well-known melodies to generate musical material for contrapuntal writing,
but they are carefully worked out artistic echoes of this practice and reflect the
trained composers craft, not the practice of Zacconis audience. For a more
realistic picture of that worldone in which some contrapuntists advanced
318 Russell E. Murray, Jr.

EXAMPLE 15.4. Adriano Banchieri, excerpt from Festino nella sera del giovedi grasso
avanti cena (Venice, 1608). Contrappunto bestiale alla mente.

no farther than singing small melodic fragments over and over in a vain at-
tempt to create a real counterpoint, we need do no more than consider Adriano
Banchieris famous (and popularly misunderstood) Contrappunto bestiale (see
example 15.4).
While this short piece can be taken at face value as a lighthearted musical
joke, it is worth noting from the title that the animals are singing alla mente,
and the parts that they sing are little more than the simplest of obligations.
The owls part, for example, might be notated by Zacconi as with the obliga-
tion of singing always sol and la in alternation. Likewise, the dogs baying
always on the note fa is just as regular and mindless. The cats part is, far
and away, the most complicated, having the widest variety of pitches and
most complicated patterns. Perhaps he is the most advanced of the students.
But it is the cuckoos part that is the most relevant. He must take his simple
obligation always to sing la fa and move its rhythmic placement to match
the changing notes of the cantus firmus. This is not at all dierent from the
Da pacem and Requiem incipits used in example 15.3.
It seems that Banchieris piece, then, also serves as a gentle parody of the
animalistic sounds emanating from the kind of exercises proposed by Zac-
coni and, we can assume, other maestri of the period.
 Zacconi as Teacher 319

Having taken the measure of his technique, we must address the question
of Zacconi as teacher and the nature of his audience. Perhaps Zacconi can
best be viewed as something of a musical seeker. Often dissatisfied with the
formal instruction he had received, his central experiences (as related in his
many anecdotes) seem to have revolved around briefand often chance
encounters with those he saw as inspired teachers in one-on-one settings.
In large measure, the seeker label might apply to his intended audience as
well. His agenda seems clear: others may provide information for the student,
but without the active approach to learning that he outlines, the student will
be frustrated. In many ways, I believe that he saw himself as a mentor and
advisoraugmenting through pedagogy the easily obtained general knowl-
edge of the contrapuntist.
Further, he seems to be driven by the desire to share these secrets that
other contrapuntists appear to have kept to themselves, thus providing to a
larger readership a substitute for those chance encounters. Returning once
more to his introductory chapter, we can see that he hints at this secretive
nature, noting that many musicians seem to prefer taking their knowledge to
the grave rather than writing it down, and that those still living keep these
secrets in their pockets, refusing to share them with others, even if they are
only of limited use. One of these secretive musici was Costanzo Porta who,
according to Zacconi, once commented to a student (speaking of Zacconis
first Prattica of 1592) that for a thousand ducats I would not have given out
the secrets that this Brother has. Whether true or not, the story highlights
Zacconis self-image as a teller of truths. Moreover, Portas valuation of this in
financial terms portrays the information that Zacconi is imparting as some-
thing of both value and validity.
Zacconis self-defined role, then, is that of pedagogical medium, and he
gives every indication (and here I am inclined to trust him) that what he ad-
vocates reflects the pedagogical style of others, notably a group of musicians
associated with Venice.
He tells this story of his own teacher, Andrea Gabrieli:

There was one student (not to name names) who had made many counter-
points on a cantus firmus. Being sick of it, he asked the Master to change
it for him. The Master glared at him disapprovingly and said Change
what? Pay attention and youll see that you have learned nothing . . . Take
the same lesson for another two months, and every day make all that you
can on it. Two months passed. The student returned and said Please,
sir, change this lesson, I dont know what more I can do with it. To this
320 Russell E. Murray, Jr.

EXAMPLE 15.5. Ludovico Zacconi, Prattica di musica . . . seconda parte

(Venice, 1622), 84. Example for making counterpoint alla mente.

[Gabrieli] replied Oh you poor little thing, you havent even begun. And
with that he picked up a pen and made four or five fugues on it, each more
beautiful than the first.

From this, we can surely credit Gabrieli for Zacconis insistence that the
student work with only one cantus firmus. We can likewise find the roots of his
approach to obligations in his observations of a lesser-known master, Ippolito
Baccusi (ca. 15501609), whose first post was at San Marco during the tenure
of Zarlino, and perhaps that of Cipriano de Rore. Having had an unsatisfac-
tory experience with another teacher, Zacconi was amazed to see a young
student of Baccusis create a counterpoint alla mente with ease. If we look at
the example Zacconi uses to illustrate this (see example 15.5), we can see that
it is nothing more than a series of stock figures, beginning at the third, fifth,
or octave of each note of the cantus firmus. The student does little more than
sight each beginning interval, and then apply the figures. It is a short step to
the use of well-known chants as substitutes for those abstract figures.
What stands out about the examples discussed here is an active and prag-
matic approach to teaching. Zacconis method, as outlined in his writing, is
experiential, and more importantly, each of his examples provides a model of
a process that the student can then replicate. In fact, Zacconi closes his section
on counterpoint by telling the student that his job is to experiment, and if he
makes a mistake, to try it again. He illustrates this by telling another story,
this one concerning his teacher Adrian Willaert improvising a third line to
a duo. Having made a mistake, he made no apologies or justifications and
simply did it over saying: I got it right this time. Zacconis final advice to
his students is to take the ideas they have found in this section and, as he puts
it, to play around with the ideas.
 Zacconi as Teacher 321

Through his writings, Zacconi creates a window through which we can

infer some of the pedagogical practices of the masters of his era. It may be that
rather than watching Zacconi as teacher in action, what we really are watch-
ing is his teachers, and perhaps their teachers as well. Through his casual
words he describes the act of teaching, and through his written examples he
allows us to take part in that learning.

NOTES
1. Jon R. Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian
Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).
2. Ludovico Zacconi, Prattica di musica seconda parte. Divisa, e distinta in quattro
libri (Venice: Alessandro Vicenti, 1622; repr. Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1983). The full title
makes clear that he will deal with both written (in cartella) and improvised (alla mente)
counterpoint sopra Canti Fermi, as well as demonstrating come si faccino i Contrapunti
doppii dobligo, e con consequenti.
3. Gioseo Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche (Venice: Francesco Senese, 1558).
4. For a deeper look at this sort of approach within the context of the emerging book
culture, see Cristle Collins Judd, Reading Aaron Reading Petrucci, Early Music History
14 (1995): 12152. As Anthony Grafton points out in his contribution to the present volume
(chap. 8), this was a standard approach to learning at this time.
5. Giovani Maria Artusi, Larte del contraponto ridotta in tavole (Venice: Giacomo
Vincenzi & Ricardo Amadino, 1586; repr. Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1980). In his introduc-
tion, Artusi makes clear his debt to Zarlino above all others.
6. . . . per dargli cibo, chil suo stomaco possi diggerire . . . Valerio Bona, Regole del
contraponto, et compositione brevemente raccolte da diversi auttori (Casale: Bernardo Grasso,
1595), sig. A 2. For a discussion of the treatise, see Russell E. Murray, Jr., The Voice of the
Composer: Theory and Practice in the Works of Pietro Pontio (Ph.D. diss., University of North
Texas, 1989), 394405.
7. Jessie Ann Owenss contribution to the present volume (chap. 17) explores this
largely neglected aspect of musical texts. The interaction of form, function, and cultural
status can provide a nexus for our understanding of the teaching and learning process.
8. The tradition of the musical dialogue in the Renaissance is a long one. The rise in in-
terest in this ancient form coincided with the general humanist interest in the poetics of the
dialogue. For an extended exploration of this, see Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking.
9. The idea of the dialogue as a place where error can safely be introduced was an
important element in contemporary theory about dialogues. Though often deployed in
defense of satiric dialogues, these transgressions can be seen as a safe way to introduce
controversial subjects. But here they serve the more prosaic function of strengthening an
argument or presenting an object lesson. See Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking, chap. 3,
esp. 101106, for his discussion of Sperone Speronis defense of error.
10. Thomas Morley, A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke, set downe in
the form of dialogue . . . (London: Peter Short, 1597), ed. R. Alec Harman (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1952). The same conceit can be seen in Thoinot Arbeaus Orchsographie (Langres:
Jehan Des Prs, 1588).
11. Pietro Pontio, Ragionamento di musica (Parma: Viotto, 1588); facs. edition, ed.
Suzanne Clercx (Kassel: Brenreiter, 1959). Bevilacquas ridotto, alongside the Accademia
Filarmonica of Verona, served as an important site for musical performance and discus-
322 Russell E. Murray, Jr.

sion. Among the musicians who dedicated works to Mario and the ridotta (and presumably
visited), were Claudio Merulo, Philippe de Monte, Luca Marenzio, Orazio Vecchi, Orlando
di Lasso, Girolamo della Casa, and Maddalena Casulana.
12. Pietro Pontio, Dialogo del R. M. Don Pietro Pontio parmigiano ove si tratta della
theorica, e prattica di musica et anco si mostra la diversit de contrapunti, & canoni (Parma:
Viotto, 1595), electronic edition, ed. Frans Wiering and Russell E. Murray, Jr., at Thesaurus
Musicarum Italicarum (http://euromusicology.cs.uu.nl/, 2002).
13. Alessandro was Marios nephew, and Verit was also an important musical person-
age with a number of musical collections dedicated to him (including Monteverdis first
book of madrigals in 1587). This august company was more appropriate for a book that dealt
with matters such as the invention of music, aesthetics, and complex canonic writing. For
a discussion of the aesthetic dimensions, see my The Theorist as Critical Listener: Pietro
Pontios Nine Cause di variet, Theoria 10 (2003): 1958.
14. Morley, A plaine and easie introduction, 140.
15. Andreas Petit Coclico, Compendium musices (Nuremburg, 1552; facs. edition, Kas-
sel: Brenreiter, 1954), sig. F2v. Cited and translated in John Milsom, Analysing Josquin,
in Richard Sherr, ed., The Josquin Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 431.
Jeery Dean has, in a series of papers, explored the question of Coclicos veracity. In any
event, true or not, the statement stands as a valid perspective of the time.
16. See my On the Teaching Duties of the Maestro di Cappella in Sixteenth-Century
Italy: The Processo against Pietro Pontio, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 14 (1988):
11528. The material comes from a processo that was instituted against Pontio when he
was Maestro at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, and eventually led to his
dismissal.
17. Most famously, Zacconi commented on the strengths and weaknesses of noted
composers. See James Haar, A Sixteenth-Century Attempt at Music Criticism, Journal of
the American Musicological Society 36 (1983): 191209.
18. . . . insegnando di Contrapunto Scolari; mostratoli un poco de principii, li lasci-
ano per longo tempo in libert, come fra Musici si dice per proverbio dinfilzar note . . .
(Zacconi, Prattica, 83).
19. Che cosa fareste tu sopra queste quattro note; pensa bene nella tua mente quello
che tu vi vuoi fare, e poi famelo sentire senza che qu in Cartella tu me ne facci mostra e nota
alcuna (Zacconi, Prattica, 84). The use of the cartella (an erasable wax or slate tablet) by
students and professionals is explored in Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work: The Craft
of Musical Composition, 14501600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 74107.
20. . . . il principio, & la strada di poter giungere al componere; perche indi ne vengano
poi tante belle, & cosi variate compositioni . . . (Pontio, Ragionamento, 22).
21. . . . di non essermi mosso compor questopera; se non per dar lume, & aiutar quei
volonterosi gioveni, che pratticando la Musica, & in cantarla ne pigliano gran gusto, e piace-
re, bramano di scolari, diventar perfetti compositori. E perche questo non si f se no per via
di contrapunto . . . (Zacconi, Prattica, 5). The question of his intended audience (or indeed
that of any theorist of the time) is a dicult one and will be addressed somewhat later in
this essay. I am indebted to Honey Meconi for highlighting this issue in her comments to
the spoken version of this article. Her other insightful comments have helped enormously
in the revisions for the present version.
22. Zacconi, Prattica, 5758.
23. Zacconi, Prattica, 5. As will be seen, his acknowledged mastery did not save him from
Zacconis opprobrium. Porta himself made a clear case for the distinction between composer
and contrapuntist in a letter to Carlo Borromeo recommending his student Giulio Cesare
Gabuzzi for the position of maestro di cappella in Milan: . . . e Contrapuntista da prova, Com-
pone bennissimo . . . [e] ben dotato duna bellissima voce de contralto et canta gratiosamente
(Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Lettere a San Carlo, F. 63 inf., fols. 398398v).
 Zacconi as Teacher 323

24. La Sesta minore, quale contiene in se tre Toni Sesquiottavi, & due semitoni, havr
sette passaggi; Il primo far dalla Sesta alla Quinta; Il secondo dalla Sesta alla Terza, Il
terzo dalla Sesta alla Ottava; Il quarto dalla Sesta allUnisono; Il quinto dalla Sesta alla
Decima; Il sesto dalla Sesta alla Seconda, & il settimo dalla Sesta alla Quarta (Pontio,
Ragionamento, 53).
25. Zacconi, Prattica, 83. The use of obligations was a standard aspect of teaching and
composition. This ranged from writing counterpoint without specific intervals to the exclu-
sive use of repeated patterns (such as the hexachord) in the newly composed voice.
26. . . . io non pretendo di adattar le parole . . . ma purramente quelle note Musicali,
con le quali esse cose sono state formate e fatte, e per puramente farne sentir i mede[se]mi
aeri e maniere (Zacconi, Prattica, 121). The tradition of using musical devices like the bell
or birdsong in chansons and other vocal works was a longstanding one, and this connection
to the secular world is at the heart of Zacconis seemingly defensive tangent. But while the
rationale for this statement was indeed a defensea Protesto Catholicoof mixing the
sacred and secular in his examples, the final sentence is a telling description of the powerful
association of words and music among the generally educated musical population.
27. See Costanzo Festa, Counterpoints on a Cantus Firmus, ed. Richard J. Agee, Recent
Researches in the Music of the Renaissance 107 (Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, 1997).
28. Richard J. Agee, Costanzo Festas Gradus ad Parnassum, Early Music History 15
(1996): 1.
29. Counterpoint no. 93 makes use of Ave maris stella (LU 1259); no. 94 uses Ave regina
caelorum (LU 1864); no. 95 uses Da pacem Domine (LU 1867); and no. 115 uses Ut queant laxis
(LU 1504). Each diers in the closeness of the paraphrase to the original, and in the degree
to which the chant melody permeates the other voices.
30. . . . vedendo che fin qu molti Musici pi che eccellenti morendo, quel tanto che
di raro sapeano, pi tosto si sono voluto portarlo in sepoltura, che lasciarlo in scrittura ad
ognuno che ne lhavesse voluto havere. Et i vivi chancor fr di noi dimorano, altresi tenen-
dosi in ci l meglio in saccoccia per ancor loro sorsi far il simile, se ne servano solamente
in alcune occasioni, senza che la communanza de scolari nhabbino punto da participare
(Zacconi, Prattica, 5).
31. Per mille Ducati, io non haverei dato fuoir i secreti ch dato questo Frate (ibid).
32. . . . ve nera uno senza nominarlo chavendo fatto molti Contrapunti sopra un
Canto fermo, essendone stuo, adimand al Mastro che gli lo mutasse; & il Mastro guar-
dandolo con occhio dispiacevole li disse; che mutare? attendi l che tu non sai niente . . .
tenne la medema lettione da circa ancora due mesi; ogni d facendovi qualche cosa sopra,
e passato li due mesi, torn dirgli: di gratia Sig. Mastro mutatemi questo Canto fermo,
chio non s pi che me vi fare; ed egli. poveretto te, non hai ancora incominciato; e tut-
to in un tempo pigliando la pena, vi form sotto da quattro cinque fughe, una pi bella
dellaltra . . . (Zacconi, Prattica, 83).
33. Zacconi, Prattica, 84. According to Zacconi, the incident took place in 1583, when
Baccusi was serving in Mantua. At the time, Zacconi was studying with an unnamed mae-
stro in Pavia.
34. It should be noted that unlike the other exercises shown here, which are generally
in partbook format, this example is in score formatmaking it easier for visual study as
opposed to performance. See Owens, Composers at Work, 3448, for a discussion of various
formats and their uses.
35. . . . che la prima volta allimproviso facendove [Willaert] qualche cosa contra le
buone osservate regole, facendolo ricantar un altra volta, dicea, a che lo stava ascoltare, hora
io lho fatta bene (Zacconi, Prattica, 127).
36. E cos giuocandovi scherzare con le sudette maniere (Zacconi, Prattica, 128).
 16
The Good Maestro: Pietro Cerone
on the Pedagogical Relationship'
GARY TOWNE

To scholars of the historical development of musical pedagogy, it is not nec-

essary to apologize for the arcane fascination exerted by the music theory of
a bygone age, nor for the forbidding dryness of its texts, nor for the obscu-
rity of its authors. It is a dicult task to extract concrete information about
pedagogy from this thicket of dense texts. Yet even within the erudite circle
of these authors, there is at least one whose innovative consideration of the
psychology of pedagogy has hitherto gone unremarked. It is time to ask why
so little attention has been paid to the forward-looking pedagogical concerns
that are sprinkled throughout book one of Pietro Cerones El melopeo y mae-
stro (The composer and teacher). These chapters discuss general psychological
and relational issues of pedagogy, rather than concrete methods for musical
instruction. As such, though they may comprise one of Cerones most origi-
nal contributions in the work, the relevant chapters have escaped notice by
scholars delving for musical issues in this very large treatise.
Several aspects of Cerone and El melopeo might explain scholars previous
dismissal of this source. First, Cerones massive tome overwhelms even histo-
rians of music theory such that no complete translation has been published.
It is, moreover, heavily derivativeas has been repeatedly noted.
Second, Cerones travels may have contributed to his relative ignominy.
He was born in Bergamo in 1566 (Gallo suggests 1561), something of a back-
 The Good Maestro 325

water in his time, although he has not yet been found in the records of any
musical institution there. He later served in the Abruzzi chapel, beginning in
1584, and then at the cathedral of Oristano, Sardinia in 1588. Following a pil-
grimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1592, he became a chaplain at the Span-
ish court. In 1604, he became chapel-master at La Santissima Annunziata in
Naples, and from 1610 until his death in 1625, he served in the viceregal chapel
there. This odyssey over the length and breadth of Italy, on to Sardinia and
Spain, and ultimately to Naples leaves Cerone appearing rootless and lacking
in either Spanish or Italian advocates.
Third, little was written about Cerone in his own time, and he was in-
creasingly censured by later authors, despite the popularity of his text for
musical instruction in Spain well into the eighteenth century. His book was
also widely used in Spanish colonies in the Americas and probably elsewhere.
The widespread adoption of Cerones text and its perpetuation of an increas-
ingly antique musical style may explain the mounting vilification of it in later
years, beginning with the libels of Antonio Eximeno y Pujades in 1701 and
continuing over the generations, to culminate with the criticism of Felipe
Pedrell in 1920. But Cerones reputation has been rehabilitated by twentieth-
century critics who have actually read his book, revealing an author who was
exhaustive in his search for comprehensiveness, and who had a clear eye for
the utility of his musical teachings.
It is this utilitarian approach that contributed to the books longevity
and perhaps to its denigrationbecause Cerone was not content just to ex-
plain the principles of musical notation, construction, and style. His is not
merely a text for the maker of music (el melopeo), but also for the teacher of
music (el maestro). He says:

What first inspired me to use such a title was that the towns and villages of
Spain lack teachers of music, and the realization that, for the greater part,
the few that do exist do not know what is necessary . . . The method used
is that as if a teacher were teaching in person, namely, with ample reasons,
simple words, examples from legends and histories, pleasing sayings, serious
statements, [appropriate analogies], generous digressions, familiar concepts,
and finally, with so many varieties that [it] all looks like a new Italian salad.
This method of writing is suitable in that the novice scholar understands
and learns more proficiently what is being stated.

To Enrique Arias, this quotation illustrates the reasons for the stylistic pe-
culiarities of El melopeo. Its literary approach, even by the standards of the time,
is cumbersome. Cerones approach to his subject is an extreme example of the
326 Gary Towne

commonplace-book technique of taking notes on every work that is read for

digestion and regurgitation. In his aspiration for comprehensiveness, Cerone
sorts, reorders, reproduces, reiterates, and amplifies material from musical,
philosophical, theological, and historical textsmaterial culled over decades
of careful study. The authors technique is a paradigm of the scholarship of its
era, and its expansiveness suits Cerones goal: to treat the whole art and process
of the teaching of music, beginning to end. In twenty-two books, beginning
with the moral background of music and its pedagogical corollaries, Cerone
proceeded to explain the fundamentals of music, along with all the subjects a
chapel-master needed to master, in logical sequence: plainchant, polyphony,
counterpoint, composition, the use of musical instruments, and other musical
considerations, ending with a book on musical enigmas and their resolutions.
The first book of the work, Moral Ornaments and HarmoniesCero-
nes discussion of moral backgroundis our subject. Elaborating on a tradi-
tion only touched on by earlier Spanish authors, the first book treats of the
formation of the musician as a person (man in Cerone), presenting advice on
his artistic and moral education and enunciating the rules of his deportment
in society. The lack of precedents for this portion of the book sets it apart
as Cerones largest original contribution. The sections philosophical rather
than technical content permits him considerable liberty in choice of topics.
Like many contemporaries, he veers between subjects like a tacking ship, from
an introductory apologia to discussions of talent, virtue, diligence, the evils of
drink, professional etiquette, adulation, slander, and Italian jingoism. These
discussions are sprinkled among those chapters that deal with the pedagogi-
cal relationship between master and student. Some of these latter chapters
deal with issues so commonplace in modern thought that they require little
explanation. These include setting an example by the teachers own study of
a variety of books and musical works, a discussion of which composers are
worthy of imitating, and a warning against plagiarism.
Other chapters show a deeper consideration of the interactionalmost
the psychologybetween student and teacher, including the approach to
teaching, the obligations and qualities of a good maestro de canto, the criteria
for choosing such a maestro, the appropriate disciplining of students, and the
benefits of correction. Later, Cerone cautions against assuming the mere
appearance of learning in search of renown, and he explores the choice of an
appropriate audience. He emphasizes that a master must honor his singers,
as students of a good master should revere him; and in concluding, Cerone
exhorts both singers and masters to know themselves.
 The Good Maestro 327

Like the rest of Cerones magnum opus, this first book oers a surfeit
of citations of venerable authorities. The dierence is that in place of the
musicians and theorists cited in later books, this introduction on moral har-
monies profusely cites biblical and classical sources. Although the result is
somewhat sententious at times, Cerones admonitions convey an innovative
sensitivity to pedagogy with important ramifications for student learning.
In the chapters under discussion, Cerone pairs his admonitions regarding
the character and deportment of both master and students, with practical
concerns. In chapter 26, he speaks:

Of the obligation which Masters of singing have, to be very vigilant, so that

their students do not adopt any defective manner.
The Master who is complete and perfect in everything must not only be
diligent that his student learn the lesson, but also must be wary, that the
student not adopt any bad habit in singing through lack of caution. The
Master must be the guide of the student; he must be the sta with which
the student sustains himself in his first steps; and for this, it is necessary
that the Master be without defect, since the child will learn to walk badly
if the guide wavers . . . One should not attempt to persuade the Master
that just good advice suces for instruction of his students, because it also
requires relevant examples; since the new singers dont attend to what the
Master says but to how and what he does in singing or playing: . . . With
merit and reason one may attribute to the Master the bad practices and
defects committed by the student: . . .

In chapter 27, Cerone advises:

That one needs to select good Masters.

Among the greatest principles which appear to me to be necessary for
bringing yourself quickly to perfection, and one of the most important, is
that you choose at the beginning good Masters, who are (if possible) both
theoreticians and practitioners, so that they can demonstrate in a finished
manner whatever they want, and set you on the road to becoming a perfect
musician.

It is also important that the master be experienced.

Learn it very well, and keep your eyes open lest you be embarrassed by
persons who know little and presume much, people who try to be Masters
before being students. It is not proper that one who lacks experience should
teach; and one who understands little can teach little, but he who has been
working a long time can teach much; . . . You should try at the beginning to
328 Gary Towne

find a good Master who will show you with a good manner what is relevant:
because if the beginner avails himself of Masters who are not fit, nor good,
nor patient in teaching, nor in setting before their students every point
of perfection; before he [the Master] upsets, benumbs and irritates them
with his manner of teaching, it is no dierent from that master builder or
carpenter, who foolishly and crazily uses a ruler and level so crooked and
untrue that he twists and destroys the whole work rather than decorating
and placing it with the greatest grace and perfection . . .

In chapter 28, Cerone delves more deeply into the actual character of the
master.

What attributes a good Master must possess.

In spite of having advised you that in order to perfect oneself most
quickly, it is necessary that at the beginning you choose Masters who sepa-
rate Theory and Practice, now in the following chapter, the main argument
is that one must find a good and complete Master. By this you can choose
the best Master, that he have much knowledge, show signs of great experi-
ence in understanding how to teach, and additionally have great patience
with students. These three are the most substantial qualities required of a
good Master: . . . One would not call anyone a good Master [just] for being
graceful in singing, for having a good voice, for being the chapel-masters
brother, for being a good clerk, good grammarian, good rhetorician, confi-
dant of the bishop, friend of count, marquess, or duke, or for other qualities
of this sort: . . . But one would only call good the one who has knowledge,
patience, and experience in teaching: . . . After diligence, what one must
consider in the election of a Master is that he has a method of teaching that
is secure and sequential, not leaping about and disorganized nor filled with a
thousand vanities and fooleries . . . It suits a Master to show grace and style
in teaching. Facility in the sciences and liberal arts consists of knowing what
helps others understand. I have known good Masters who, without being
particularly good singers, nor exquisite composers, make, by their good in-
dustry and appearance, their students very perfect and skillful singers . . . so
one recognizes if he understands teaching and if he teaches well, when those
of his school have improved and students improve daily . . .

In chapters 29 and 30, Cerone explores a more dicult topicdiscipline.

Of the things that demonstrate that a Master is good for teaching; of the
method he should adopt in chastising the students, where succinctly, he
praises humility and rebukes pride.
Nothing adorns more an excellent Musician and a perfect Master
than being [both] conversational and silent. Usually, those who are good
 The Good Maestro 329

Masters understand these two conditionsthat with courtesy to all, they

give satisfactory answers to the questions they are asked, and that, however
much or little they teach, they teach it with a pleasant disposition. They
speak with much familiarity and grace as they strengthen their students;
they repeat the same rule in dierent ways, for they know that repeat-
ing it is of benefit to the one who is receiving instruction; outside these
discourses, you will find them calm and quiet, and without desire for any
superfluous word.

He continues: There are youth[s] who learn without the whip, and oth-
ers who, if it is not there for them, will profit nothing. The Masters anger is
very often appropriate when the occasions merit and demand it, always taking
account of the time, the place, and the quality of the student.
The author then cites exhaustively several biblical passages often col-
loquially summarized as, Spare the rod and spoil the child. These quotes,
noted below, come from the Old Testament book of Proverbs (13.24, 23.13),
and the (for many Protestants, apocryphal) book of Ecclesiasticus (7.25, 30.1,
and 33.24/25). Cerone continues similarly, but then tempers his recommenda-
tions with a discussion of the appropriate use of clemency, augmenting these
biblical authorities with quotes attributed to Plutarch, Seneca, Democritus,
Cyrus the Persian, the Emperor Titus, and Saint Augustine.
I say that whoever holds a legitimate mandate must become angry with
the negligences and excuses of his students, and reprimand them when he
is wont to do so, sometimes with hard words, and sometimes with bland
ones, or another time with other punishment, as long as it does not pass the
bounds of honest chastisement, given that he is Master and not a tormenter.
To do otherwise would not merit the name of Master.

Continuing his citations from biblical, classical, and early Christian au-
thors, Cerone tempers harshness with his advocacy of judgment and moder-
ation.
Beyond what I say, the Emperor Titus said that to show mercy was the
right arm, and to chastise misdeeds the left one; thus it is a more glorious
thing to encourage virtues than to chastise vices, because in the first, love
shines forth, and in the second, fear. And this conforms with what was
said by Saint Augustinethat he who rules must be greatly loved as well
as feared, but that he who rules, rules better by love than by fear. The good
Master has to be with his students like a father with his children, and not
like any father, but a most benign and loving father, so that it must appear
above all that he rebukes and chastises for love rather than for hatred. And
330 Gary Towne

it is more than certain, that men are more inspired by aection than by
fear; and they stir themselves to great things and excel in excellent virtue
more for the hope of a future reward than for dread of chastisement. We
hold testimony of this from Titus Livius, who says, Rome increased its
empire more by clemency than by victories. It can be advised that correc-
tion must be exercised with much prudence, taking account (as I say) of the
nature of each person: . . . From this, Masters should learn a lesson, being
advised that the admonition of a Master should be dispassionate and born
of love, it being unnecessary to use bitter and sanguinarious words rather
than sweet and cheerful ones; especially when one sees that his student has
tried everything possible to learn, and that [the Master] doesnt excuse him
his work to do him honor, having always in mind the very ancient adage,
Good shepherds clip the sheep, not skin them . . .
There are other students (as I say) who are rough, ill-bred, of a harder
nature, who will never perform well unless you go after them with the
whip in hand: . . . Finally, there are others who are incorrigible and proud,
who do not take account of what is said any more than a deaf person, nor
fear the rod any more than an ass; with whom the poor Master loses all his
patience at once. These it is necessary to abandon to save his time, com-
mending them every day to God, that he might hold them in his blessed
hand, etc.

Cerone also quotes Cicero, noting that anger in punishment is absolutely

prohibited, for it corrupts the soul. In another quote, he observes: For
without a doubt, as the reverend father Gaspar Astete says, anger bewilders
men, destroys humility, banishes charity, dries up virtues, smothers good
intentions, disturbs calm, destroys peace, shortens life, consumes health, un-
does counsel, distempers reason, and disarrays all the harmony and virtues
of the soul.
Cerone concludes chapter 29 with a discussion of the virtue of measured
and well-considered speech. In his advocacy of professional restraint in
discipline, Cerone supports both positive and negative reinforcement, but
only as appropriate for each student. The masters actions must be calm and
deliberate and his speech ample for instruction, but otherwise reserved and
well-considered. Cerone expands further on virtues and modes of discipline
in chapter 30:
Of how the correction of the Master is very beneficial, and ought to be so.
The new student does not abandon good principles on seeing that his
Master corrects him at times with asperity, accompanying from time to
time the words with blows, for in so doing, he performs the oce of a good
 The Good Maestro 331

Master, apprising [the student] that not all those who use blandishments
are friends, nor all those who rebuke are enemies; and that love with sever-
ity is better than deception with mildness. . . .
Just as honey placed upon a wound burns and hurts it, but has a sweet
and beneficial eect, so the correction of the Master placed upon the fault,
although it stings and hurts, withal is sweet and beneficial . . .
A fool spurns his fathers correction, but to take a reproof to heart
shows good sense.
But to be most secure, the heedful student tries not to give his Master
occasion to come to these ends; . . . The heedful student must take pleasure
in the salutary counsels of his Master, in his honest and discreet correction,
in his mild and prudent admonitions, in his beneficial and unique advice,
and in his well-presented and well-worn examples, as much the venerable
ones as the modern.
For this, it is very necessary that the Master understand very well the
way to correct and chastise, and knows that the rod of chastisement arises
from the root of a love of justice, and not from hatred of the person . . .
But whatever manner of correction one chooses, with whatever type of
person, one must always be diligent that the one rebuked remains subdued
and consoled, [and is] not left totally disconsolate and aicted. . . . So
likewise, those who correct a student conscientiously should not later shun
him after making him bitter and rough, but with sweet conversations and
smooth words, they should pacify and encourage him . . .
So the wise and prudent Master, sometimes with gentleness, benevo-
lence and grace, enfolding and delighting the student, attracts him to
goodness and honesty; other times, when it is necessary, with chastise-
ment, rebuke, bitter words, and the freedom to speak with authority, goes
straight to the heart, telling him the truth though it be distasteful to him;
and at other times correcting him with words and actions together, holding
the truth of honor and reputation ever before the student.

Cerones exploration of discipline reveals a sensitive (for its time) per-

spective on the appropriate use of corporal punishment and its eects and
benefits for both the master and the student, with an emphasis on the impor-
tance of tempering harshness with gentle diplomacy and a balanced approach
to chastisement with consideration of the individual student. Although some
aspects of this approach seem extreme for our era, on the whole it belies the
false image of ill-considered, unremitting brutality in the school discipline
of earlier times.
As noted above, chapters 31, 32, and 33 deal with issues so well enshrined
in modern theories of education that they require little explanation. These
332 Gary Towne

include setting an example by the teachers own study of a variety of books

and musical works, and a discussion of which composers are worthy of imitat-
ing. Passing over these chapters, we arrive at chapter 34:

How, in addition to following good Masters and books, it is necessary to

consult and teach always the opinion of others.
Even more than having the arts and treatises of music, and more than
being comprehensively instructed by a good theoretical and practical
Maestro, it appears to me that if one wishes to profit by these things as
quickly as possible, it also suits one to maintain friendships with other
Music Masters, and sometimes to confer with them about their studies and
diculties, for they can show more in a quarter of an hour with their living
words than books with dead ones can in a whole day, and clearer and more
distinctly.

Chapter 34, as can be seen in the preceding quote, oers beneficial advice
for both the master, who can profit from consultation with colleagues; and
for the student, who, having already chosen a good master to study with,
should also avail himself of opportunities to study with others. As an ex-
ample, Cerone goes on to cite the example of Palestrinanot his works, but
rather what Cerone divines or takes for granted of the Romans biography
including the composers (otherwise undocumented) travels to study with
great composers and extraordinary eorts to procure, translate, and study
musical treatises. The author cites no sources for his biographical assertions,
but rather seems to have relied on assumptions or oral traditions arising from
Palestrinas reputation, papal recognition, and distinguished service in Ro-
man churches. On a more personal note, Cerone relates his own profit from
his four years of association with Jan van Veere in the Abruzzi.

I know all this . . . from experience, especially from having had a very
strong friendship with Juan Verio [of Flemish origin and chapel-master,
who was in the service of Milady Marguerite of Austria who is in heaven.
With whom, over the period of four years that I was employed in the Du-
cal City of Abruzzo in service of the Chapel of the Diocese, I pursued my
studies, and] when I was in doubt, I asked his opinion. In any extremity, I
delighted in talking from time to time with him, because never did I listen
to his words without profiting from his advice. He was always revealing
things unknown to many, and worthy of being known.

Of particular interest is Cerones statement that, in Abruzzo, he served

in the chapel of the diocese (presumably the cathedral) rather than that of
 The Good Maestro 333

Marguerite of Austria, as has often been supposed. Investigation of capitular

archives could lead to more concrete documentation of Cerones early life,
which rests now entirely on his own statements in El melopeo. Such docu-
ments survive in the Biblioteca comunale di Ortona, according to Parlul.
Not surprisingly, Cerone does not appear in documentation of Margarets
chapel, although Veere (as Giovanni Verius) was prominent from 1567 to
1586. Cerone uses this illuminating autobiographical digression as a per-
sonal example of the main point of chapter 34, that the master must practice
continuing education and seek constant self-improvement through his con-
sultation with others. He continues:
The soul of the musician who does not converse with other musicians
exposes him as either (1) lazy for not upholding the one who incites and
inspires him, by invoking [the colleague] for what he knows and disputing
with him, or (2) pued up with a vain conviction: because without compar-
ing his talent with anyone elses, he insolently attributes to himself the
same. Contrariwise, he who in conversing undertakes to praise his studies
is [seen as] greatly burning to perfect himself, and he who is the slightest
bit negligent comes to be needled about his competence. And just as the
studious man considers it shameful to yield to an equal, so he holds as a
great honor the ability to surpass and win a greater one.

Cerones account (however factual) of Palestrina and his own experiences in

studying and associating with other musicians develops into a discussion of
the relationship between such conversation and the esteem and deference due
to a colleague or mentor. This thematic transformation in chapter 34 unfolds
further in chapters 35 and 36, which deal with the students reverence or re-
spect for his master, and the aront of a students ingratitude.
Beginning with chapter 37, there is a shift of object in the discussion.
From giving advice to the master about aspects of the student-teacher re-
lationship, most of the subsequent chapters move toward giving advice on
professional issues in the general direction of the student. Of course, since
Cerone has advocated lifelong study for his maestro, these observations apply
to the professional deportment of the master as well. These chapters deal
with appropriate professional circumspection (chap. 37), misrepresentation of
credentials (chap. 38), theft of intellectual property (chap. 3940), and other
subjects. These and subsequent chapters deal largely with issues of profes-
sionalism that extend beyond just the teacher-student relationship. Within
this section though, there are a few informative, amusing, and cautionary
parts.
334 Gary Towne

In chapter 37, for instance, Cerone moves to a subject that might seem
to us excessively prescriptive, if not perhaps even hypocritical in his case
the importance of silence and taciturnity in professional dealings. A brief
example suces to show the argument.

Here follows the same material; where one demonstrates the peril and
damage that can be caused by too much talk, and the virtue of silence.
Do not be garrulous with Masters if they are not listening and are
silent . . .

Cerone then considerably weakens his argument by expounding on the

virtues of taciturnity and brevity for five pages, quoting over twenty classi-
cal, biblical, and later works. Quotes from the Bible include Psalms, Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, Philippians, and James, while there are paraphrases of
and allusions to Genesis, Judges, Romans, and I Corinthians. Classical authors
quoted include Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics), Diogenes Laertius (Life of Cato,
probably quoting Iamblichus), Horace (Odes), Iamblichus (Life of Pythagoras),
Isocrates (from Joannes Stobaeuss Extracts), Lucian (Hermotimus, and The
Cock), Ovid (Ars Amatoria), Plutarch (Apothegms, Lives, and De Garrulitate),
Seneca (Ad Lucilium epistulae morales), Thales of Miletus (quoted in Erasmuss
Apothegms), Xenocrates (quoted in Valerius Maximus, Factorum et Dictorum
Memorabilium), and Zeno (Fragments). Post-classical authors include St.
Ambrose (De ociis ministrorum), St. Augustine (Ad Lucillam, City of God,
and Confessions), St. Gregory the Great (Morals on the Book of Job), Isidore of
Seville (Etymologies, book 15), Pseudo-Augustine (Sermones ad fratres in Er-
emo), Pseudo-Cato (Distichs), and Erycius Puteanus (Modulata Pallas). Other
quotes, largely untraceable, include Aeschylus, Amasis (the last Egyptian Pha-
raoh, probably from Herodotus), Epaminondas (perhaps from Thucydides),
Homer, Plotinus, Plutarch, Simonides, Socrates, Sts. Ambrose, Bernard, and
Jeromealong with Latin, Greek, and Spanish proverbs. Hardly brief.
The prolixity indicated by this list is more characteristic of the level of
documentation found in these chapters of El melopeo, than what was described
earlier. Cerone reveals himself (even without consideration of his musical
knowledge) as a scholar of remarkable erudition and versatility. For him and
other contemporary authors, this is the obvious justification for eschewing
brevity in the commonplace-book approach to scholarship they took. In their
thirst for acclaim, they eagerly seized the opportunity to cite all remotely
relevant quotations gathered over a lifetime of reading and classifyingit
is erudition by the yard. As noted, Anthony Graftons essay in this volume
 The Good Maestro 335

(chap. 8) vividly describes the practice, which was familiar well beyond the
Early Modern period.
Chapters 38 and 39 expand on a refrain begun earlier, Cerones condem-
nation of the proud, the envious, and the unworthy; he anathematizes in this
case the great lengths gone to and contrivances used by charlatans to acquire
musical reputations. It is not clear whether Cerone had specific figures in
mind, although in his long career, he must have worked with some colleagues
whose methods he disapproved of. Chapter 40 vividly describes and goes on
to condemn a method of theft of musical intellectual property, much as a
modern professor would advise a student of today about plagiarism: There
are others (and they are everywhere) who acquire some compositions of un-
known foreign composers, which, after getting new, soft paper, they show in
public as their own, accompanied by a letter of arrival written in large apoth-
ecary letters, which says: Hulono made me. Hulono does not seem to
refer to a specific person, but appears to be a generic name, like John Smith or
Jane Doe. Cerones subsequent report of a similar personal experience deals
with musicians of other names.
From this point on, the discussion centers on ethical issues of profes-
sional relationships: the ill eects of envy (chap. 41), flattery versus appropri-
ate praise (chaps. 43, 47), true versus false friendship (chaps. 4546), denigra-
tion of great composers and their works (chaps. 4950), formative evaluation
of music (chap. 51), appropriate occasions for musical discourse (chap. 52),
all of which is interspersed with a few chapters of summary and supplement
(chaps. 42, 44, 48). Chapter 52 also oers advice relative to the students
relationships, not only with his master but with non-musicians.

That it is not an appropriate thing to discuss Music with every type of

person, nor all the time.
Let us also place in the catalogue of the disturbed those indiscreet
persons who, with a disordered appetite, exert themselves much too much
discussing and speaking of Music with persons who are not of the art, nor
even (which is worse) aficionados of it.

He goes on to advocate the discussion of music only with those who appreci-
ate the art, lest it be ridiculed or despised, reserving silence for other occa-
sions. This echoes Cerones earlier advocacy for silence beyond necessary
conversation (chap. 37). In both places, the advice serves as a navigational aid
for the student in conversations with his master and other musicians, as well
as with the uninitiated.
336 Gary Towne

Chapter 53 begins with a rhetorical discontinuity, as Cerone leaps into

an explanation of why there are more music professors in Italy than in Spain.
But this discussion is less farfetched than it might at first seem. Cerones ex-
planation for the superiority of Italian music teaching goes beyond jingoism
to explore the pedagogical rationale and the centrality of good teaching that
has developed in Italy, including appropriate relationships between students
and their masters, as well as issues of cultural support and infrastructure:

The reason why there are more professors of Music in Italy than in Spain.
The first reason is because of the greater diligence of the Masters,
because one could not imagine with what love and what diligence they
teach, who could not teach their own children with greater aection and
care than they bestow on everyone in general, without taking account . . . of
whether or not it is the day of practice or the hour assigned for lessons . . .
For just as the gardener receives pleasure in seeing the trees that he has
planted growing and loaded with fruit, so the true teacher takes joy in see-
ing the students he has taught become able and sucient, for they are the
trees set by his hand and watered with the sweat of his brow . . .
The second reason is because of the endurance and patience of the
students, because, [although] being young men with beards, they always
accompany their Master, and when they go to the Chapel or to practice (if
needed), they take no aront at carrying [his] books, as if they were boys
of eight or ten years. All of this servitude makes of them friends of Music,
and the thirst that they hold for it spurs them to distinguish and advance
themselves . . .
The third reason is because of a particular aection that the Italian na-
tion holds for Music . . .
The fourth reason is because of the greater accommodations that there
are for learning it, for in many cities of Italy, there are buildings called
academies . . .
The fifth reason is the continuous desire that [Italians] have to know
more every day . . .

It is significant that the first reasons advanced on Cerones list explore the
characters of masters and students and of their pedagogical relationship. The
frequent recapitulation of these subjects emphasizes again the importance of
the theme of the pedagogical relationship among Cerones various subtexts.
The juxtaposition of the conditions of music teaching in Italy and Spain and
the explanation of the dierences also reinforces Cerones initial apologia, that
the towns and villages of Spain lack teachers of music, and . . . for the greater
part, the few that do exist do not know what is necessary, and that his goal
 The Good Maestro 337

in writing is to improve this teaching, as if a teacher were teaching in person

. . . so that the novice scholar understands and learns more proficiently what
is being stated.
From his rhapsody on the Italian paradigm of music education, Cerone
moves, with little strain, into panegyrics on the art of music itself and its
composition, for several chapters. Only near the end of book I does he return,
in three final chapters, to pedagogical issues, this time in the relationship
between the maestro di capella and the singers in his choir. This relation-
ship is dierent from but analogous to the relationship between the master
and student, and yet in chapters 63 to 65, Cerone distills the essence of both
relationships in a fundamental reciprocity of respect based on the humble
acknowledgment of human fallibility.
(63) Of Chapel-masters who attain to the teaching profession through
favors; of their conditions, and of what they can expect from their Singers.
It is proper that Chapel-masters take account of their singers and honor
them . . .
(64) Of how the Singer is obliged to honor and revere his Chapel-master,
whoever he may be.
Honorable and well-born singers delight in being obedient, and dont
trouble themselves about obeying others of lower station than themselves,
because they do not remark on the mettle of which the master is made, if it
is not the same as their own . . .
(65) Of the recognition of the same, and an exhortation to Singers and
Chapel-masters.
However, concluding all this I say that the singers, just as much as the
Chapel-masters, must use diligence to know themselves, considering all the
faults and imperfections that every man carries; and for this reason they
must empathize with one another and must have patience with all, and above
all with the Masters, Subcantors, Cantors and others who govern . . .

The hierarchy presented here of cantor, subcantor, and (chapel-)master

provides another generic example for clarifying and amplifying Cerones most
significant pointhis exhortation in chapter 65. This chapter is an eective
conclusion to and summary of all the previous chapters dealing with profes-
sionalism among students, singers, and their mastersthat is, the majority
of book I of El melopeo y maestro. These chapters establish the appropriate re-
lationship between student (or singer) and master and place Cerone securely
in the forefront of the pedagogy of his time, not because of earth-shattering
developments in the material he is teaching, but rather due to Cerones own
338 Gary Towne

deep understanding of the fundamental conjunction of teaching: the encoun-

ter of the teacher and the student, and its implied pedagogical contractthe
teacher must be erudite, must balance benevolence and chastisement with
compassion, and must set an example of professionalism. The student, in turn,
must acknowledge this learning and follow this example. Both must regard
each other with respect and empathy, and seek always to know themselves
better; they must work together toward their goal of musical perfection.
To us, these ideas may seem intuitive or even inherent in the educational
process, but in 1613, they oered an innovative concept of pedagogical eec-
tiveness that was predicated on interpersonal relationshipsa concept that
Cerone developed far beyond the mere allusions of his predecessors (Ber-
mudo, Tapia, and others). Cerones exploration of these issues is particularly
expansive, and infuses a sense of moderation and humanity into our percep-
tions of an era when corporal punishment with a birch rod or whip was a
standard pedagogical method (even under Cerone), and the torture-master
was an indispensable judicial ocer. In this context, Cerones concern for
humane and insightful pedagogy reveals in El melopeo y maestro a foreshad-
owing of modern education, which partially explains its currency and appeal
throughout Spanish dominions worldwide for nearly two centuries.

APPENDIX

Book and chapter headings relevant to the pedagogical relationship, from

book I of R. D. Pedro Cerone, El Melopeo y Maestro. Tractado de Musica, 2
vols. (Naples: Gargano & Nucci, 1613; facs. edition, Bologna: Forni, 1969).

BOOK I

. . . (which is of moral ornaments and harmonies), which contains some pre-

cepts, exhortations, and morals: after revealing some faults and vices, we will
provide those precepts for proper behavior that a proficient singer and ac-
complished musician must have.

CHAPTERS
26. Of the obligation which masters of singing have, to be very vigilant that
their students do not adopt any defective manner.
27. That one needs to select good masters.
28. What attributes a good master must possess.
 The Good Maestro 339

29. Of the things which demonstrate that a master is good for teaching; of the
method he should adopt in chastising the students, where succinctly, he
praises humility and rebukes pride.
30. Of how the correction of the master is very beneficial, and ought to be so.
31. That masters, the better to give lessons, should study each day to inspire
their students to do the same.
32. That for most masters, it is necessary to read dierent methods and
treatises of music, and to see many works in practice.
33. Of which practicing composers we may imitate safely and without peril.
34. How, in addition to following good masters and books, it is necessary to
consult and teach always the opinion of others.
35. Of the reverence that one owes to masters.
36. Here follows the same material; wherein one abominates the detestable
vice of ingratitude.
37. Here follows the same material; where one demonstrates the peril and
damage that can be caused by too much talk, and the virtue of silence.
38. Of those ambitious ones who pass for a preeminent master among the
ignorant, and of the crazy invention that some use to be acclaimed as ex-
cellent musicians.
39. Of those who adorn themselves with the works of others in order to attain
fame through them.
40. Of those who regularly steal others works, attributing them as their
own.
41. Of the envious and of those with bad dispositions, particularly of those
who do not wish to teach reliably, and of the eects of envy.
42. Defense of the author regarding a few complaints that one could have
with things that I say.
43. Of the dierent limits of appropriate behavior, and of the various
compliments and words of courtesy which a few minor musicians would
soil by using when dancing attendance on musicians of excellence: and of
that [which is appropriate] to present to [the excellent musicians] hearing,
that they are great musicians and good composers.
44. Here follow other types of appropriate behavior, much more noteworthy.
45. Of friendship and of the true friend.
46. Of the feigned or false friend.
47. Of the fawner or flatterer.
48. Of how true friends must act in the correction of their friend, or of any
other person.
49. Of the irresponsible criticism and disparagement of famous masters and
their compositions.
50. Of those who speak ill of others compositions [while] always praising
their own.
51. The approach one must adopt in judging others compositions, in order to
judge them in a productive way, and of other advice about similar issues.
340 Gary Towne

52. That it is not an appropriate thing to discuss music with every type of
person, nor all the time.
53. The reason why there are more professors of music in Italy than in Spain.

63. Of chapel-masters who attain to the teaching profession through favors;

of their conditions, and of what they can expect from their singers.
64. Of how the singer is obliged to honor and revere his chapel-master,
whoever he may be.
65. Of the recognition of the same, and an exhortation to singers and chapel-
masters.

NOTES
Early drafts of this chapter were read at the North Dakota University System Hu-
manities Summit, on 16 October 2004, and at the University of North Dakota Graduate
Symposium, on 23 February 2005, in addition to the conference Reading and Writing the
Pedagogies of the Renaissance: The Student, the Study Materials, and the Teacher of Music,
14701650, at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, 24 June 2005. I am
grateful for Dr. Francisco Garcas generous assistance to me in my research for this article,
and to Dr. Gene Dubois for checking my translations. Except where noted, all translations
are my own.
1. R. D. Pedro Cerone, El melopeo y maestro. Tractado de musica, 2 vols., intro. F. Al-
berto Gallo (Naples: Gargano & Nucci, 1613; facs. edition, Bologna: Forni, 1969). Francisco
Garca, Pietro Cerones El Melopeo y Maestro: A Synthesis of Sixteenth-Century Musical
Theory (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1978) is the most extensive discussion of
Cerones magnum opus to date. On page iii of the dissertation, he observes that Cerones
Spanish was virtually identical to what he learned as a child in northern New Mexico. As
he told me, this linguistic advantage enabled him, in the course of his dissertation research,
to translate Cerones entire work, a great accomplishment that was most regrettably lost in
a flood after the completion of his dissertation in 1978.
2. Karl Gustav Fellerer, Zu Cerones musiktheoretischen Quellen, Gesammelte Auf-
stze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 11 (1955): 17578; Lewis Lockwood, On Parody as Term
and Concept in 16th-Century Music, in Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: A
Birthday Oering to Gustav Reese, ed. Jan LaRue (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 57072;
James Armstrong, How to Compose a Psalm: Ponzio and Cerone Compared, Studi Musi-
cali 7 (1978): 10339; Enrique Arias, Cerone and his Enigmas, Anuario Musical 44 (1989):
1103; Charles Jacobs, Ornamentation in Spanish Renaissance Vocal Music, Performance
Practice Review 4 (1991): 11685, and others cited herein are among the authors who have
explored Cerones extensive borrowings. Such borrowing would have been a sign of erudi-
tion in his own times, and can still be appreciated as evidence of thoroughness in research
worthy of any modern doctoral dissertation. Although Cerones method of citation is not as
meticulous as modern standards require, his capacity for attribution is very generous for his
own time and belies any intent to plagiarize, something he specifically condemns.
3. In his introduction to the facsimile edition of El melopeo y maestro, Alberto Gallo
suggests 1561, based on Cerones age as cited in his portrait. Robert Stevenson initially ac-
cepted Gallos hypothesis in his Review of Pedro Cerone, El Melopeo Tractado de Musica
Theorica y Pratica, Journal of the American Musicological Society 24 (1971): 477 n. 1, but
after further inquiry he rejected it in favor of the traditional date of 1566; see Stevensons
Pedro Cerone (15661625), Imposter or Defender of the Faith? Inter-American Music Re-
 The Good Maestro 341

view 16 (1997): 54. Stevenson (ibid., pp. 45), citing Ramn Baselga Esteve (Pedro Cerone
de Bergamo: Estudio Bio-Bibliogrfico, Tesoro Sacro Musical 54 [1971]: 914), notes the ab-
sence of the young Cerone from all surviving documentation in Bergamoan absence that
my research, alas, confirms. Cerones own allusions and asides in El melopeo y maestro are
thus the only sources for firm biographical data. These are noted in the works of Stevenson
and Baselga Esteve, as well as other authors cited herein.
4. Barton Hudson, Cerone, Pietro, in Grove Music Online, at Oxford Music Online:
www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/05304 (accessed 28 Septem-
ber 2008); and Stevenson, Pedro Cerone (15661625), 414. Both give analytic biographies
of Cerone, which build upon Stevensons earlier Review of Pedro Cerone, 47785. In his
two-part study, Pedro Cerone de Bergamo: Estudio Bio-Bibliogrfico, Tesoro Sacro Musi-
cal 54 (1971): 815, 4048, 7179, 99109, and 55 (1972): 26, 3541, Ramn Baselga Esteve
furnishes an admirable and very thoroughly researched biography.
5. Stevenson, one of Cerones staunchest advocates, has discussed him in several
publications, most recently in Pedro Cerone (15661625) cited above. On pp. 1920, he
discusses the books circulation and influence in Latin America; on pp. 13 and 1425,
Stevenson lists Cerones critics and defenders, with copious paraphrases of their libels and
laudations.
6. Cerone, El melopeo,1: 1: 9. Translation from Arias, Cerone and his Enigmas, 87
88, with my emendations in square brackets. Arias notes in the conclusion of this article:
Pietro Cerone must be considered one of the great synthesizers in the history of musical
theory. His originality lay not so much in his thoughts as in their thorough presentation.
Almost like a writer of a parody mass, he took the materials of the major theorists of his
day and transformed and developed them. The El Melopeo represents a confluence of the
finest Spanish and Italian theory of the later Renaissance together with the elaborations
and elucidations of a man deeply experienced in the music of his time.
7. Ibid., 88.
8. The full title preceded by the subtitle in parentheses is: Libro primero. (que es
de los Atavios e consonancias morales), en el qual se contienen unos Avisos, documentos,
y moralidades: que debaxo el descubrir algunos defectos y viciosos, se dan los avisos de las
buenas partes, que ha de tener un cumplido Cantante, y un perfecto Musico. This is trans-
lated in Garca, Pietro Cerones El Melopeo, p. x, as: Book I. (which is of moral ornaments
and harmonies), which contains some precepts, exhortations, and [morals]: after revealing
some faults and vices, we will provide those precepts for proper behavior that a proficient
singer and accomplished musician must have.
9. Gallo, intro. to Cerone, El melopeo, vii (cited in note 2, above). Garca, Pietro Cero-
nes El Melopeo, x (also cited in note 2); and Francisco Jos Leon Tello, Estudios de historia de
la teoria musical (Madrid: Consejo superior de investigaciones cientificas / Instituto espaol
de musicologia, 1962), 26263, discuss the near-absence of precedent for Cerones discus-
sion in all but two earlier authors who influenced him. Fray Juan Bermudo, Declaracin
de instrumentos musicales (1555), trans. in George Lazanas, Juan Bermudo, Declaracin
de Instrumentos musicales, 1555 (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1967; unavailable
to me at present), merely touched on the formacin del msico; and Martin de Tapia,
Vergel de Musica (Burgo de Osma: Diego Fernndez de Cordova, 1570), plagiarized liberally
from Bermudo. Yet even these two authors barely allude to pedagogical concerns, which
emphasizes the uniqueness of Cerones innovative and thorough investigation. A facsimile
of Bermudos book (minus the two-part prologue) is published as Fray Juan Bermudo, De-
claracin de Instrumentos musicales, 1555, ed. Macario Santiago Kastner (Kassel: Brenreiter,
1957). This and Bermudos other writings are also discussed in Paloma Otaola Gonzlez,
Tradicin y modernidad en los escritos musicales de Juan Bermudo, del Libro primero (1549) a
la Declaracin de Instrumentos musicales (1555) (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2000).
342 Gary Towne

10. Cerone, El melopeo, 1: chaps. 3133, 39, and 40. For a full listing of relevant chapter
titles, see the appendix.
11. Ibid., 1: chaps. 2630.
12. Ibid., 1: chaps. 38, 52.
13. Ibid., 1: chaps. 6365.
14. Ibid., 1: 1: chaps. 7273
15. Ibid., 1: 1: 7374.
16. Ibid., 1: 1: 7475.
17. Ibid., 1: 1: 76.
18. Ibid.
19. The following examples require both Latin Vulgate and Revised Standard Version
texts, since they and their versification are not entirely concordant. Examples:
Proverbs 13.24 (Cerone has chap. 12): Qui parcit virgae odit filium suum; qui
autem diligit illum, instanter erudit. / He who spares the rod hates his son, but he
who loves him is diligent to discipline him.
Ecclesiasticus 7.25: Filii tibi sunt? [repeated in Cerone] erudi illos, Et curva illos
a pueritia illorum. / Do you have children [sons]? Discipline them, and make them
obedient from their youth.
Ecclesiasticus 33 (Vulg. has 25; RSV, 24): Cibaria, et virga, et onus asino; Panis,
et disciplina et opus servo. / Fodder and a stick and burdens for an ass; bread and
discipline and work for a servant.
Ecclesiasticus 30.1: Qui diligit filium suum adsiduat illi flagella. / He who loves
his son will whip him often.
Proverbs 23.13: Noli subtrahere a puero disciplinam, Si enim percusseris eum
virga non morietur. / Do not withhold discipline from a child: if you beat him with
a rod, he will not die.
Cerones sources on clemency are all classical or early Christian, with quotes attributed to
Plutarch, Seneca, Democritus, Cyrus the Persian, the Emperor Titus, and Saint Augustine.
This degree of apologia, which may seem excessive to us, is actually relatively restrained for
this section of Cerones work, as will be seen below. Such prolific documentation is the natu-
ral consequence of the commonplace-book method of scholarship, which is aptly described
in Anthony Graftons contribution to this volume. Cerones meticulous use of this approach
demonstrates that the many borrowings for which he is often chastised reveal exemplary
seventeenth-century scholarship practices. See also below.
20. Cerone, El melopeo, 1: 1: 76.
21. Ibid., 1: 1: 7677.
22. Ibid., 1: 1: 77, citing Cicero, De Ociis, 1: 38: 136, and [Domitius] Marsus (?), Epis-
tles, 5.
23. Ibid., 1: 1: 78. Gaspar Astete (15371601) was a Spanish Jesuit professor and cat-
echist at Simancas and Valladolid who wrote several devotional works, of which the most
famous is his Catecismo de la doctrina cristiana, the only one of his works that is still in
print or available to meand it is still in use, mainly in Latin America. The discussion of
anger cited by Cerone is longer than that in the Catecismo, and thus must come from one
of Astetes works which is unavailable to me. See Inomos at Lucio Anneo Sneca Instituto
de Estudios Clsicos: http://turan.uc3m.es/uc3m/inst/LS/humanastete.htm and http://
www.mercaba.org/FICHAS/CEC/catecismo_astete.htm.
24. Cerone, El melopeo, 1: 1: 8082.
25. Proverbs 15.5 (RSV).
26. Cerone, El melopeo, 1: 1: 8385.
27. Ibid., 1: chap. 31: That masters, the better to give lessons, should study each day to
inspire their students to do the same; chap. 32: That for most masters, it is necessary to
 The Good Maestro 343

read dierent methods and treatises of music, and to see many works in practice; chap. 33:
Of which practicing composers we may imitate safely and without peril.
28. Ibid., 1: 1: 91.
29. Ibid., 1: 1: 92. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina may be viewed as Roman, not only
by adoption, but because his native village, Palestrina, is well within territory controlled by
Rome since republican times. Stevenson, in his Review of Pedro Cerone, 47778, evalu-
ates Cerones fascination with a composer (Palestrina) already falling from favor, in light of
the polemic of Antonio Eximeno y Pujades in his novel, Don Lazarillo Viscardi (pub. Ma-
drid: Sociedad de Biblifilos Espaoles, 1872; written 17981802), as also cited by Stevenson
in Pedro Cerone (15661625), 13. Further information about Eximeno can be found in
Allice Pollin, Toward an Understanding of Antonio Eximeno, Journal of the American
Musicological Society 10 (1957): 8696.
30. My orthography of the name Jan van Veere is an attempt to adapt to his probable
native town the name of a composer who appears under several variants: Jean Van Veere
in Edmond Vander Straeten, La musique aux Pays-Bas avant le XIX e sicle (Brussels: G. A.
Van Trigt, 1882), 48284, cited in Stevenson, Pedro Cerone (15661625), 7; Juan Verioin
Cerone, El melopeo, 92; Joanne Verius or van Verein Howard Mayer Brown and Kristine
Forney, Joanne Verius, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition
(London: Macmillan, 2001), 26: 478. Brown and Forney note two lost chanson-books and
five surviving chansons (two in lute intabulations only) by this composer. I have preferred
a Flemish form of his name, based on his probable native town, Veere on the Walcheren
Peninsula in Zeeland, Netherlands. Nearby municipalities of greater size where Jan van
Veere may have advanced his study of music include Middelburg, Bergen op Zoom, and
especially Antwerp. Bruges and Ghent are further by land but closer if one boats across the
Westerschelde; see www.eupedia.com/netherlands/veere.shtml, www.deltawerken.com/
History/394.html, and http://maps.google.com.
31. Unbracketed segments as translated by Robert Stevenson, in Pedro Cerone (1566
1625), 67. The bracketed section has been translated by the author.
32. Parlul, La Cappella Musicale della Cattedrale di San Tommaso Apostolo ed il suo
regolamento nel XIX sec., Abruzzo Oggi 37 (June 1984), posted on the internet at www
.portaleperortona.it/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=463 (accessed 8 January
2008).
33. Seishiro Niwa, Madama Margaret of Parmas Patronage of Music, Early Music
33 (2005): 2934.
34. Cerone, El melopeo, 1: 1: 93 (enumeration the translators).
35. Ibid., 1: chap. 35. Of the reverence that one owes to masters; chap. 36: Here fol-
lows the same material; wherein one abominates the detestable vice of ingratitude.
36. Ibid., 1: 1: chaps. 3740 (see appendix).
37. Ibid., 1: 1: 100.
38. Psalms 140.3; Proverbs 10.19, 16.1, 18.21, 21.23, 28.1617; Ecclesiastes 3.7; Ecclesiasticus
32.11, 11.8; Philippians 4.5; James 3.2, 5, 710. The paraphrases of and allusions to Genesis,
Judges, Romans, and I Corinthians are too ranging and diuse to be identified here.
39. Epaminondas was leader of the Theban forces in their defeat of the Spartans at the
Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE. Plutarchs life of Epaminondas is lost, but he is mentioned in
numerous other of the Lives, including that of his lover, Pelopidas; see Louis Crompton,
Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp.
2, 70.
40. Cerone, El melopeo, 1: 1: chaps. 3839.
41. Ibid., 1: 1: 109.
42. Ibid., 1: 1: chaps. 4152 (see appendix).
43. Ibid., 1: 1: 14748.
344 Gary Towne

44. Ibid., 1: 1: 147.

45. Ibid., 1: 1: 14748.
46. Ibid., 1: 1: 14851, also translated and discussed at greater length in Ruth Hannas,
Cerone, Philosopher and Teacher, Musical Quarterly 21 (1935): 41012.
47. Excerpted from Arias, Cerone and his Enigmas, 8788.
48. Cerone, El melopeo, 1: 1: 182.
49. Ibid., 1: 1: 186.
50. Ibid., 1: 1: 188. Outside the formally prescribed Holy Orders, the governing oces
of the pastoral and musical sta were at least somewhat unique to the situation of each
church. For instance, in Bergamo the sta of the cathedral (after the amalgamation of the
two separate cathedrals in 1561) included two chapters of Canons: San Vincenzo, led by an
archdeacon, an archpriest, and a primicerius (precentor, often a musical title); and Sant
Alessandro, led by a praepositus (provost) and a cantor. The separate chapters had entirely
dierent governing structures, sharing only their bishop at the top. The Basilica of Santa
Maria Maggiorenext door to the cathedralwas governed by a lay confraternity that
was outside the bishops jurisdiction. The clerical sta included a chapel of chaplains (and
a school), led by a rector, master of ceremonies, chapel-master, major sacristan, preceptor
(of the school), and a decanus (another title that was often musical). Positions subordinate
to those listed changed in name, functions, and capacities within certain limits according
to the current administrative prescriptions, as well as to the needs and talents available.
Similar variability would also have occurred in Spain. These heirarchies in Bergamo are
discussed in Bruno Cassinelli, Luigi Pagnoni, and Graziella Colmuto Zanella, Il duomo di
Bergamo (Bergamo: Edizioni Bolis, 1991), 31; and Francesca Cortesi Bosco, Il coro intarsiato
di Lotto e Capoferri per Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo (Bergamo: Credito Bergamasco
/ Edizioni Amilcare Pizzi, 1987), 103104.
51. As noted above, the discussion of Bermudo and Tapia comes from Garca, Pietro
Cerones El Melopeo, x; and Leon Tello, Estudios de historia de la teoria musical, 26263.
52. Book title translation from Garca, Pietro Cerone's El melopeo, x.
Perspective 3
 17
You Can Tell a Book by
Its Cover: Reflections on Format
in English Music Theory&
JESSIE ANN OWENS

My purpose in this essay is to provide a lens through which to view the huge
array of books from the Early Modern period that we call music theory,
by investigating the small subset of titles that were published in England.
I put scare quotes around theory because I want to problematize words
that we use without giving them much thought: theory, theorist, treatise. In
casual parlance, everyone who writes about music is a theorist, every text is
a treatise, and every topic is theory. Tellingly, the editions and facsimiles
of everything from schoolboy trots to learned tomes sit side by side in our
libraries, under the Library of Congress subject heading MUSICTHEORY
HistoryEarly Works to 1800.
We see this usage in even the most distinguished scholarship. In his
introduction to The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, Thomas
Christensen oers a very useful sketch of the history of the enterprise of
music theory, reviewing the topics writers addressed and the major trends
of each period. Paragraph after paragraph describes music theory, sometimes
in quotation marks, sometimes not. He notes that many of the writings do
348 Jessie Ann Owens

not bear the title theory or music theory, and yet he cant escape working
within our contemporary conceptual framework that applies this category to
all writing about music.
Penelope Gouk points out the diculties of this pervasive usage in her
thoughtful review of Rebecca Herissones Music Theory in Seventeenth-Century
England:

Like most of the people who will read this book, Herissone takes for
granted (i) that music theory is a body of knowledge about musics
structure and nature that is generated chiefly for and by composers and
musicians, and (ii) that the term music theorist can be used unproblem-
atically for anyone who contributes to this body of knowledge, regardless
of their actual occupational or social identity. These assumptions unneces-
sarily constrain what can be said about these texts, which were written by
authors from a variety of dierent backgrounds.

This observation is a useful reminder that we need to be able to distinguish

the range of writing about music in the early modern worldto dierenti-
ate, for example, textbooks from the equivalent of scholarly monographs or
journal articles. Instead of catch-alls like theorist or theory, we need to
find words that are specific to the particular activity and reflect the character
of the audience and social function of the text(s) under consideration.
One approach to discovering both context and audience, as Cristle Col-
lins Judd has shown, is to investigate the specific communities of readers and
writers of these books. Another is to decipher the clues about function that
are imbedded in the nature of the book as an object, namely, its appearance
size, number of pages, layout, format, etc. This approach is well known to
historians of the book as well as to the musicologist-bibliographers who have
studied individual printers, but it has not been a major part of the scholarship
on music theory.
A classic application of this way of thinking about the material form of
books is found in Paul Grendlers seminal article, Form and Function in
Italian Renaissance Popular Books:

Form and function are closely connected in books. The physical ap-
pearance of books indicates purpose and intended readership. A combi-
nation of size, type, and page layout oers visible signals informing the
reader of the content before he begins to read a book. Books that look
dierent are dierent. They have dierent subject matters, purposes, and
readerships.
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 349

Anyone browsing in a bookstore in the late twentieth century knows

this. Today an illustration on the cover provides the most obvious clue
concerning the subject matter and purpose of a book. When the cover
shows a handsome man with a scowl on his face and a gun in his hand
along with a beautiful young woman in distressand possibly some degree
of undresswe know that the book is a thriller. When the cover shows
a spaceship, we know that the book is science fiction. And when we see a
perfectly plain monocolor cover with no picture but just the title and the
name of the author, we know that the book is a work of scholarship. Today
the cover signals the content and purpose of a printed book.

Grendler analyzes four popular texts from the perspective of their appear-
ancephysical features such as size, layout on the page, kind of lettering. One
of the conclusions he draws from his investigation is that
. . . traditional form, rather than the preferences of individual printers
and publishers, dominated in the printing of popular books. When a
publisher who did not specialize in popular titles decided to print one, he
conformed to the traditional form. Exceptions were few; the uniformity
was noticeable. Indeed, such consistency was very remarkable in the large,
unregulated and individualistic publishing enterprise. Although no guild
or government imposed on the printing trade regulations for the size, ap-
pearance and production of books, publishers adhered to a common form
for popular books. Reader expectation and preference created a very strong
tradition which publishers honored. (pp. 48384)

Grendlers observations are broadly applicable, and certainly relevant to

books about music printed in England during the period from roughly 1575
to 1690. The point that I would like to emphasize is that there is a strong
correlation between format and kinds or genres of books. I would go so far
as to say that you can almost always predict the contents of a book from its
formatyou can tell a book by its cover.
No doubt a primary consideration in the match between type of book
and its function and audience was price. Price was determined in part by the
amount of paper that was needed, since paper was one of the most expensive
items in producing a book. Paper came in various sizes, and was printed in a
variety of formats. To quote from Gaskells classic explanation of imposition,
The compositor imposed the pages for each side of a sheet[. . .]; the order of
the pages in each forme (as the pages imposed in this way for each side of the
sheet were called) being such that, when a sheet of paper printed from them
was folded to make a section of a book the pages followed each other in the
350 Jessie Ann Owens

proper sequence. A books cost was determined in part by the number of

sheets required, which in turn depends on the format (a rough calculation is
the number of pages divided by the format). Format in this context refers
to the arrangement of its [the books] formes and the subsequent folding of
the printed sheets as indicated by the number and conjugacy of the leaves and
the orientation of the paper in the gatherings, and is expressed in the terms
folio, quarto, octavo, etc.
The books under consideration in the present study were for the most
part printed in one of the formats that I list here by size (from largest to
smallest): broadside or broadsheet (a single page printed on one side, or some-
times both sides, of a sheet); folio (four pages on a sheet, two each on front
and back); quarto, in both upright and oblong orientations (eight pages); and
octavo (sixteen pages). Technically speaking, format alone does not define
the size of the book, but rather the size of the paper combined with format;
thus, one can speak of a small, medium, or large folio. But format does also
correlate with and can stand in for size as a kind of shorthand. In the discus-
sion that follows, I focus on both format and orientation (oblong or upright),
without making further distinctions based on paper size. The sample size, I
believe, supports general conclusions about the profile of each format, but not
a further refinement based on paper size.
Concrete evidence for the importance of format can be found in the series
of catalogues of books printed in England or available for sale dating through-
out the period under investigation. These include:
1. Andrew Maunsell, The first [-seconde] part of the catalogue of English printed
bookes (1595, STC 17669)
Listing by printer, date, format (folio, 4, 8)
2. John Playford, A catalogue of all the musick-bookes that have been printed in
England, either for voyce or instruments (1653, Wing C1268A)
First section (books printed between 1571 and 1638): one column of books
in folio, two columns of books in quarto; alphabetical order
Second section: musick bookes lately printed (no indication of size or price)
3. Robert Clavell, A catalogue of all the books printed in England since the
dreadful fire of London [16661672] (1673, Wing C4598)
Three sections: Musick in folio, Quarto, Octavo, listing price and
publisher/printer/seller
4. Robert Clavell, The general catalogue of books printed in England since the
dreadful fire of London [16661674] (1675, Wing C4600)
First section (identical to Playford 1653): A catalogue of all the musick-
books that have been printed in England (folios first, then quartos, without
prices)
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 351

Second section: Musick books lately printed (folios, quartos, octavos;

within each section, ordered by price)
5. Robert Clavell, The general catalogue of books printed in England since the
dreadful fire of London [16661680] (1680, Wing C4601)
Folios first, then quarto, octavo, & twelves (without prices), using the
alphabet for headings (conflates the two sections from the 1675 edition)
6. A Curious Collection of Musick-Books . . . to be sold by Henry Playford (1690,
Wing P2428)
Sizes and prices
7. A Catalogue of ancient and modern musick books . . . to be sold . . . 1691 (1691,
Wing C1278)
Most of the treatises are in one section: folios listed first (nos. 16975),
then quartos (nos. 176201), but some are to be found elsewhere, either
in a section defined by size or with the size specified; among the treatises
supposedly in quarto are some octavos (e.g., Simpson, Playford). The only
book listed as octavo is Birchenshas Templum musicum (discussed below)

Although these catalogues are not entirely reliable, they do help us see
how books might be categorized. While some, but not all, of the lists distin-
guish between quarto and octavo, all of them identify folios. Clearly format
was worth recording.
As we consider the formats in turn, it will be helpful to keep in mind a
further distinction, namely, whether the book consists essentially of music
or of text (prose). In books of music, instruction is typically limited to a brief
didactic introduction, and the format is dependent on conventions associated
with the particular instrument or ensemble. In books consisting primarily
of prose, some of which may also contain musical compositions, format is
determined by factors such as price, audience, purpose, and of course, con-
tent.
What follows is both an overview of English treatises from the per-
spective of size and format, and a somewhat personal narrativethe ah-ha
moments that helped me understand the importance of the material form of
these books. Rather than proceed in order of size (e.g., from large to small), I
have chosen to organize the discussion according to the characteristic profile
of the various formats.

OBLONG QUARTO

The particular book that prompted me to consider the nature of books pro-
duced in oblong quarto is a 1637 reissue, acquired by the Huntington Library
in 1998, of an anonymous treatise that was first published in 1596 by the Lon-
352 Jessie Ann Owens

FIGURE 17.1. Anonymous, The pathvvay to musicke (London, 1596), title page
(London, British Library).

don draper William Barley (see figure 17.1), under the following title: The
pathvvay to musicke, contayning sundrie familiar and easie rules for the readie and
true vnderstanding of the scale, or gamma-vt: vvherein is exactlie shevved by plaine
denitions, the principles of this arte, brieflie laide open by vvay of questions and
answers, for the better instruction of the learner. Whereunto is annexed a treatise
of descant, & certaine tables, vvhich doth teach hovv to remoue any song higher, or
lovver from one key to another, neuer heretofore published (1596, STC 19464).
In a 1970 study, John Ward established that the 1596 Pathway, though
given bibliographical independence by library cataloguing, was actually part
of Barleys A nevv booke of tabliture, containing sundrie easie and familiar instruc-
tions, shevving hovve to attaine to the knovvledge, to guide and dispose thy hand
to play on sundry instruments, as the lute, orpharion, and bandora: together vvith
diuers nevv lessons to each of these instruments. VVhereunto is added an introduc-
tion to prickesong, and certaine familliar rules of descant, with other necessarie
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 353

FIGURE 17.2. William Barley, A nevv booke of tabliture (London, 1596), title page
(London, British Library).

tables plainely shewing the true vse of the scale or gamut, and also how to set any
lesson higher or lower at your pleasure. Collected together out of the best authors
professing the practise of these instruments (1596, STC 1433) (see figure 17.2).
The discovery of another exemplar strengthens the case that Barley had con-
structed the volume in modular fashion so that a reader could purchase one
or more of its four sections: instructions and lessons for the lute; lessons for
the orpharion; lessons for the bandora; and the introduction to prickesong,
and certaine familiar rules of descant . . . Each has its own title page, letter
to the reader and signature starting anew with A, though only the lute section
contains the full apparatus of dedication and verses. The surviving copies all
dier from one another and attest to the composite nature.
The pathway appeared close in time to Thomas Morleys A plaine and easie
introduction to practicall musicke (1597) and William Bathes A briefe introduc-
tion to the skill of song, now securely dated to 1596. These three books were
quite dierent in purpose, and, not surprisingly, in format: Bathes in octavo,
Morleys in folio, and Barleys in oblong quarto.
354 Jessie Ann Owens

FIGURE 17.3. Adrian le Roy, A briefe and plaine instruction (London, 1574), title page
(London, British Library).

Barley was looking to publish small, cheap books of instrumental music

for an audience of amateur music lovers, particularly those who did not have
access to or could not aord a teacher. The pathway functions like a didactic
preface for a collection of pieces, although it could also be sold on its own. Its
model is likely to be the 1574 translation of Adrian le Roys A briefe and plaine
instruction to set all musicke of eight diuers tunes in tableture for the lute. With a
briefe instruction how to play on the lute by tablature, to conduct and dispose thy
hand vnto the lute, with certaine easie lessons for that purpose. And also a third
booke containing diuers new excellent tunes. All first written in French by Adrian
Le Roy, and now translated into English by F. Ke. Gentleman (1574, STC 15487),
also an oblong quarto (see figure 17.3), or Barleys lost 1593 new booke of Cit-
terne Lessons with a plaine and easie instruction for to learne the Tableture . . .
registered by Danter as a moste perfect and true Instruction whereby a man
maye learne by his own industrie to playe on the Cytterne without the helpe of
any teacher. By their very nature, didactic prefaces, which constitute only a
small portion of a book of music, appear in the format used for the repertoire
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 355

FIGURE 17.4. Anonymous, The pathvvay to musick (London, 1637), title page. Reproduced
by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

they explicate. Convention is a powerful determinant of the format associated

with particular repertories.
The 1637 reissue was published by John Benson (Printed for Iohn Benson,
and are to be sold at his shop in St. Dunstans Church-yard Fleet-street) with a
new title-page: The pathvvay to mvsick. Contayning sundry familiar and easy rules
for the ready and true understanding of the scale, or gamma-ut: wherin is exactly
shewed by plain definitions, the principles of this art, briefly layd open by way of
questions and answers, for the better instruction of the learner (1637, not in STC;
ESTC S126482) (see figure 17.4). Benson shortened the title, eliminating the
reference to descant even though that material is present. He may have been
making use of stock that was still available to be sold some thirty-five years
after the books publication or even selling a foul copy. The unique Huntington
copy has a few mistakes corrected in the surviving exemplars from the 1596 edi-
tion; for example, the woodblock of the gamut is upside down (sig. Aii v).
It is not easy to explain why Benson would reissue in 1637 a didactic pref-
ace that was already out of date in 1596. Whatever the commercial reasons
356 Jessie Ann Owens

FIGURE 17.5. John Playford, A musicall banquet (London, 1651), title page. Reproduced by
permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

might be, the book does provide continuity in the relationship between for-
mat and content. The original issue of Barleys The pathway and A new booke
of tabliture worked within existing conventions that defined oblong quarto
as the preferred format for didactic prefaces associated with collections of
instrumental music.
It is significant that John Playford, whose publications would dominate
the second half of the seventeenth century, was apprenticed to Benson. In 1651
Playford and Benson issued an anthology called A musicall banquet, set forth
in three choice varieties of musick. The first part presents you with excellent new
lessons for the lira viol, set to severall new tunings. The second a collection of new
and choyce allmans, corants, and sarabands for one treble and basse viol, composed
by Mr. William Lawes, and other excellent authours. The third part containes new
and choyce catches or rounds for three or foure voyces. To which is added some few
rules and directions for such as learne to sing, or to play on the viol (1651, Wing
P2489), in oblong quarto with a brief didactic preface (see figure 17.5). From
this publication Playford spun o a series of prototypes beginning in 1651 and
1652 that became the dominant forms of music publication for the rest of the
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 357

century. These include many popular titles in oblong formats, some of which
contain prefaces designed to instruct the beginner on fingerings, tablature,
and other aspects of the instrument.
There was one other music textbook in this format that was not a didac-
tic preface, namely, William Bathes Introduction to the true arte of musicke.
No copy is now known to existthe text survives only in a late manuscript
copybut Sir John Hawkins transcribed the title page (Imprinted at Lon-
don by Abel Jees, dwelling in Sermon-lane neere Paules Chaine anno 1584)
and most helpfully described its format as small oblong quarto, black let-
ter. It is also described in the 1595 Maunsell catalogue as quarto.

OCTAVO

An examination of the didactic portion of the 1651 A musicall banquet shows

that oblong quarto does not work very well for prose. Playford actually di-
vided the page in half and presented the text in two columns, each containing
the amount of text that would fit on a typical page in octavo. A comparison of
an excerpt from the 1651 quarto and the similar passage from the 1683 octavo
edition is telling (see figures 17.6 and 17.7).
When Playford decided to spin o the didactic preface to A musicall ban-
quet as a free-standing title, he chose octavo format and created a textbook,
A breefe introduction to the skill of musick for song & violl by JP (1654, Wing
P2447) that would become a best-seller and go through over sixteen editions
in the seventeenth century. This choice of format harkens back to Bathes A
briefe introduction to the skill of song (1596) and Thomas Campions A nevv vvay
of making fowre parts in counter-point, by a most familiar, and infallible rule. Sec-
ondly, a necessary discourse of keyes, and their proper closes. Thirdly, the allowed
passages of all concords perfect, or imperfect are declared. Also by way of preface,
the nature of the scale is expressed, with a briefe method teaching to sing (ca. 1613,
STC 4542). In fact, in editions between 1655 and 1679 Playford included
Campions counterpoint text, with annotations by Christopher Simpson.
Octavo became the standard format for instruction books intended for
amateurs consisting primarily of prose rather than of musical compositions
(although some octavos also included some musical compositions). Playfords
lead would be followed by Christopher Simpson, who published The principles
of practical mvsick delivered in a compendious, easie, and new method: for the
instruction of beginners, either in singing or playing upon instruments. To which
are added, some short and easie ayres designed for learners in 1665 (Wing S3814),
358 Jessie Ann Owens

FIGURE 17.6. John Playford, A musicall banquet (London, 1651), sig. A3r. Reproduced by
permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

revised and enlarged in 1667 (Wing S3810) as A compendium of practical musick

in five parts: teaching, by a new, and easie method, 1. The rudiments of song. 2. The
principles of composition. 3. The vse of discords. 4. The form of figurate descant.
5. The contrivance of canon (with at least four later editions). Possibly in this
tradition, though without commercial appeal, is Templum musicum: or The
musical synopsis, of the learned and famous JohannesHenricusAlstedius,
being a compendium of the rudiments both of the mathematical and practical part
of musick: of which subject not any book is extant in our English tongue (1664,
Wing A2926). This translation by John Birchensha of a German rudiments
of music dating from many decades earlier could hardly have found much
of an audience in Restoration England. Indeed, Samuel Pepyss view was
scathing: This day in the barge I took Berckenshaws translation of Alsted
his Templum, but the most ridiculous book, as he has translated it, that ever
I saw in my life, I declaring that I understood not three lines together from
one end of the book to the other.
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 359

FIGURE 17.7. John Playford, An introduction to the skill of musick (London, 1683),
sig. B4vB5r (pp. 1011) (Private collection).

The importance of octavo format for amateur instruction in music was

brought home to me when I was looking at the Houghton Library copies of
Playfords Introduction to the Skill of Musick. The library possesses exemplars
of nearly every edition from 1654 through 1730. As I was working through
these copies in chronological order, I found an anomaly in the call numbers,
which were generally Mus 286 followed by the last two digits of the year, as
Mus 286.54* for the first edition in 1654. Strangely, the 1667 edition had a
call number Mus 286.67.5*, which I thought must have been a mistake, and
so I decided to call up Mus 286.67*. What appeared was Nivers Trait de
la composition de musque [sic] of 1667, a work I had known only in the transla-
tion by Albert Cohen. It had never occurred to me to wonder what it looked
like. Seeing this French treatise on composition, identical in size to the row
of Playford introductions, made me understand at a glance that it belonged
to the genre of elementary instruction in counterpoint. Clearly, printers on
360 Jessie Ann Owens

both sides of the channel were using identical formats for these books, and
the formats reinforced their kinship. Nivers and Playford were in eect close
cousins, to be sure, speaking in dierent languages.
One final example sheds further light on the octavo. William Holders A
treatise of the natural grounds, and principles of harmony (1694, Wing H2389)
seems at first far too high-brow to fit the general type of books in octavo for-
mat. Holder (16161698) was not a professional musician but rather an accom-
plished amateur; he described himself on the title page as William Holder,
D. D.[,] Fellow of the Royal Society and late Sub-Dean of Their Majesties
Chappel-Royal. Thanks to the fortuitous preservation of extensive corre-
spondence about the production of this book, we can see the deliberate deci-
sion to position it alongside the best-known octavos of its day, Playford and
Simpson. The correspondence records eorts over sixteen months (from
August 1692 to November 1693) to see Holders treatise through the press.
Most of the letters were written by John Bayard, whom Holder had commis-
sioned to serve as editor and intermediary between the various tradesmen
involved in the production. We see in excruciating detail the progress of the
book, sheet by sheet, as proofs were reviewed by Bayard, sent to Holder, and
back to the publisher (John Carr) and printer (John Heptinsall). In his letter
of 3 November 1693, Bayard accounted for the cost of printing 500 copies (23
11s.), and concluded, I do think it convenient when it is published to sell them
at 2 shillings ye Book bound in sheepes leather and 2 shill. 6 pence if they are
bound in calf which is the same price as Simpsons Compendium and Play-
fords Introduction is sold at, which are of the same volume with your Book.
For our purposes, it is telling that Holders treatise would be paired in price
and size with Playford and Simpson, especially since fitting the textand the
tables and diagramsonto the small octavo pages had proven a challenge. In
fact, one of the British Library copies of the 1694 edition (shelfmark 1042.e.11)
is bound with the 1694 edition of Playfords Introduction. While in some ways
not a typical octavo, Holders treatise, with its curious blend of musical rudi-
ments and mathematical explanations of tuning, enjoyed enough success to
merit two posthumous editions (1701 and 1731).
In Holders book, as well as in others at both ends of the chronological
spectrum, we sometimes see octavo having a function other than as a mass-
market textbook. During the 1580s it was used for two learned disquisi-
tions on the nature and use of music, both published in Oxford: Anonymous,
The praise of musicke: wherein besides the antiquitie, dignitie, delectation, & vse
thereof in ciuill matters, is also declared the sober and lawfull vse of the same in
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 361

the congregation and church of God (1586, STC 20184), and John Case, Apo-
logia musices tam vocalis quam instrumentalis et mixt (1588, STC 4755). In
the second half of the seventeenth century, Thomas Salmon published his
attempt to reform musical clefsAn essay to the advancement of musick, by
casting away the perplexity of dierent clis. And uniting all sorts of musick lute,
viol, violin, organ, harpsechord, voice, &c. in one universal character (1672, Wing
S417)in octavo, maybe hoping for readership from Playfords audience, and
Matthew Locke used the same format for his vitriolic responses. In these
examples, octavo can be seen simply as a very inexpensive way of bringing
out a book.

BROADSIDE BROADSHEET
When Playford was deliberating about how to expand the Principles of the
Theorique part of Musick from the 1651 volume, he considered another for-
mat in addition to octavo. He writes in the 1654 A breefe introduction:
Courteous Reader: I was desired by some Masters to Print the Scale of
Musick, or Gam-ut, in a halfe sheet of Paper, to put in a Schollers Book,
to save the pains of writing; which I intended onely to have done; but upon
second thoughts I have altred my minde, and made the addition of some
necessary plain Rules for the better understanding thereof, and the help of
Beginners. (sig. A2)

In other words, he considered putting all the information on a fold-out

pagea halfe sheet of Paperinserted into a book, just as Bathe (or his
publisher) had done in A briefe introduction to the skill of song, even calling
it out in the title: Also a table newly added of the companions of cleues, how
one followeth another for the naming of notes: with other necessarie examples, to
further the learner.
This format, known as broadside or broadsheet, oered a convenient
way to fit a great deal of information on a single page. The page could be at-
tached to a wall or kept ready to hand, or it could be tipped into a volume as
a fold-out sheet. This format has not been suciently studied as a method of
elementary music instruction, perhaps because the survival rate is poor and
the bibliographical trail hard to follow. Table 17.1 lists a sampling of Euro-
pean broadsides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
From surviving examples we can imagine that the subjects covered a wide
range of elementary instruction in music. One type provides instruction on a
particular instrument. For example, Dinko Fabris has identified seven broad-
362 Jessie Ann Owens

TABLE 17.1. A sampling of European didactic broadsides.

a) Intabulation, fingering charts

Regole per accordare il liuto (Rome: Antonio Strambi, [before 1540?])
Bologna, Museo Civico Bibliografico, B.145
Dinko Fabris, Lute Tablature Instructions in Italy: A Survey of the Regole from
1507 to 1759, in Performance on Lute, Guitar, and Vihuela: Historical Practice and
Modern Interpretation, ed. Victor A. Coelho (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 1646; see esp. 4244 for a discussion of the lute broadsides
Michele Carara, Regola ferma et vera per intavolare nel liuto (Rome: Ettore Ruberti, 1585)
Fabris, Lute Tablature Instructions, 43; Michele Carrara, Intavolatura di Liuto,
1585, ed. Benvenuto Disertori (Florence: Leo S. Olschski, [1956])
b) Rudiments of music
Giovanni Francesco da Ferrara, Principium et ars totius musicae (four editions: Rome,
Modena, Antwerp, and an unidentified location; dating from the early sixteenth to the
early seventeenth centuries)
Eugeen Schreurs and Jan Van der Stock, Principium et ars tocius musice: An early
example of mensural music printing in the Low Countries (ca. 15001508), Music
Fragments and Manuscripts in the Low Countries, Yearbook of the Alamire Foun-
dation 2 (1997), 17182
Anonymous, Monochorum. Regula musica (sixteenth century)
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 2.o Mus. Pr. 156/11
Laura Youens, Forgotten Puzzles: Canons by Pieter Maessens, Revue belge de
musicologie 46 (1992): 86; my thanks to Dr. Katelijne Schiltz for sharing copies of
broadsides from the Munich collection.
Sigismundus Salminger, Gradatio, siue scala principiorum artis musicae, pro tyronibus,
iam primum incipientibus (Augsburg: Philipp Ulhard, [ca. 1545])
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 2.o Mus. Pr. 156/8
Regola universale facile et sicura di rova tutte le note overo mutationi di canto in qual si
voglia chiave (Rome: Nicolo van Aolst, 1587; lost, survives in Philip Hainhofers lute
manuscript of 1603)
Fabris, Lute Tablature Instructions, 42
Jacques Cossard, Pour apprendre chanter (Paris, 1633), reproduced from Cossard,
Mthodes pour apprendre lire (Paris, 1633); preserved in Paris, Bibliothque Nationale
MSS. N.a.f. 4671, f. 51
Kate van Orden, Childrens Voices: Singing and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century
France, Early Music History 25 (2006): 20956, esp. 249; my thanks to Professor
van Orden for sharing this material in advance of publication.
c) Counterpoint, thoroughbass
Francesco Bianciardi, Breve regola per imparar a sonar sopra il Basso con ogni sorte distru-
mento (Siena: Enrico Zucchi, 1607)
Bologna, Civico museo bibliografico musicale, C.96
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 363

sides among Italian lute sources from 1507 to 1759. He describes them as
follows: Engraved on only one side, the sheet typically contains the figure of
a lute, a short piece of vocal music transcribed into several dierent types of
tablature, and brief rules for reading music and intabulation.
Sometimes the broadside simply contains an illustration of the instru-
ment, showing the fingering. For example, Henry Playford advertised in 1694
A Table Engraven on Copper, shewing any Note with the Compass of the
Bass-Viol; very Beneficial to Young Practitioners on that Instrument. These
sorts of illustrations are also frequently included in music textbooks, for ex-
ample, the bass viol on page 88 of the 1683 An Introduction to the Skill of Musick
(sig. G3v).
Another type of didactic broadside attempts to present the entire range
of musical rudimentsgamut, notation of pitch and rhythm, modes and
psalm tones, etc. A widely disseminated and enduring example is Principium
et ars totius musicae (various spellings), known to have been published from
the beginning of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth,
both north and south of the Alps. Broadsides of this sort typically include
a Guidonian hand, an illustration of the hexachords and mutation, mensural
notation, and rules for psalm tones and modes.
An English example of this type is The Scale, or Basis of Musick (see
figure 17.8). It does not exist as an independent bibliographical entity, but is
found as a folded sheet in some of the copies of James Cliords The Divine Ser-
vices, the second, much enlarged edition of anthem texts that was published in
1664. Cliords publication can be viewed as part of the enormous project of
restoring the liturgical practices of the Book of Common Prayer following the
restoration of Charles II as King of England in 1660and of addressing the
need for music education. This sheet contains the rudiments of music written
by Ralph Winterton, a physician and professor of medicine at Cambridge.
Although it was known to W. Barclay Squire, it has not been recognized as
a pedagogical tool in its own right. It contains the scale with mnemonic verse
about the rule of mi, a method for determining solmization based on the key
signature frequently found in English pedagogical texts, including Playford
(see figures 17.6 and 17.7). The Scale, or Basis also has examples for prac-
ticing solmization that show transposition by clef and signature, and a sta
showing the duration of notes and rests. The bottom third of the sheet is an
explanation in prose of the rudiments presented above in the Table.
Other broadsides covered more advanced topics, such as counterpoint
and thorough bass. One that has not survived, which Playford advertised in
364 Jessie Ann Owens

FIGURE 17.8. Ralph Winterton, The Scale, or Basis of Musick, in James Cliord,
The Divine Services (London, 1664), Shelfmark: Bliss B 274, fold-out between pp. 428
& 429 (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford).

1682 and 1683, is A Sheet of plain Rules and Directions for Composing Musick
in Parts. by Mr. John Birchenshaw Price 6 d. It could conceivably be the
great Card of the body of Musique, which Birchensha used in 1662 when he
was teaching Samuel Pepys. Pepys writes that Birchensha cries [it] up for a
FIGURE 17.9. Anonymous, A compendium, containing exact rules to be observed in the
composing of two or more parts (London, 1673) (*EB65 A100 B675b v. 3, Houghton
Library, Harvard University).
366 Jessie Ann Owens

FIGURE 17.10. John Playford, An introduction to the skill of musick (London, 1683), sig.
I4vI5r (pp. 23) (Private collection).

rare thing; and I do believe it cost much pains, but is not so usefull as he would
have it. Field and Wardhaugh speculate that it may be a chart of consonant
and dissonant intervals in all keys.
A second example of this type has survived in a unique copy in the
Houghton Library; apparently overlooked until now, it provides a brief ac-
count of concords and discords, a description of the possible kinds of motion
in two-voice counterpoint, and then four rules for handling concords and four
for discords. Entitled A compendium, containing exact rules to be observed in the
composing of two or more parts, either for vocal or instrumental musick (Wing
C5609A), it was printed for William Gilbert at the Half-Moon in St. Pauls-
church-yard in 1673 (see figure 17.9). This title found its way into Robert
Clavells 1675 catalogue of books printed in England among the octavos as A
Compendium or Rules for Composing two or more parts, either for Vocal
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 367

FIGURE 17.11. John Playford, An introduction to the skill of musick (London, 1683), sig.
I5vI6r (pp. 45) (Private collection).

or Instrumental Musick. Printed for W. Gilbert. In the 1680 catalogue, it

appeared among the quarto, octavo, & twelves as Compend. for Vocal or
Instrumental Musick, a sheet. I suspect that the catalogues are listing the
same item.
Ten years later, in 1683, Playford altered the tenth edition of An introduc-
tion to the skill of musick to oer a new explanation of counterpoint, described
on the title page as The third [book], the art of descant, or composing of musick in
parts, in a more plain and easie method than any heretofore published (see figures
17.10 and 17.11). He writes in the preface: Also I have in a brief method set
forth the Art of Composing Two, Three, and Four Parts Musically; in such
easie and plain Rules as are most necessary to be understood by Young Prac-
titioners, which were never before Printed, but now in this Tenth Edition.
His claim that the material had never been printed is false: he has in fact used
the text of the 1673 broadside verbatim.
368 Jessie Ann Owens

Whatever the borrowing may tell us about how literally we should take
any of Playfords statements, it surely reinforces the kinship between the small
octavos and the large broadsides for pedagogical use. The close connection
between the contents should not be surprising because both are inexpensive
ways of providing elementary instruction in music.

UPR IGHT QUARTO

The two remaining formats, upright quarto and folio, need to be seen as some-
what rarified, especially in contrast to broadside and octavo. In England, at
least, upright quarto seems to be associated with learned volumes, including
what we would today call vanity publications, financed by the author. (In the
discussion that follows, I will refer to upright quarto simply as quarto.)
The distinction between quarto and octavo was brought home for me
while I was working on Charles Butlers The principles of musik, in singing and
setting: vvith the two-fold use therof, ecclesiasticall and civil (1636, STC 4196). I
was using the Da Capo facsimile edition of Butlers Principles. Because it was
almost identical in size to the facsimile of Playfords Introduction, I had not
realized that there was a dierence in format. Even facsimiles, ostensibly
reproductions of the original, can obscure the material form of a book. It took
working with the actual books to make clear that Butlers quarto belongs to
quite a dierent world from Playfords octavo.
Over the course of his long life (he lived from 1560 to 1647), Butler pub-
lished extensively; the correlation between format and content is telling.
After university, he worked as a schoolteacher from 1595 to 1600, and in 1597
published one of the myriad adaptations of Ramuss Rhetoric that went to
many editions, all but one of them either octavo or the even smaller duo-
decimo. His other title in octavo was a treatise about bees, The feminine mon-
archie, published in 1609; an enlarged edition would appear in quarto in 1623.
The rest of his titlesa book on marriage law (1625), one on oratory (1629),
one combining the rhetoric and oratory treatises (1629), one on English gram-
mar (1633 and 1634), an edition of the bee treatise in reformed spelling (1634),
and finally one on music (1636)all appeared in quarto, mostly at his own ex-
pense (impensis authoris), and from 1634 in his idiosyncratic version of English
spelling. Butlers The principles of musik consists of two separate essaysone
an introduction to music, the other a reflection on the social uses of music;
they bristle with erudition, including marginal notes and end notes with their
own marginal references (see figure 17.12). The divide we see in his books
FIGURE 17.12. Charles Butler, The principles of musik (London, 1636), 19. Reproduced
by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
370 Jessie Ann Owens

between the school texts in small, cheap formats running to many editions
and the heavily researched, self-published titles underscores the meaning of
quarto as a signifier of erudition, not destined for the commercial market.
That this understanding was widely held can be seen in the correspon-
dence concerning the publication of Holders 1694 treatise, discussed above.
The letters reveal a significant amount of customization in the production.
For example, some sheets were printed on higher quality paper, some in a
larger size. There were also four dierent title pages. Holder was evidently
very displeased that books had been printed as published by the author
rather than by John Carr. Bayard, in a letter written in December 1693, ad-
dressed the issue of the title pages:

[I] found, that the books of that sort of paper [smaller size], which were
bound up in hast in sheeps leather [the cheapest binding] for the Feast [of
St. Cecilia], had the title dierent printed from those of that paper I sent
you [larger size]; and were not printed for the Author, and this I do assure
you of now; and that there was not one of this larger paper exposed at that
time. It seems tis very usual to print books with such dierent titles; and
that those of larger paper they commonly express to be printed for the Author
[italics added for emphasis]; so that as I said, you have not the least reason
to be discomposed any further about it.

Larger paper, and by implication, quarto format, normally indicated self-

published works.
Among the books printed in quarto are two titles associated with the
Royal SocietyWilliam Lord Brounckers translation, Renatus Des-Cartes
excellent compendium of musick: with necessary and judicious animadversions
thereupon. By a person of honour (1653, Wing D1132) and Francis North, Baron
Guilfords A philosophical essay of musick directed to a friend (1677, Wing
G2216). Also in quarto is a curious pamphlet, possibly the work of Thomas
Salmon, The musicall compass (1684, Wing M3162), which presents the rudi-
ments of music by means of three engraved illustrations and an accompanying
four-page poem.
The category of books published in upright quarto also contains a num-
ber of titles that could be described as collections of music with some sort of
didactic introduction. For example, Thomas Ravenscroft began a collection
of four-voice part-songs with a treatise on the notation of rhythm: A briefe
discourse of the true (but neglected) vse of charactring the degrees, by their perfec-
tion, imperfection, and diminution in measurable musicke, against the common
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 371

practise and custome of these times. Examples whereof are exprest in the harmony
of 4. voyces, concerning the pleasure of 5. vsuall recreations. 1 Hunting, 2 hawking,
3 dauncing, 4 drinking, 5 enamouring (1614, STC 20756). The treatise takes
the format of the music it precedes, written in a choirbook format with four
parts on each opening. Another example is Thomas Robinsons brief tutor
that begins his New citharen lessons, with perfect tunings of the same, from foure
course of strings to fourteene course, euen to trie the sharpest teeth of enuie, with
lessons of all sortes, and methodicall instructions for all professors and practitioners
of the citharen (1609, STC 21127), published by Barley and similar in function,
though not in format, to the 1596 Pathway.
Given the widespread use at this time of upright quarto for vocal mu-
sic, it is no surprise that Elway Bevin would publish his A briefe and short
instruction of the art of musicke, to teach how to make discant, of all proportions
that are in vse: very necessary for all such as are desirous to attaine to knowledge
in the art; and may by practice, if they can sing, soone be able to compose three,
foure, and five parts: and also to compose all sorts of canons that are usuall, by
these directions of two or three parts in one, upon the plain-song (1631, STC 1986)
in that format. This is a book with many more notes than words, one that
mostly teaches by example rather than by explanation. In these instances,
the prevailing practice for the printing of music dictated the format for the
pedagogical texts.

FOLIO

Thomas Morley was the first English writer to use folio format for a music
textbook. He published A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke, set
downe in forme of a dialogue: deuided into three partes, the first teacheth to sing
with all things necessary for the knowledge of pricktsong. The second treateth of
descante and to sing two parts in one vpon a plainsong or ground, with other things
necessary for a descanter. The third and last part entreateth of composition of three,
foure, fiue or more parts with many profitable rules to that eect. With new songs
of, 2. 3. 4. and .5 [sic] parts (STC 18133) in 1597, and a second edition appeared
posthumously, in 1608 (STC 18134). Morley seems consciously to be setting
his book apart from the two 1596 music texts discussed aboveBathes octavo
and Barleys oblong quarto. His models may well have been ambitious folios
such as those published on the continent by Gaurius, Glarean, Zarlino,
and Zacconi, but he is also familiar with quartos such as Tigrini and Orni-
thoparchus, and with octavos such as Beurhusius and Lossius.
FIGURE 17.13. Thomas Morley, A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke
(London, 1597), 2 (Private collection).
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 373

Morleys use of an elaborate woodcut for the title page heightens the im-
pression of authority created by the format. Yet the book is far from a luxury
item (see figure 17.13). It is in small folio format, and the surviving copies at-
test to the considerable diculty of printing an accurate copy: a significant
number of formes exist in more than one state. Morleys text did not enjoy
the popularity later enjoyed by Playford or Simpson, but the large number of
surviving copies of the two editions and the evidence of hard use by readers
attest to its significance.
Only two other seventeenth-century writers would use folio format
for their treatises, John Dowland and Thomas Mace. Dowland, for reasons
that have yet to be established, published a translation of Andreas Orni-
thoparchuss Micrologus, which was first published as an oblong quarto in
1517 (with many subsequent editions), in folio in 1609 (see figure 17.14). This
musica practica consists of four books, the first, second, and fourth of which
cover standard topics: the principles of plaine song (i.e., pitch), Mensurall
Song (rhythm), and Counterpoint. The third book deals with ecclesiasti-
cal accenthow to intone the Latin of the epistles, gospels, and other parts
of the Catholic liturgy. The value of Ornithoparchuss nearly century-old
German school-text, with its connections to Catholic practice, for a musi-
cian in Jacobean England is far from clear. Perhaps the reasons are to be
found in Dowlands biography. He dedicates the book to Robert Cecil, Earl
of Salisbury, one of the most influential politicians of his time. In his letter
of dedication, Dowland, who had returned to England but was still seeking
a place at court, seems to acknowledge the datedness of the endeavor, but
nonetheless seeks the benefits of Cecils patronage: am I emboldened to
present this Father of Musicke Ornithoparchus to your worthyest Patron-
age, whose approoued Workes in my trauailes (for the common good of
our Musitians) I haue reduced into our English Language. Beseeching your
Lorship (as a chiefe Author of all our good) graciously to receiue this poore
presentment, whereby your Lordship shall encourage me to a future taske,
more new in subiect, and as memorable in worth. Copies were still available
in 1690.
Thomas Mace used folio format for his massive Musicks monument; or,
A remembrancer of the best practical musick, both divine, and civil, that has ever
been known, to have been in the world. Divided into three parts. The first part,
shews a necessity of singing psalms well, in parachial churches, or not to sing at
all directing, how they may be well sung, certainly; by two several ways, or means;
with an assurance of perpetual national-quire; and also shewing, how cathedral
FIGURE 17.14. Andreas Ornithoparchus, Micrologus (London, 1609), 8. Reproduced
by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Figure 17.15. Thomas Mace, Musicks monument (London, 1676), 79. Reproduced
by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
376 Jessie Ann Owens

musick, may be much improved, and refined. The second part, Treats of the noble
lute, (the best of instruments) now made easie; and all its occult-locked-up-secrets
plainly laid open, never before discovered; . . . directing the most ample way, for
the use of the Theorboe, from o the note, in confort, &c. . . . In the third part, the
generous viol, in its rightest use, is treated upon (1676, Wing M120) (see figure
17.15). Musicks monument was self-published, financed by the 304 subscrib-
ers whose names were listed at the beginning of the book, each of whom
committed to pay the pre-publication price of 12s (in sheets, unbound, with
binding available at cost). Mace, identified on the title as one of the Clerks
of Trinity Colledge, in the University of Cambridge, was sixty-three years
old and eager to hold onto a musical world that had long since vanished. It is
possible that he chose the format to accommodate both the length of his text
and the large number of musical examples and compositions. He announced
his music text, then entitled A Remembrancer, at the end of his 1675 pamphlet
(quarto), Profit, conveniency, and pleasure, to the whole nation. Being a short
rational discourse, lately presented to His Majesty, concerning the high-ways of
England, and listed the names of friends and relatives in York, Nottingham,
Cambridge, Norwich, and London where subscribers could pick up and pay
for their books.
The other didactic texts in folio format are all associated with collections
of instrumental music that by convention appeared in folio rather than oblong
quarto. In this category are the didactic prefaces in:
1) Thomas Robinson, The schoole of musicke: wherein is taught, the perfect
method, of true fingering of the lute, pandora, orpharion, and viol de gamba;
with most infallible generall rules, both easie and delightfull. Also, a method,
how you may be your owne instructer for prick-song, by the help of your lute,
without any other teacher: with lessons of all sorts, for your further and better
instruction (1603, STC 21128)
2) Varietie of lute-lessons: viz. fantasies, pauins, galliards, almaines, corantoes,
and volts: selected out of the best approued authors, as well beyond the seas as of
our owne country. By Robert Douland. VVhereunto is annexed certaine obse-
ruations belonging to lute-playing: by Iohn Baptisto Besardo of Visonti. Also a
short treatise thereunto appertayning: by Iohn Douland Batcheler of Musicke
(1610, STC 7100)
3) Christopher Simpson, The division-violist: or An introduction to the playing
upon a ground: divided into two parts. The first, directing the hand, with other
preparative instructions. The second, laying open the manner and method of
playing ex-tempore, or composing division to a ground. To which, are added
some divisions made upon grounds for the practice of learners (1659, Wing
S3813; three additional editions)
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 377

"

It is clear that formatand its corollary, sizedoes matter. This survey

of early modern English texts suggests that the small (octavo) and very big
(broadside) formats were destined to be inexpensive tools for student or ama-
teur instruction. Pedagogical prefaces accompanying musical editions were
also common, and came in the formats standard for the particular type of
music (upright quarto, oblong quarto, folio, etc.). Upright quartos were clearly
designed for a more elite audience, and typically were in eect self-published.
Folios were too rare to make generalizations possible. Morley may have had
continental models in mind for his A plaine and easie introduction to practicall
musicke; the other folios were generally associated, directly or indirectly, with
lute or viol music.
Format is also a powerful, if not always appreciated factor in historiogra-
phy. It plays a role in the survival of printed material. The larger books tend
to be more durable; they are less likely to be read and consumed, and then
once they ceased to fill their original function they were more valuable to col-
lectors than smaller books. Perhaps because of this survival rate, or perhaps
because larger books also tended to be more substantive, the larger formats
also dominate our histories of theory. For example, Gustave Reeses survey,
Fourscore Classics of Music Literature, published in 1957, cites some twenty-six
titles in the Renaissance section, eighteen of which were published between
1500 and 1600. Of these eighteen, over half (10) are folios (Aron, Glarean,
Bermudo, Vicentino, Zarlino, Sancta Maria, Salinas, Galilei, Zacconi, and
Diruta), two are oblong quartos (Virdung and Silvestro de Ganassi), four
are upright quartos (Schlick, Heyden, Finck, and Bottrigari), only one is an
octavo (Agricola); none are broadsides. This is a history based on large books.
And Reese is not alone; this is the standard stu of histories of theory.
This view doesnt reflect the actual production of books during this cen-
tury. We can get a much better read on actual production by using ke Da-
vidssons catalogue of sixteenth-century printed music treatises. An analysis
of two random slices of his data (about one-third of his 613 titles) shows that
over half (56 percent) were octavos, about a third quartos, and only 7 percent
folios.
It is also important to be cautious about how large books were con-
sumed. For example, Judd posits for Glareans tome a rather narrowly de-
378 Jessie Ann Owens

fined community of university-trained northern humanist readers; the sur-

vival of presentation copies suggests a particular group of humanist readers,
often with training in philosophy and theology. And for Zarlino, who
reissued Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558) two times (1561, 1562) with new title
pages, she imagines a printing strategy not so much tied to a commercial
market but to career advancement. We take figures such as Glarean and
Zarlino to be the pillars of music theory; we cant help but be influenced
by their heft. But are we writing a history of books bought by few and read
by even fewer? It would be interesting to write a history of theory from the
perspective of format: the story told by octavos would be far dierent from
that by the folios.
We are now at a curious moment in the history of the book. Thanks
to the industry of several centuries of musical scholarship by Hawkins and
Gerbert and Coussemaker, and now to the miracles of technology, we can
be virtually divorced from the texts in their original forms. Thesaurus musi-
carum latinarum (TML) and its companion databases have harnessed digital
technology and the internet to create the ultimate anthology of theoreti-
cal texts. These texts are available in a curiously disembodied form; we can
search individual words but we have precious little sense of the materiality
of the books or manuscripts from which these texts have been drawn. The
original form disappearsand with it, more often than we realize, a sense
of the function that the form can communicate. While I revel in the access
to the texts that TML makes possible, I nonetheless want to underscore the
central message of this essay: the importance of working directly with the
books themselves, and of learning to understand the significance of their
material forms.

NOTES
I read a version of this article as a keynote address at the 2005 NEH conference in
Baltimore, Reading and Writing the Pedagogies of the Renaissance: The Student, the Study
Materials, and the Teacher of Music, 14701650, and an earlier version under the title Catch
as Catch Can: The Material Form of Musical Instruction in Early Modern England, at the
2003 Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society. I am indebted to Professors
Jane Bernstein, Ellen Harris, Cristle Collins Judd, Kate van Orden, Jeremy Smith, and Pe-
ter Stallybrass for valuable suggestions. STC and Wing numbers are taken from the online
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC, British Library). I generally provide the full title as
it is given in ESTC the first time I refer to a book, and use a short title thereafter.
1. The late Harold Powers first drew my attention to this problem in his critical and
yet sympathetic assessment of Pietro Aarons work on mode; see his Is mode real? Pietro
Aron, the octenary system, and polyphony, Basler Jahrbuch fr historische Musikpraxis
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 379

16 (1992): 952; trans. Annie Curdevey as Le mode est-il une ralit? Pietro Aaron, le
systme octonaire et la polyphonie, in Lire, composer, analyser la Renaissance (Paris and
Tours: Minerve, 2003), 177238.
2. The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 123.
3. Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 8 (2002): www.sscm-jscm.org/v8/no1/gouk
.html (accessed 16 May 2009).
4. Cristle Collins Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory: Hearing with the Eyes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
5. For example, Robert D. Hume, Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles
of Archaeo-Historicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79, laments the lack of
attention to format: We must also remember that the material text itself often sends out
powerful signals about how it is to be interpretedfolio, quarto, pamphlet, and broadside
produce very dierent impressions, as can typography and contextual content. My thanks
to Ellen Harris for this reference. See, for example, Daniel Heartz, Typography and For-
mat in Early Music Printing: With Particular Reference to Attaingnants First Publica-
tions, MLA Notes 23 (1967): 702706. D. W. Krummel, English Music Printing 15531700
(London: The Bibliographical Society, 1975), while focused primarily on type, never strays
far from considerations of convention, market, and format. And the recent article by Kate
van Orden, Childrens Voices: Singing and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century France, Early
Music History 25 (2006): 20956, also considers format in the context of music pedagogy
in France.
6. Paul F. Grendler, Form and Function in Italian Renaissance Popular Books, Ren-
aissance Quarterly 46 (1993): 45185; the passage quoted is from pp. 45152.
7. There are a number of surveys of the surviving texts, including Morrison Comegys
Boyd, Elizabethan Music and Music Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1940; 2nd edition, 1962; rev. edition, 1974); a series of articles by Lillian Ru in The
Consort (19641970); Barry Cooper, Englische Musiktheorie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,
in Entstehung Nationaler Traditionen: Frankreich, England (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftli-
che Buchgesellschaft, 1986); and Rebecca Herissone, Music Theory in Seventeenth-Century
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), with useful appendices listing printed
sources in alphabetical and chronological order. As a rule, the focus in these studies is on
content rather than on the physical characteristics of the books. Another angle from which
to view these texts is through their social function in the educational system. See Jane
Flynn, The Education of Choristers in England During the Sixteenth Century, in English
Choral Practice 14001650, ed. John Morehen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 18099; and Susan F. Weiss, Didactic Sources of Music Learning in Early Modern
England, in Didactic Literature in England 15001800: Expertise Constructed, ed. Natasha
Glaisyer and Sara Pennell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). See also my study Concepts of Pitch
in English Music Theory, 15601640, in Tonal Structures in Early Music, ed. Cristle Collins
Judd (New York: Garland, 1998), 183246.
8. Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972;
paperback edition, 1995), 177, estimates that in the sixteenth century the cost of paper was
as high as 75 percent of the total.
9. Ibid., 78117; citation from p. 78.
10. David Gants (A Discussion of Project Methods, Early English Booktrade Data-
base: www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/Gants/EEBD/methods.html) reviews various measures of
productivity (for example, title, lines of type, or edition sheet), and explains why the latter
is chosen for the Early English Booktrade Database. My thanks to John Buchtel for this
reference. A vivid example of the cost of producing a music book in England can be seen in
Margaret Dowlings fascinating study of the litigation surrounding the publication of John
380 Jessie Ann Owens

Dowlands 1600 lute song folio (The Printing of John Dowlands Second Booke of Songs or
Ayres, The Library, ser. 4, no. 12 [1932]: 36579); the folio edition was to consist of 1025
copies of twelve and a half sheets each. My thanks to Jeremy Smith for reminding me of
this article. See below, for a discussion of the production of Holders 1694 A treatise of the
natural grounds, and principles of harmony.
11. Gaskell, A New Introduction, 80.
12. An interesting snapshot of book sizes, as measured by the cost of various kinds of
bindings, is the 1619 price list A generall note of the prises for binding of all sorts of bookes
(STC 16768.6). The rough categories are folio, 4, 8, etc., but within folio are the further
qualifiers large, small, medium. The price lists have been published by Mirjam Foot, Some
Bookbinders Price Lists of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in Studies in the
History of Bookbinding (Brookfield, Conn.: Scholar Press, 1993). But see the recent study
by Stuart Bennett, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles 16601800 (New Castle, Del.: Oak
Knoll Press and the British Library, 2004). My thanks to Peter Stallybrass for this refer-
ence. On paper sizes and printing formats see Bennett, Trade Bookbinding, 168; and Gaskell,
A New Introduction, 7375.
13. My thanks to Peter Stallybrass for suggesting this line of inquiry.
14. ESTC, following Wing, gives the date as [1670?]. Lenore Coral dated it 1653 on
the basis of the address of Playfords shop. She transcribed and analyzed the contents in A
John Playford Advertisement, RMA Research Chronicle 5 (1965): 112. Krummel, English
Music Printing, 115, suggests that Playford might have come into possession of the stock of
unsold music from the last of the music patentees.
15. On Clavell see Bennett, Trade Bookbinding, 2023.
16. The title page claims that The pathway has a treatise of Descant, & certaine Tables,
vvhich doth teach hovv to remoue any song higher, or lovver from one Key to another, neuer
heretofore published. While some scholars have suggested that these certain tables are
missing, Theodore Dumitrescu (personal correspondence) argues that we should be looking
for something allowing one to read a piece in a dierent clef, and not to perform transposi-
tion in the modern sense. He points out that near the opening of the counterpoint sections
of The pathway, a number of examples make mention of sight for changing written pitch
into a dierent sung pitch, connected to music where a single note is supplied with an
additional number indicating a sounding interval in a dierent octave. The table of four
examples at the bottom of sig. F iir is a good example, with the text, In these fower your
sight euer by duplication, triplication, and quadruplication of voyce. The sight technique
had never received a printed explanation before, as all other known examples come from
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, where it is discussed similarly in a number of coun-
terpoint treatises. Thomas Morley (A plaine and easie introduction [London, 1597], sig. *3v)
certainly recognized the source used by the author of The pathway: And the last part of his
booke treating of Descant, he tooke verbatim out of an old written booke which I haue. But
it should seeme, that whatsoeuer or whosoeuer he was, that gaue it to the presse, was not
the Author of it himselfe, else would he haue set his name to it, or then hee was ashamed
of his labour (cited from Texts in English on Music, directed by Peter Leerts: www.chmtl
.indiana.edu/tme/ [accessed 18 March 2008]).
17. John M. Ward, Barleys Songs without Words, Lute Society Journal 12 (1970): 522,
esp. 1415. ESTC still treats them as separate titles. A note to A new booke (STC 1433) reads:
An introduction to prickesong = The pathway to musicke (STC 19464, possibly edited by
Barley), with which this was intended to be issued (accessed 27 December 2008).
18. Ian Harwood, Wire Strings at Helmingham Hall: an Instrument and a Music Book
(Lute Society Booklets 10 [2005]). Harwood provides a detailed study of the copy discov-
ered at Helmingham Hall in the library of Lord Tollemache. (I thank Lord Tollemache for
permission to examine the volume; I am also grateful to Ruth Smith for her assistance on
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 381

this visit.) See also Matthew Spring, The Lute in Britain: A History of the Instrument and its
Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 138.
19. The British Library owns all four parts, originally bound together, but now bound
separately as A new booke and The pathway; the Huntington Library possesses the lute
section (1596) and a 1637 reissue of The pathway; the Helmingham Hall copy, which is miss-
ing some leaves, contains The pathway, the orpharion and the bandora sections; the Royal
College of Music copy contains the three instrumental sections. See Ward, Barleys Song,
1415, and Harwood, Wire Strings, 3841.
20. The dating is by Jeremy Smith on the basis of watermark evidence and the business
practices of the printer Thomas East; see Thomas East and Music Publishing in Renaissance
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Smith makes clear the significance of
1596 for music publication. England had a complex system that included registration of
individual titles by the Company of Stationers and patents or monopolies issued by the
Crown for classes or categories of books. The music patent was not assigned between 1596
and 1599. East took advantage of this gap to register a number of titles, including the Bathe
treatise. Barley, who was not a stationer, could have registered the book through the printer,
J. Danter, but chose not to. The gap in the patent meant that East and Barley could publish
music with no adverse consequences.
21. Cited from Ward, Barleys Songs, 17. For a discussion of Barleys indebtedness to
LeRoy, see Harwood, Wire Strings, 46.
22. I would like to thank Jane Bernstein, Ronald Broude, and Jeremy Smith for their
observations about this volume. I am also grateful to Stephen Tabor (Huntington Library)
for his assistance. The 1637 issue supplies legible text for sig. E, which was poorly inked in
the British Library copy of 1596.
23. It was not uncommon to try to market unsold sheets by adding a new title page,
sometimes claiming (falsely) to be a revised or corrected edition; see Bennett, Trade Book-
binding, 14. On Zarlinos use of this strategy, see below.
24. Adrienne Simpson, A Short-Title List of Printed English Instrumental Tutors
up to 1800, Found in the British Library, RMA Research Chronicle 6 (1966): 2450. Titles
include: English Dancing Master, 1651 (many eds.); A Booke of New Lessons [Cithern Git-
tern], 1652; Musicks Recreation [Lyra Viol], 1652 (several eds.); Davidson, Songs and Fancies,
1662 (two later eds.); Musicks Hand-Maide [Virginals, Harpsycon], 1663; Apollos Banquet
[Treble Violin], 1669 (many later eds.); Greeting, The Pleasant Companion [Flageolet], 1672;
Locke, Melothesia, 1673; A.B., Philo-Mus., Synopsis, 1680 (now edited by Rebecca Heris-
sone [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006]); Hudgebutt, Vade mecum (recorder), 1679. On Playford
see most recently, Stacey Jocoy [Houck], John Playford and the English Musical Market,
in Noyses, sounds, and sweet aires: Music in Early Modern England, comp. and ed. Jessie Ann
Owens (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2006), 4861.
25. On the 1584 book and its relationship to Bathes 1596 publication, see William Bathe,
A briefe introduction to the skill of song, ed. Kevin Karnes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
26. John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (London:
Novello, Ewer & Co., 1875), 497.
27. The anonymous and rare sales catalogue, Playfords Brief introduction to the skill
of musick. An account, with bibliographical notes, of an unique collection comprising all the
editions from 1654 to 1730. In the possession of Messrs. Ellis, London (London: Messrs. Ellis,
1926; copies at Houghton Library and the Huntington Library), provides a listing of all
extant editions with a bibliographic essay. The Huntington Library catalogue describes the
collection as being made by R. E. Brant, and lists Brant as an alternate author. Many of the
volumes listed in the catalogue are now in Houghton Library. See also Lillian M. Ru, A
Survey of John Playfords Introduction to the Skill of Music, The Consort 22 (1965): 3648;
and Herissone, Music Theory, app. C.
382 Jessie Ann Owens

28. STC 4542, listed in ESTC as [1610]. For the dating, see Christopher R. Wilson,
ed., A new way of making fowre parts in counterpoint by Thomas Campion. And, Rules how to
compose by Giovanni Coprario (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 47. Another example is the lost
treatise, A Briefe Instruction of Musicke, collected by P. Delamote Frenchman, Prin. By
Tho. Vautrollier. 1574. 8 [= octavo], listed in Maunsells 1595 Catalogue of English Printed
Books (STC 17669).
29. Birchensha writes, It was for your Profit and Benefit that I undertook this Trans-
lation: and that you might thereby understand the Rudiments and Principles both of the
Mathematical and Practical Parts of this Science (sig. A7r). He doubtless thought he was
translating Alsteds own work from his multivolume encyclopedia (1630); he would have
had little chance to recognize Alsteds source as Johannes Lippiuss Synopsis musicae no-
vae of 1612. See John Howard, Form and Method in Johannes Lippiuss Synopsis musicae
novae, Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985): 52450, at 54344. See the
forthcoming edition John Birchensha: Writings on Music, ed. Christopher Field and Ben-
jamin Wardhaugh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). It is noteworthy that Birchensha explicitly
acknowledges that he is part of a longer history of translating musical writing that includes
Dowland and Meibom.
30. 5 March 1667, cited from: www.pepys.info/1667/1667mar.html (accessed 15 May
2009).
31. Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, Treatise on the Composition of Music, trans. and ed.
Albert Cohen (Brooklyn: Institute of Mediaeval Music, [1961]).
32. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick from the original manuscripts,
with a life of John Aubrey and a foreword by Edmund Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1957), 160: He is very Musicall, both theoretically and practically, and he
had a sweete voyce.
33. British Library, Sloane MS 1388, fols. 56108. See Edward J. L. Scott, Index to the
Sloane Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1904).
34. H. Edmund Poole, The Printing of William Holders The Principles of Harmony,
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 101 (19741975): 3143. While this fascinating
article surely captures the important features of the correspondence, my cursory reading
suggests that there is additional material not quoted by Poole; the correspondence certainly
merits being published in full, in conjunction with a study of the surviving exemplars of
the 1694 edition.
35. Poole, The Printing, 37. By 14 December 1693 the total had climbed to 26 6s.
1d.: printer 14, paper 6 18s. 4d., wood cuts 1 14s., binding 1 14s. 7d. (this from a passage
not quoted by Poole).
36. It was also well thought of by both Burney and Hawkins. For a recent study of
Holder see Jerome Stanley, William Holder and His Position in Seventeenth-century Philoso-
phy and Music Theory (Lewiston: Mellon, 2002).
37. J. W. Binns, John Case and The Praise of Musicke, Music & Letters 55 (1974):
44453, established that Case was not the author of The praise of musicke; Binnss transla-
tion of Apologia musices is in progress.
38. Field and Wardhaugh, John Birchensha, forthcoming.
39. Playford continued, in the next paragraph: The Work as it is I must confesse is not
all my owne, some part of it was collected out of other mens writings, which I hope will the
more commend it (sig. A2v).
40. John Milsom, Songs and Society in Early Tudor London, Early Music History
16 (1997): 23593, provides a sobering view of the loss (and chance survival) of sixteenth-
century song-sheets. My focus is on didactic broadsides; for recent scholarship on the many
broadsides that contain musical canons, see Michael Lamla, Musical Canons on Artistic
Prints from the 16th to the 18th Centuries, in Music Fragments and Manuscripts in the Low
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 383

Countries, Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation 2 (1997), 479510; and Thomas Rder,
Verborgene Botschaften? Augsburger Kanons von 1548, in Canons and Canonic Tech-
niques, 14th16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History, ed. Katelijne Schiltz
and Bonnie J. Blackburn (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 23551.
41. Dinko Fabris, Lute Tablature Instructions in Italy: A Survey of the Regole from
1507 to 1759, in Performance on Lute, Guitar, and Vihuela: Historical Practice and Modern
Interpretation, ed. Victor A. Coelho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1646;
see esp. 4244 for a discussion of the lute broadsides.
42. In Thesaurus Musicus (London: J. Heptinstall for Henry Playford, 1694); also ad-
vertised in A Choice Collection of New Songs and Ballads (London, 1699) as A Sheet Engraven
on Copper, being Directions for the Bass Viol. Price. 6 d. and in the sixth edition of John
Playfords The whole book of psalms (London, 1700) as Also a large Sheet of Directions for
the Bass-Viol. Price 1 s.
43. Eugeen Schreurs and Jan Van der Stock, Principium et ars tocius musice: An early
example of mensural music printing in the Low Countries (ca. 15001508), in Music Frag-
ments and Manuscripts in the Low Countries, Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation 2 (1997),
17182.
44. I discuss this text at greater length in my forthcoming Ralph Winterton and The
Scale, or Basis of Musick: A Seventeenth-Century English Broadsheet.
45. See Norman Moore, Winterton, Ralph (16011636), rev. Michael Bevan, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29776
(accessed 3 January 2005).
46. W. Barclay Squire, Catalogue of Printed Music Published Between 1487 and 1800
Now in the British Museum (London, 1912), I: 279, description of James Cliord, Divine
Services (1664 ed.): wanting the Scale or Basis of Musick between pp. 428 and 429. See
also Cliord, James by W. B. Squire, rev. Peter Lynan, in the online edition of the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/5653 (ac-
cessed 3 January 2005).
47. Playford described the verses he included in the 1651 A Musicall Banquet as a Copy
of Verses which I have had by me for a long time, and though they be Ancient, the method
is true, and much matter couched in a few words (sig. A2v). It seems likely that Playford
and Winterton were both drawing on a received method for teaching solmization. For an
explanation, see my Concepts of pitch, 21215.
48. Choice Ayres and Songs to sing to the Theorbo-lute or Bass-viol (1683). I owe this refer-
ence to the late Lenore Coral. Christopher Field and Benjamin Wardhaugh, in their forth-
coming edition of Birchenshas writings, note its appearance a year earlier in John Playford,
Musicks Recreation on The Viol, Lyra-way, 2nd edition (London, 1682), sig. A4v.
49. www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1662/02/24/ (accessed 15 May 2009). See Leta Mill-
er, John Birchensha and the Early Royal Society: Grand Scales and Scientific Composi-
tion, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 115 (1990): 6379.
50. Field and Wardhaugh, John Birchensha, forthcoming.
51. Houghton Library, p EB65 A100 B675b v. 3 [No. B9 of the Marquess of Bute broad-
sides]. Edward Arber, The Term Catalogues, 16681709 (London: Arber, 1903), I: 151: A
Compendium, Containing exact Rules to be observed in the composing of two or more
parts, either for Vocal, or Instrumental, Musick. Price 6d. Printed for W. Gilbert at the Half
Moon in St. Pauls Churchyard. William Gilbert was a bookseller in London, from 1671 to
1673; see Donald Wing, A Short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, Ireland,
Wales, and British America, and of English books printed in other countries, 16411700, 2nd
edition (New York: MLA, 19721998), IV: 371.
52. John Playford, An introduction to the skill of musick, with new intro., glossary, and
index by Franklin B. Zimmerman (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 282 pp. illus., 23 cm.;
384 Jessie Ann Owens

Charles Butler, The principles of musik in singing and setting, intro. Gilbert Reaney (New
York: Da Capo Press, 1970), xv, 135 pp. illus., music, 23 cm. [actually 22 cm.].
53. ESTC shows thirty records between 1597 and 1704.
54. The feminine monarchie had a number of posthumous editions in both Latin and
English.
55. Three were identified by Poole (The Printing, 40 n. 4): (1) Printed by J. Heptin-
stall, for John Carr, at the Middle-Temple-Gate, in Fleet-street, 1694; (2) Printed by J.
Heptinstall, for the author, and sold by J. Carr, 1694; and (3) Printed by J. Heptinstall, and
sold by J. Carr at the Middle-Temple-Gate in Fleetstreet, B. Aylmer at the Three Pidgeons
in Cornill, W. Hensman, at the Kings-Head in Westminster-Hall, and L. Meredith at the
Star in St. Pauls Church-Yard, 1694. Richard Luckett informed me in 2004 that he was
aware of a fourth title cancel.
56. Poole, The Printing, 40.
57. For a study and edition of Norths essay, see Jamie C. Kassler, The Beginnings of the
Modern Philosophy of Music in England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
58. Benjamin Wardhaugh will include this text in his edition of Thomas Salmons
musical writings. The text is a valuable witness to the understanding of key.
59. Edition in progress by Ross Dun for the series Music Theory in Britain 1500
1700: Critical Editions (Ashgate).
60. Elway Bevin, A Briefe and Short Instruction of the Art of Musicke, ed. Denis Collins
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
61. Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, ed. R. Alec Har-
man, with a foreword by Thurston Dart (London: Dent, 1952; 2nd edition, 1963). There is
also a modern language edition: Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical
Music, ed. Ben Byram-Wigfield (Great Malvern: Cappella Archive, 2002). John Milsom and
I are preparing a critical edition for the Ashgate series, Music Theory in Britain 15001700:
Critical Editions.
62. On English writers awareness of continental treatises, see Theodor Dumitrescu,
The Early Tudor Court and International Musical Relations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 261.
For Morleys indebtedness, see the rich documentation provided by R. Alec Harman in
the footnotes of his edition, A Plain and Easy Introduction; and Herissone, Music Theory,
27576, 28688. Gustave Reese and Steven Ledbetter posit that Morley had access to one
of the Cologne editions of Ornithoparchus, all of which were in upright quarto; see Andreas
Ornithoparchus, trans. John Dowland, A compendium of musical practice: Musice active
micrologus, intro. Gustave Reese and Steven Ledbetter (New York: Dover, 1973), viiix.
63. More than one writer has even attempted to read connections between the woodcut
and the treatise, without realizing that it was commissioned for William Cunninghams
The Cosmographical Glasse (1559) and used until 1613 for books on a variety of subjects. See
Stephen Orgel, Textual Icons: Reading Early Modern Illustrations, in The Renaissance
Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan
Sawday (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 5994, esp. 6162 and figs. 67; and
R. B. McKerrow and F. S. Ferguson, Title-page Borders Used in England & Scotland, 1485
1640 (Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 1932), no. 99, pp. 9293.
64. For a facsimile of both Ornithoparchus and Dowland, see A compendium of musi-
cal practice. The edition of Ornithoparchus chosen for the facsimile is the second Leipzig
edition of 1517 (OL17ii), which belongs to a dierent branch of the transmission from that
of the Cologne branch probably used by Dowland.
65. Lynn Hulse, The Musical Patronage of Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury (1563
1612), Journal of the Royal Musical Association 116 (1991): 2440; and Lynn Hulse, Musique
Which Pleaseth Myne Eare: Robert Cecils Music Patronage, in Patronage, Culture and Pow-
er: The Early Cecils, ed. Pauline Croft (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 13958.
 You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover 385

66. Thomas Mace, Musicks Monument [London, 1676], vol. I: Reproduction en fac-
simil; vol. II: Commentaire par Jean Jacquot, transcriptions par Andr Souris (Paris: CNRS,
1958; 1966). Jacquot (pp. xxixxxx) suggests that Mace came to London in 1692 to sell his
library, instruments, and the remaining copies of his book. The advertisement for the
saleAn advertisement to all lovers of the best sort of musick (listed in ESTC as London?:
Ratclie and Thompson?, 1676, Early English books tract supplement interim guide: Harl.
5936[384], and transcribed by Charles Burney in A General History of Music, annot. Frank
Mercer [New York: Dover, 1957], 2: 37778)unfortunately does not list the titles in his
library. On Mace see Spring, The Lute in Britain, 42436.
67. To put this into a larger context see, for example, Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and
Popular Piety, 15501640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
68. Gustave Reese, Fourscore Classics of Music Literature (New York: Liberal Arts
Press, 1957; repr., 1970).
69. ke Davidsson, Bibliographie der musiktheoretischen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts
(Baden-Baden: Heitz, 1962). Although additional material has come to light since its publi-
cation over forty years ago, this catalogue continues to be a valuable resource.
70. Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory, 121.
71. Ibid., 18498.
 Contributors

Charles M. Atkinson is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of

Music at the Ohio State University. He has also taught at the University of
California at Irvine, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and
at the Sorbonne in Paris. His scholarly work is devoted primarily to music
within the intellectual history of antiquity and the Middle Ages. The recipi-
ent of various prizes and awards, he has served as President of the American
Musicological Society.

Colleen Baade is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Creigh-

ton University in Omaha, Nebraska. She holds a Ph.D. in historical perfor-
mance practice from Duke University, as well as graduate degrees in musicol-
ogy, organ performance, and Spanish languages and literatures. She works
as a church musician and sings with the early music vocal ensemble, Dulces
Voces. Her research deals primarily with aspects of nuns music-making in
early modern Spain.

Susan Boynton is Associate Professor of Historical Musicology at Columbia

University. Her book, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the
Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 10001125 (2006), won the Lewis Lockwood Award
of the American Musicological Society. She has co-edited books on music
in childhood, young choristers, and the customs of the monastery at Cluny.
Her forthcoming book, Silent Music: Echoes of Medieval Ritual and the Con-
struction of History, focuses on the study of Iberian liturgical manuscripts in
eighteenth-century Spain.

Cynthia J. Cyrus, Associate Dean of the collegiate program of the Blair School
of Music, Vanderbilt University, also serves as Aliated Faculty in European
388 Contributors

Studies and in Womens and Gender Studies. She is the author of Scribes for
Womens Convents in Late Medieval Germany (2009), and is completing studies
on the libraries of womens monasteries in late medieval Germany, and liter-
acyparticularly musical literacyin late medieval France. She has also ed-
ited the chanson settings of Hayne van Ghizeghems De tous biens plaine.

Kristine K. Forney is Professor of Music at California State University, Long

Beach. She specializes in Renaissance music printing, performance practices,
and womens studies, with publications in major journals and essay collec-
tions as well as in The New Grove Dictionary of Music. Her research has been
supported by grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the
American Philosophical Society. She is the author of The Enjoyment of Music
and editor of The Norton Scores.

Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princ-

eton, is interested in the history of books and readers, and in the history of
scholarship and education in the West. His books include Joseph Scaliger
(19831993), Defenders of the Text (1991), The Footnote (1998), and Worlds Made
by Words (2009). He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities,
and the Mellon Foundations Distinguished Achievement Award.

John Griths works extensively in Spanish Renaissance music as well as mu-

sic for lute and vihuela. In addition to editions of Renaissance instrumental
music, his research encompasses style studies, the history of music printing,
biography, musical relations between Spain and Naples, and the social history
of music, particularly in the urban sphere. He holds a chair in Music at the
University of Melbourne.

James Haar is W. R. Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Music in the Univer-

sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His interests in Renaissance music
include the sixteenth-century madrigal, and currents of humanism, music
theory, poetic tastes, and stylistic change. His most recent work, done jointly
with colleague John Ndas, is centered on fifteenth-century topics. The re-
sults of this research may be seen in articles on Antonio Squarcialupi, John
Hothby, and sacred polyphony in Florence, ca. 14301450.
 Contributors 389

Gordon Munro is Head of Undergraduate Programmes and Creative and

Contextual Studies at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, in
Glasgow. He studied at the RSAMD and Glasgow University, completing his
doctoral thesis, Scottish Church Music and Musicians, 15001700, in 2000.
Gordon is also Assistant General Editor and Trustee of Musica Scotica.

Russell E. Murray, Jr., Professor and Associate Chair of Music at the Uni-
versity of Delaware, directs the Collegium Musicum and is a faculty mem-
ber in Womens Studies. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of North
Texas. His research on musical theory and practice in Northern Italy in
the Renaissance has appeared in numerous venues and he is a contributor
to The New Grove Dictionary of Music. His work has been supported by
grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright
Foundation.

Jessie Ann Owens is Professor of Music and Dean of the Division of Hu-
manities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Davis.
She has served as President of the American Musicological Society and Re-
naissance Society of America, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences. She is author of Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical
Composition 14501600 (1997), and currently serves as series editor of Critical
Editions of Music Theory in Britain 15001700.

Dolores Pesce is Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis.

Her publications include The Anities and Medieval Transposition (1987),
Hearing the Motet (1997), and Guido dArezzos Regule rithmice, Prologus in
antiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation
(1999). Professor Pesce also writes about music of the late nineteenth century,
focusing particularly on Edward MacDowell and Franz Liszt.

Peter Schubert is Associate Professor at McGills Schulich School of Music.

His publications include articles and chapters in the Journal of Musicology,
Music Theory Spectrum, the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, and
the Journal of the American Musicological Society. His recording of Pierre de
la Rues magnificats was released on the Naxos label in 2007. He has been
working on Renaissance improvisation, and has recently presented papers in
Ghent, Basel, and Utrecht.
390 Contributors

Pamela F. Starr is Professor of Music History at the University of Nebraska-

Lincoln, and current Secretary of the American Musicological Society. She
has been Review Editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Soci-
ety. Her research has focused on music and music patronage at the papal court
and other fifteenth-century court institutions, music and music patronage in
sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, and music and film.

Gary Towne, Professor of Music and Director of Music Graduate Studies

at the University of North Dakota, has degrees from Yale University and
the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has received grants from
the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and Fulbright, and has investigated
Pietro Cerones early life, text underlay in Renaissance polyphony, civic wind
bands, and early cori spezzati performance practice. He is editing the masses
of Gaspar de Albertis, and writing a book on music in medieval and Renais-
sance Bergamo.

Susan Forscher Weiss holds a joint appointment in Musicology at the Pea-

body Conservatory, and in German and Romance Languages at the Johns
Hopkins University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland,
with additional studies at New York University, the University of Michigan,
the Juilliard School, and with Nadia Boulanger. Her numerous publications
include a study of the manuscript Bologna Q 18, articles in leading journals,
and entries in Grove Music Online. She is the recipient of grants from Har-
vard University, the Folger Library, and the National Endowment for the
Humanities.

Blake Wilson is Professor of Music at Dickinson College and a former fel-

low of Villa I Tatti. He is the author of Music & Merchants: The Laudesi
Companies of Republican Florence (1992), and has articles in The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and in Journal of Musicology, Early Music History, and
other journals. He has just completed a book on the traditions of singing
poetry in Renaissance Florence, and is currently completing an edition of
Heinrich Isaacs music for Florence and a study of Florentine improvisatory
singing traditions.
 Index
Page numbers in italics refer to figures and tables.
Abelard, Peter, 32, 35n23
LAbraham sacrifiant, 103
Accademia dei Filarmonici (Bologna),
209
Accademia Filarmonica (Verona), 305
accents, prosodic, 4142
Act of 1560 (Scotland), 65
Act of Parliament, tymous remeid (1579,
Scotland), 67, 7375, 7778
Adages (Erasmus), 148, 149, 16667,
17677, 178, 188nn33,34
Admonitio generalis (Charlemagne), 3738,
39, 4748n2
Adore un Dieu, le pere tout-puissant (Ser-
misy), 99, 122n27, 123n34
Aerde, Jacomyna van, 88
Agricola, Rudolf, 144
Alabanas de Msica (Bermudo), 135n4
Alcuin of York, 37, 40, 49n9
Alla battaglia (Isaac), 294, 297
Almande de la Nonette, 107
Alme rector, 2728, 28
Alsted, Johannes Henricus, 359, 382n29
Ambrose of Milan, 55
ancient texts, teaching of, 3751
Andrewes, Lancelot, 146
Angeni, Ambrogio, 29399
Anne of Denmark, 67, 71, 75
annotations/marginalia, xiv, xv, 42, 147,
208; age of, 246n81; coded systems,
225, 244n58; conclusions and next
steps, 23637; corrections, 21617;
in external sources, 213; function of,
21314; shoulder notes, 214, 216, 217;
by students, 231, 232; translations,
216; typology of, 21425
anthologies, xvi
Antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica
(Vicetino), 10
antichi, 1213
Antwerp, xiv, 84125; Antwerp Cathe-
dral, 100, 101; Church of Our Lady, 88,
91; communal schools, 88, 91; School
of the Laurel Tree, 103; texts, 9195,
92, 93, 94, 9598, 99100; womens
education, xiv, 84125
Aphorisms (Erasmus), 151
Apologia musices tam vocalis quam instru-
mentalis et mixte (Case), 361
Arbiol, Antonio, 266, 278n18
Arcadelt, Jacob, 317
Arce, Pedro Vidal, 265
Aretino, Pietro, 85
Arias, Enrique, 325, 341n6
Aristotle, 32, 144, 164, 187n20, 207
Arithmetica (Boethius), 40
armarius (Iibrarian), 5354, 57
Arning, Henricus, 149
Ars grammatica (Donatus), 40
The Art of Descant or Composing Musick in
Parts (Campion), 245n67
The Art of Music (Scottish manuscript),
73, 74
Arte de musica teorica y pratica (Montanos),
161, 16877; commonplace headings,
169; entradas, 16977; examples and
tables, 170, 171, 172, 174, 17576; trea-
tise on composition, 170, 189n44
392 Index
Arte de taer (Santa Mara), 134
Arte del contraponto (Artusi), 304
El arte tripharia (Bermudo), 26768, 271,
27980n32
Artusi, Giovanni Maria, 304
Ascham, Roger, 196, 199200
associative learning, 2730, 35n25
Atkinson, Charles, xiv, 52
Attic Nights, 143, 150
Atto of Reichenau, 54
audience, 268, 317, 319, 321n21; reader
as reviewer/editor, 21617. See also
students
Augustine, St., 12, 238n7
Aurifodina (Drexel), 145
Azzaiolo, Filippo, 106
Baade, Colleen, xivxv
Baccusi, Ippolito, 11, 320
Bacon, Francis, 146
bajn (dulcian, curtal), 26465
Banchieri, Adriano: Cantorino (Banchieri),
79, 8, 14, 16, 20nn11,12; La Cartella,
20n14, 219, 243n53; La Cartellina del
canto fermo gregoriano, 222, 223, 224;
Contrapunto bestiale alla mente,
318, 318
Banco rari 229 manuscript, 290, 296
Bandone, Ser, 294
Baptista, Gracia, 275, 275
Barasoain, Martin de, 270, 274, 275,
281nn42,43,44, 282n51
Barbireau, Jacques, 106
Barksdale, Clement, 198
Barley, William, 351, 35153, 352, 371,
380n17
Barthes, Roland, 21314, 241n37
Basilicon Doron (James I), 198
Bassano, Augustine, 106, 124n67
basso continuo, 132
Bates, William, 195, 19697
Bathe, William, 73, 353, 357, 361, 371,
381n20
Baxandall, Michael, 142
Bayard, John, 360, 370
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 217
Beaulaigue, Barthlemy, 102103
Beguines, 99
Belcari, Feo, 288, 28990, 291, 293,
301n16
Bellasy, Jakob Khun von, 253
Bellum musicale (Sebastiani), 217, 244n65
Bembo, Cardinal Pietro, 85
Benson, John, 35556
Bentivoglio, Ermes, 212, 233, 235
Een bequaem maniere on jonghers soetlijck
by sanck te leeren (Sonnius), 9195, 92,
93, 94, 9598, 99100, 117
Bermudo, Juan, 12627, 13034; El arte
tripharia, 26768, 271, 27980n32;
Declaracion de instrumentos musicales,
12627, 13034, 135n4, 13637n18,
136n14, 137nn20,21, 258
Bern manuscript (1491). See Ein Tutsche
Musica (Bern manuscript)
Berthout, Jehan, 124n56
Bevilacqua, Alessandro, 305, 322n13
Bevin, Elway, 371
bicinia/tricinia, 101102, 11112
Birchensha, John, 359, 36465, 382n29
Black, John, 74
Blackhall, Andrew, 71
blind musicians, 4, 269
Boethius, 12, 3233, 40, 41, 135n4; glosses
on, 4547, 50n23, 51n26
Bona, Valerio, 304, 321n6
Bonaventura de la Brescia, 5, 69, 14, 209,
21920, 220
Boniface VIII, 251
book format and size, 34849, 37778,
379n5; broadside (broadsheet),
36168, 362; catalogues, 35051;
costs of production, 37980n10; cover,
34849; covers of books, 34849;
didactic prefaces, 35456, 35758,
376; folio, 350, 37176, 372, 374, 375;
format, 35051; octavo, 350, 35761;
paper and price considerations,
34950; quarto, 350, 35761; quarto,
oblong, 35157; self-published titles,
36870; title page, 355, 356, 370, 373,
378, 381n23, 384n63; upright quarto,
36871
The Book Named the Governor (Elyot),
200
Book of Common Prayer, 363
Book of Discipline (1560), 66
borrowing: commonplace books and, 141;
commonplace entradas and, 172, 177
78, 185, 186n8, 187nn7,17, 189n48;
marginalia and, 227, 231, 23637,
241n31, 244n64; in treatises, 244n65,

307, 340n2, 342n19, 36768, 380n16,
382n39
Bottegari, Cosimo, 130
Boyle, Leonard, 40
Bracciolini, Poggio, 144
Die Brandung (Canetti), 144
A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick
for Song and Viol (Playford), 245n67,
358, 361
breviaries, 25455
Breviloquium musicale (Bonaventura de la
Brescia), 5, 69, 209, 21920, 220
A brief introduction to the skill of song
(Bathe), 353, 358, 361, 371, 381n20
A briefe and plaine instruction (Le Roy),
354, 354
A briefe and short instruction of the art of
musicke (Bevin), 371
A briefe discourse of the true (but neglected)
use of charactring the degrees (Raven-
scroft), 73, 37071
brigata (youth brigade), 29399
broadside (broadsheet), 304, 350, 36168,
362
Brouncker, William Lord, 370
Brown, Howard Mayer, 287, 290,
299300n1
Bruto, Giovanni Michele, 85, 121n3
Bud, Guillaume, 15152
Buoni, Tommaso, 196, 199
Burel, John, 7173, 75
Burger, Anna Maria Busse, xvii
Burmeister, Joachim, 163, 187n13
Burnets of Leys, 75
Burnett, Duncan, 75
Bushnell, Rebecca, xvii
Butler, Charles, 36870, 369
Butt, John, xvii
Byrd, William, 75, 127
Caccini, Giulio, 13
cadences, 169, 178
Calcagnini, Celio, 147
Calvin, John, 91, 122n28
Calvinism, 9192, 100
Camargo, Miguel Gmez, 274, 282n50
Camillo, Giulio, 148
Campion, Thomas, 245n67, 35859
Cancionero de Palacio, 131
Cancionero de Uppsala, 131
Canetti, Elias, 144
Index 393
Canguilhem, Philippe, 134, 137n22
cantasi come (sing it like . . .) rubric, 288,
289, 29091
canto figurale (mensural polyphony), 12,
308, 312
canto plano, 6, 9, 308
cantorino, 6, 12, 1416, 18, 215
Cantorino (Banchieri), 79, 8, 14, 16,
20nn11,12
cantors, 12, 2526, 5354
cantus firmus, 308, 310, 317, 31920
Carolingian writings: Admonitio generalis
(Charlemagne), 3738, 4748n2; De
litteris colendis, 3840; glosses and
commentaries, 4051; Guido dArezzo,
2536; harmonic theory, 4243; li-
brary catalogues, ninth-century, 40;
treatises, 4041
Carr, John, 370
Carruthers, Mary, 35n25
cartella, 306, 322n19
La Cartella (Banchieri), 20n14, 219,
243n53
La Cartellina del canto fermo gregoriano
(Banchieri), 222, 223, 224
Casaubon, Isaac, 146, 156n16
Case, John, 361
Cassiodorus, 40, 48n3
Castiglione, Baldassare, 128, 130, 195
Castris, Bartolomeo de, 294, 295, 296,
302n27
Castro, Jean de, 101102, 11112
Catherine of Aragon, 8485
Cattis, Franciscus de, 224
Cavazzoni, Marco Antonio, 233
Caza, Francesco, 240n23
Ceasar, Sir Julius, 147
Cecil, Robert, Earl of Salisbury, 373
Cela sans plus (Lannoy), 297
Cellini, Benvenuto, 4
Cerone, Pedro (Pietro), xv, 11, 21n19,
16162, 189n48, 191nn67,74,76, 324
44; background, 32324, 34041n3;
entradas with one passo, 172, 174, 175
76, 17980; entradas with two passos,
17072, 171, 181; studies, 33233. See
also El melopeo y maestro (Cerone)
chansonniers, Huguenot, 99
chansons, 101, 102, 104, 11112
chansons spirituelles, 101, 105, 108,
108109
394 Index
chant-books, 5657, 25455, 257
Chapel Royal (Scotland), 66, 70, 74, 75, 78
Charlemagne, 3738, 4748n2
Charles I (England), 78, 198, 203
Charles II (England), 363
Charles V (Emperor), 91
Cherchi, Paolo, 178, 190nn58,60
Chi passa per questa strada (Azzaiolo), 106
children, xvii, xviii, 9; Antwerp, 88, 91,
99100; early modern England, 196,
200201, 203204, 21112, 236,
238n6; oblates, 5357, 62n18, 252;
singing lessons, 46. See also nuns;
song schools (Scotland)
Chrestienne resjouyssance (Beaulieu), 105
Christe qui lux es et dies, 100
Die Christelycke Leeringhe (Velpius), 100,
117
Christensen, Thomas, 34748
Church Fathers, translations of, 252
Cicero, 144, 148, 150, 151, 153, 162, 165,
300, 330, 342
Ciceronians, 15051, 187, 191
Cimello, Giovan Tomaso, 209
clausura (cloister), 250, 251, 25354, 256,
279n24
Clavell, Robert, 35051
clefs, 6, 16
Clemens non Papa, Jacob, 99100, 101,
105
Cliord, James, 363, 364
Cluny, abbey of, 5354, 57
Cochlaeus, Johannes, 211, 239n20
Cock, Symon, 99
Coclico, Adrianus Petit, 306
Colenuccio, Pandolfo, 147
Collge de France, 151
colors, visual use of, 2728, 36n26
Comenius, Jan Amos, 146
commentarii (Gellius), 143
common places (loci communes), 144, 145,
161, 16465, 168
commonplace books, musical, 16192;
formal structure and, 16885; inferior
examples as teaching device, 163; note-
book and heading methods, 16263,
18485n38, 184n36; published collec-
tions and, 16364
commonplace books, non-musical, xiii,
xiv, 73, 14157, 304; bees, image of,
14142, 162; categories of inquiry,
16465; as creative art, 152; crite-
ria for, 16364; eects on habits of
reading and argument, 14950; as
hermeneutical tools, 154; images of
commonplacing, 146; indices, 149,
177, 188n34; instructions for, 14445;
literary, 16467; mechanical devices,
147; need for memorization, 14344;
plagiarism and, 162; private and public,
148; as published genre, 149; retrieval
schemes, 147; techniques used in trea-
tises, 32526, 33435, 342n19; title
books, 146
commonplacing, 14243, 14849, 167;
modal commonplaces, 163, 16768. See
also entradas
A compendium, containing exact rules
to be observed in the composing of
two or more parts (Anonymous), 365,
36667
composers: list of, in Zacconi, 1213; nuns
as, 271, 27476; respect for, 14; song
schools and, 7071; teachers as, 910
composition: counterpoint leads to,
307308, 322n23; four-voice, 102, 106,
16162, 170, 178, 184, 29697
composition studies, 910
Compostin, Gian Battista, 88, 11011
Conditor alme (Baptista), 275, 275
contrafacts, 107, 125n74
Contrapunto bestiale alla mente
(Banchieri), 318, 318
Contreni, John, 40, 4748n2
Coornhert, Dirck, 153
Coppini, Alessandro, 310n13
copying, 18, 2122n27, 130, 132
Correspondence (Sidney), 145, 197
Cortot, Alfred, 208
Council of Mechelin, 93
Council of Toulouse, 99
Council of Trent, 91, 25051, 259n3
counterpoint, 9, 12, 133, 27475; based
on Kyries, 309, 310, 311, 312, 316;
combinative, 310; composition and,
307308, 322n23; discussion of how
to learn, 30910; extemporizing, 134
35; invertible, 17374, 174, 17576,
189n53; mixture of sacred and secular,
316, 318, 323n26; obligations, use of,
310, 31115, 313, 316, 323n25; pas-
sages, 307308; as performance prac-

tice, 307; from Requiem and Da pacem
incipits, 316, 316; on Salve Regina, 310,
31113; species method, 307; teaching
of, 304, 30617; three principles of,
30910, 317; traditional methods of
teaching, 307308, 308
Counter-Reformation, 84, 91
courtesy and conduct manuals, 193206;
on music education for women, 195
96, 201205; Music of the Spheres in,
194, 195, 19697; women writers of,
196, 201203
The Courtier (Castiglione), 128, 130, 195
Cromwell, Thomas, 200
Curtis, Alan, 106, 107
customaries, 5254, 57
Dachstein, Wolfgang, 91
DAlbizo, Francesco, 29193
dance music, 88, 106
Darrell, William, 196, 204205
David, King, 56, 60, 61n13
Davidson, Patrick, 78
Davidson, Thomas, 74
Davidsson, ke, 377
De arte cantandi micrologus (Orni-
thoparchus), 217
De commendatione cleri, 40
De copia (Erasmus), 163, 16467
de fastigo. See De nuptiis Philologiae et Mer-
curii (Martianus Capella)
De harmonia musicorum instrumentorum
opus (Gaurius), 212
De institutione clericorum (Hrabanus Mau-
rus), 40
De institutione feminae christianae (Vives),
8485, 121n2, 277n2
De institutione musicae (Boethius), 40, 41,
4547, 50n23, 51n26
De interpretatione (Aristotle), 32
de la Cerda, Juan, 268, 279n29, 280n35
de la Cruz Brocarte, Antonio, 27374,
282n50
de la Cruz Ribera, Ana, 275, 282n55
de la Encarnacin, Isabel, 26566,
278n16
De libris quos legere solebam et qualiter
fabulae poetarum a philosophis mystice
pertractentur (Theodulf of Orlans), 40
De litteris colendis, 3840
De musica (Stuber), 7374
Index 395
De music elementis primis, 73
De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (Mar-
tianus Capella), 40, 41, 4345; de
fastigo, 41
De politia litteraria (Decembrio), 150
de Rore, Cipriano, 13, 189n5, 320
Decembrio, Angelo, 150
Declaracion de instrumentos musicales
(Bermudo), 12627, 13034, 135n4,
136n14, 13637n18, 137nn20,21,
258
del Lago, Giovanni, 233, 23536
Den lustelijcken Mey, 107, 125n71
dEste, Leonello, 143
devotional songs (lauda), 28890
Dialogo del R. M. Pietro Pontio (Pontio),
305
dialogue, conceit of, 304306, 321nn8,9
Dialogus de musica (Pseudo-Odo), 4041
Diamanti, Giovanni Battista, 215
diesis, 17
Dioscorides, 147
Directions for Health, Naturall and Artifi-
ciall (Vaughan), 19798
Diruta, Girolamo, 163, 187n15
divine oce, 53
The Divine Services (Cliord), 363, 364
The division-violist (Simpson), 376
doctors (song school assistants), 67
Dodecachordon (Glarean), 10, 211, 212,
243n51
Donatus, 40, 231, 240n28
Donckers, Franciscus, 100101, 119
Donne, John, 199
Douglas, Gavin, 72
Dowland, John, 217, 239n18, 244n65, 373,
376, 37980n10
Dowland, Robert, 376
Dowling, Margaret, 37980n10
Drexel, Jeremias, 145
Duchez, Marie Elizabeth, 41
Dumitrescu, Theodore, 380n16
Duncan Burnetts Music Book, 70
duos, 17273, 190n55; imitative (ID), 173,
17476, 17576, 17980, 181, 182,
183, 184; Non-Imitative (NIm) presen-
tation, 170, 184, 189n53
Durie, John, 79n7
Dyck, Adrian, 101
Dygon, John, 226, 237
dynasties, musical, 26364
396 Index
Edward, Robert, 73
Eighty Years War, 107
Elizabeth, Princess, 203
Elizabeth I, 196, 200, 201
Elyot, Thomas, 196, 200
emulation, 287, 290
Enchiridion musices (Wollick), 212, 233,
236, 237, 242n39, 245n77
Encina, Juan del, 131
England, early modern: children, 196,
200201, 203204, 21112, 236,
238n6; courtesy and conduct manu-
als, 193206; marginalized groups,
19495
entradas, 16977; Imitative Duo, 173,
17476, 17576, 17980, 181, 182,
183, 184, 184; invertible canon open-
ing, 17374, 174, 17576, 189n53;
with one passo, 17277, 174, 17576,
17980; Periodic Entries, 173, 17476,
17576, 17980, 181, 182, 183, 184,
184; tonal answer, 17374, 174, 175
76, 17980; with two passos, 17072,
171, 181
Epistola ad Michahelem (Guido dArezzo),
2536, 27, 33n3; associative identifica-
tion of modes, 2730; musical under-
standing in, 25, 3132; sensory percep-
tion and intellect in, 2533; Ut queant
laxis, 27, 27, 2831, 29, 34n12
Erasmus, Desiderius, 86, 99, 104, 14445,
147, 168; Adages, 148, 149, 166
67,17677, 188n34; Aphorisms, 151; on
Ciceronians, 15051; On Copiousness
in Words and Ideas, 144, 148; De copia,
163, 16467; on sententiae, 163; text-
books by, 14849
Escuela Msica segn la prctica mod-
erna (Nassarre), 26971, 27475,
280nn36,37,38,39, 281nn40,41,46,47
Espinosa, Dawn, 135n4
An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of
Gentlewomen (Makin), 203
An essay to the advancement of musick
(Salmon), 361
Eton College, 145
Etymologie (Isidore of Seville), 40
Eucharistic debate, 3132, 35n22
eumlation, 278
Eustorg de Beaulieu, 105, 124n59
exemplum, 165, 166, 168
Eximeno y Pujades, Antonio, 325
expression, 17
extemporization, 13435
Faber, Heinrich, 242n43
fabordones, 169, 178
Fabris, Dinko, 36162
fantasia, 13335
Fantasia sopra Anchor che col partire (Gali-
lei), 134
Fassler, Margot, 54
Fattorini, Gabriel, 163
Fellerer, Karl, 253
fenecimientos, 169
Festa, Costanzo, 317
Field, Christopher, 366
Filicaia, Alessandro de, 294
Filicaia, Antonio de, 29399
Fior angelico di musica (Picitono), 217,
244n65
Flacius Illyricus, 15354
Flecha, Mateo, 131
Florence: brigata (youth brigade), 29399;
lauda (devotional songs), 28892; oral
tradition, 28893; pedagogy and lit-
eracy in, 278302
Florentine Camerata, 142
Flores musices (van Reutlingen), 21415,
242n42
Floris, Frans, 86
folio, 37176, 372, 374, 375
footnote, early form, 214, 242n40
Forbes, John, 74
Form and Function in Italian Rensais-
sance Popular Books (Grendler),
34849
Form und Weiss (Anonymous), 256
Four Centuries of Music Teaching Manuals,
15181932 (Rainbow), xvii
Fourscore Classics of Musical Literature
(Reese), 377
Foxe, John, 147
Francesco de la Ferrara, Giovanni, 363
Freigius, Johann Thomas, 7374, 82n38
Freis, Wolfgang, 268, 27980n32
Il Fronimo (Galilei), 133, 134, 137n22
Frosch, Johann, 16263, 185, 186n9
frottole, 291
Fuenllana, Miguel de, 131
fugue, 13, 312
Fulda, Adam von, 231

Fuller, Thomas, 156n16
funeral wakes, 7677
Gabrieli, Andrea, 11, 306, 31819
Gaurius, Franchinus, 208, 212,
240nn21,23,24, 245n75; De harmonia
musicorum instrumentorum opus, 212;
Practica musicae, 10, 1112, 20n8,
21n23, 73, 226, 227, 244n61
Galilei, Vincenzo, 130, 133, 134
Galliarde qu passa, 106
Gaskell, Philip, 349
Gehl, Paul, 290
Gellius, Aulus, 143, 149, 178
Genevan psalter, 107
Genitrice di Dio (Belcari), 288, 28990,
301n16
The Gentleman Instructed (Darrell),
204205
The Gentlewomans Companion, or a Guide
to the Female Sex (Woolley), 202
Giliardi, Arnolfo, 301n13
Giustinian, Leonardo, 288, 289, 291, 293,
301n16
Glarean, Heinrich, 114, 208209, 237,
240n25, 37778; commonplace books
and, 186187n12, 163, 167, 16869;
Dodecachordon, 10, 211, 212, 243n51;
Isagoge in musicen, 211, 240n28;
Musicae epitome sive compendium ex
Glareani Dodecachordo, 211, 217, 219,
243n50, 37778
glosses, 4047; hymnaries, 52, 54, 5457,
5760; syntactical, 5556; theologi-
cal, 56
Gombert, Nicolas, 13233
gorgia, 19
Gosson, Thomas, 204
Gouk, Penelope, 348
Grafton, Anthony, xvii, 213, 242nn38,40,
321n4, 33435
grammar, 40, 4142, 55
Greek theory, 10
Grendler, Paul, xvii, 34849
Guarino, Battista, 143, 156nn9,11
Guarino of Verona, 143, 150, 23839n7
Guerson, Guillaume, 245n74
Guicciardi, Ludovico, 8586, 10910
Guido, Antonio di, 28788
Guido dArezzo, xiiixiv, 7, 2536,
33nn3,4,8, 34nn10,11,12,14,15,17,
Index 397
35nn19,20; colored sta lines, 2728,
36n26; Micrologus, 26, 27, 31, 33n3;
Prologus, 26; Regule, 26
Guidonian hand, 5, 67, 9, 1416, 15, 74,
207208, 210, 215, 219
Guild of St. Ambrose, 8891, 102, 111,
11416
La guirlande des jeunes filles (Meurier),
103104, 11213
Gunzo of Novara, 40, 49n10
Gushee, Lawrence, 33n3
Guzmn, Francisca Gonzlez de, 264
Haar, James, 209, 238n6
hands, 238nn2,4; in Banchieris Cantorino,
8, 9; Guidonian, 5, 67, 9, 1416, 15,
74, 207208, 210, 215, 219
harmonic composition, 297, 302n33
harmonic theory, 4143
Harmony and the Music of the Spheres
(Teeuwen), 45, 49n17, 50n20
harp, 72, 270
Harrison, Thomas, 147
Haunsperger, Agatha, 252
Hawkins, John, 226, 244n65, 357
Heemskerck, Maarten van, 107
Henry VIII, 200
Herissone, Rebecca, 348
hexachords, 67, 16, 207
Heyden, Sebald, 167
Heyns, Peter, 103
Hickes, George, 205
Higford, William, 196, 198
history of theory, 10
Holder, William, 360, 370, 382n34
homophonic music, 13132
Howard, Donald, 23839n7
Humanism, xvii; commonplace books, role
in, 152; transformation of music and,
14243
Hume, Robert D., 379n5
hymnaries, glossed, 52, 54, 5457, 5760
Ibez de Isaba, Doa Mara, 276
imitatio, 162
imitation: imitative duos (ID), 173, 174
76, 17576, 17980, 181, 182, 183,
184; Multiple Time-Intervals (MTI),
18182, 184; time-intervals, 173, 174
77, 17576, 17980, 18485
Index expurgatorius, 93
398 Index
individual tutelage, 9
The Institution of a Gentleman (Higford),
198
Institutiones divinarum et humanarum lec-
tionum (Cassiodorus), 40, 48n3
institutions, xiv, 52. See also monasteries
and convents; Nonnberg Abbey (Salz-
burg); nuns
instrumentalists, amateur, xiv, 12637;
musical style and, 129; Scotland, 74
75; vocal polyphony and, 12728, 130
intellectus, 34n9
intervals, 7, 26; Multiple Time-Intervals
(MTI), 18182, 184; six-interval
system, 2729, 34n11, 35n25; time-in-
tervals, 173, 17477, 17576, 17980,
18485; vertical-interval succession,
172, 190n54
intonation formulas (enechemata),
3435n18
An introduction to the skill of musick (Play-
ford), 358, 359, 360, 363, 366, 367,
36768
Introduction to the true arte of musicke
(Bathe), 73, 357
invention, selva and, 17778
Isaac, Heinrich, 278, 294, 296, 29798,
302n34
Isagoge in musicen (Glarean), 211, 240n28
Isidore of Seville, 40, 41
Istitutioni harmoniche (Zarlino), 10,
189n51, 244n65, 245n74, 304, 378
Jackson, Heather, 213, 241n36
James, First Earl of Abercorn, 75
James I (Scotland), 198
James VI (Scotland), 67, 71, 7778, 80n17
Jees, Abel, 357
Jimnez, Juan Ruiz, 263
Jonson, Ben, 153
Joscelin, Elizabeth, 196, 203
Josquin des Prez, 14, 13133, 16869,
187n12, 297, 306
Judd, Cristle Collins, 163, 16768, 212,
321n4, 348, 37778
The Judgment of Humane Actions (Ma-
rand), 198
Kareest, Joes, 87
Kemp, Andrew, 70, 75
Kendrick, Robert, 250
Ker, Lady Anne, 73
Kinloch, William, 75
kirk session, 66, 76
Kmetz, John, xvii
Knox, John, 65
Krakow University, 217
Kuenberg, Margaretha von, 25455, 257,
26061n19
Kyries, counterpoint based on, 309, 310,
311, 312, 316
La Santissima Annunziata, 324
Landini, Francesco, 4
Lanfranco, Giovanni Maria, 231
Lang, Susan, 259n10
Langius, Josephus, 188n34
Lannoy, Colinet de, 297
Lapidge, Michael, 56
Lasso, Orlando di, 910, 2021n16, 108,
163
lauda (devotional songs), 28892
laus musicae, 135n4
Lazari, Bartolomeo, 22425, 243n54
Le Roy, Adrian, 354, 354
The Learned Maid; or, whether a Maid may
be a scholar? (Schurman), 201202
Ledbetter, Steven, 384n62
Lennard, Sampson, 199
Liber tramitis, 54
libraries, 5455; Antwerp, 101; Folger,
195; Glareans, 212, 240nn25,28;
Houghton, 359; Huntington, 195,
351, 355, 381n27; Maces, 385n66;
Martinis, 239nn17,18; Newberry, 195;
Nonnberg Abbey, 252; student, 149;
Vatican, 40, 224; Werdensteins, 217
library catalogues, ninth-century, 40
Libro de descripcin de verdaderos retra-
tos de ilustres y memorables varones
(Pacheco), 262, 27677n1
Lidea del giardino del mondo (Tomai), 178,
188n34, 190n62
Lied (Virdung), 106
Lieto, Bartolomeo, 130
Lippius, Johannes, 382n29
Lipsius, Justus, 144, 15253
literacy, xi, xvxvi, 57, 70, 257, 288290,
293295, 297298
liturgical texts, sacred tunes used for,
99100, 288, 28889, 291, 29192,
292, 301n16, 323n26

loci communes. See common places
Locke, John, 148
Locke, Matthew, 361
locus, 16467
Lodge, Anne, 204
Lodge, Thomas, 19596, 197, 204
Long, Michael, xvii
Lore, Niccol, 295, 302n27
Louis de France, 74
lute, 74, 128; manuscripts, 129, 13435
Luther, Martin, 99
Mace, Thomas, 373, 375, 376, 385n66
Machiavelli, Niccol, 290
Macrobius, 141
madrigals, 291
maestro di cappella, 19
El maestro (Miln), 126
Makin, Bathsua, 196, 203
Makowski, Elizabeth, 251
Malcolm, Noel, 147
manicule, 214, 242n39
Manrique, Doa Teresa, 268
manuscripts, xvxvi, 10, 40; lute, 129,
13435. See also individual manuscripts
Marand, Lonard de, 196, 198
marginalia. See annotations/marginalia
Marguerite of Austria, 33233
Marian antiphons, 310, 312
Marot, Clment, 99, 100, 103, 105
Marrow of the Transitions Most Used in
Orations (Arning), 149
Martianus Capella, 40, 4145, 50n23
Martin of Laon, 42, 43, 47, 50n20
Martnez de la Roca, Joaqun, 263
Martini, Giovanni Battista, 208, 209, 212,
217, 233, 239n17
Martini, Johannes, 297
Mass, 7, 13, 57, 249, 252; Spanish, 13233
Matins, 55
Maunsell, Andrew, 350
Maurus, Hrabanus, 40
Maxwell, John, 75
Mayne, Jasper, 199
McKitterick, Rosamond, 48n2
McTaggart, Timothy, 105106
Medici, Lorenzo de, 294, 295
Melancthon, 165, 188n31
Melendez, Antonio, 224
melody: role in counterpoint, 307; sonus,
45, 47, 5051n24, 50n23, 52n26
Index 399
El melopeo y maestro (Cerone), xv, 11,
16162, 17782, 32444; Moral
Ornaments and Harmonies, 32628,
33839, 341n8. See also psychology of
pedagogy
Melton, James van Horn, xvii
Melville, Andrew, 66, 71, 73, 74
Melville, James, 66, 71
memorization, 6, 7, 54, 57, 207208,
238n2; ars memorativa, 213; colored
sta lines, 2728, 36n26. See also com-
monplace books, musical; hands
memory theatres, 148, 207
Mendoza, Bernardino de, 152
Mendoza, Blasina de, 263
mensural notation, 9, 12, 130
Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 194
Merchant Taylors School, 201
Mes, Gherardus, 100
Meurier, Gabriel, 103, 11213
Mexias, Pedro, 178
Micrologus (Guido dArezzo), 26, 27, 31,
33n3
Middle Ages, xiiixiv
Miln, Luis, 126, 129
Millar, Edward, 74
MIML (Musical Instruction and Musical
Learning) website, xviii
Miranda, Mara de, 27173
A Mirrhor mete for all mothers, matrons,
and maidens (Salter), 121n3, 204, 206
Missa Lhomme arm (Palestrina), 13
modal antiphons, 3435n18
moderni, 13
modes, 7, 1011, 16, 20n9, 41; associative
identification of, 2730; commonplace
books and, 163; fifteen tropes, theory
of, 4445; tonus, 42, 4647; wing dia-
gram, 4647
modules, 17274, 175, 181, 184, 189n45,
191nn72,77,78
Moens, Symoen, 88, 122n16
monasteries and convents: Convento de
San Leandro, 262; customaries, 5254,
57; Ebstorf, convent of, 252, 260n13;
education of women in, 25153,
25657; Fruttuaria monastery, 57; in
German-speaking lands, 24950, 256
57; glossed hymnaries, 52, 54, 5457,
5760; Marienberg, convent of, 252,
260n13; Monasterio de la Encarnacin
400 Index
(vila), 263; Monasterio de Santa Ana
(vila), 263; Monasterio de Santa Clara
(Montilla), 268, 27980n32, 282n55;
Monasterio de Santa Clara (Seville),
263; Monasterio de Santa Mara de los
ngeles (Madrid), 276, 28283n56;
Neukloster (Buxtehude), 257; Real
Convento de San Francisco (Sara-
gossa), 269. See also Nonnberg Abbey
(Salzburg)
monochord, 26, 27, 34n15
Monson, Craig, 250, 259n3
La montaigne des pucelles/Den Maeghden-
Bergh (Valry), 104105
Montanos, Francisco de, 16162, 164,
16877, 187n17, 189nn40,44, 190n57
Morales, Cristbal de, 13, 132, 137n20
Morley, Thomas, 74, 19394, 227, 228,
229, 230, 244n64, 305, 377; borrowing
from, 380n16. See also A Plaine and
Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke
(Morley)
Moss, Ann, 167, 188n34, 19091n64
motets, 101; of Palestrina, 18485, 191n77
mother and child (double) virginal, 86
The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Childe
(Joscelin), 203
Mouton, Jean, 131
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 209
Mulcaster, Richard, 196, 200201
Murray, Russell, 21n20
music, etymology of term, 4
Music of the Spheres, 194, 195, 19697
music schools (Scotland): disorderly pu-
pils, 76, 83n64; instrumental tuition,
7475. See also song schools (Scotland)
Musica (Boethius), 40
musica ficta, 181
Musica getutsct (Virdung), 106
Musicae epitome sive compendium ex Glar-
eani Dodecachordo (Glarean), 211, 217,
219, 243n50, 37778
A musicall banquet (Playford), 356, 356
57, 357, 358
The musicall compass (Solman?), 370
Musice active micrologus (Ornithoparchus),
209, 211, 217, 218, 239n18, 244n65,
373, 374, 384n64
Musicks monument; or, A remembrancer
of the best practical musick (Mace), 373,
375, 376
musicus, 12, 2526, 127, 135n4
Musyck boexken (Susato), 101, 105106,
119
mutations, 67, 16
Mutianus Rufus, 151
Nantes (Brittany), 29394
Narvaz, Luis, 136n17
Nassarre, Pablo, 26871, 27475,
280nn36,37,38,39, 281nn40,41,46,47
Natural History (Pliny), 142, 147
New Aberdeen music school (Scotland),
74, 78
new booke of Citterne Lessons (Barley),
354
A new booke of tabliture (Barley), 352,
35253, 356, 380n17
New citharen lessons (Robinson), 371
A new way of making fowre parts in counter-
point (Campion), 35859
Nicholas of Cusa, 143
Niemller, Klaus, xvii
Nivers, Guillaume Gabriel, 35960
Nocte Atticae (Gellius), 178
Non fu mai pena maggiore (DAlbizo),
29193, 292
Nonnberg Abbey (Salzburg), xiv, 250;
educational outreach, 25153; eect of
clausura on, 25354; historical context,
25658; polyphony at, 256, 25758,
261n23; post-Tridentine visitations,
25455; reform in 1620s, 25556; re-
sistance to Tridentine reforms, 25354
Noone, Michael, 27778n14
North, Francis, Baron Guilford, 370
North, Roger, 155
Northall, W., 227
notation, 6; mensural, 9, 12, 130; tabla-
ture, 126, 12932; in Zacconi, 1417,
17
Notre Dame, xvii
numeri sonori, 13
Nunca fue pena mayor (lvarez), 292, 292
nuns, xivxv; clausura (cloister), 250,
251, 25354, 256, 279n24; composi-
tion and, 271, 27476; constitutions,
266, 278nn17,19,20; dowry waivers,
26667, 27173, 27273, 282n49,
28283n56; instruction manuals for,
266; Mistress of Novices, 266; musical
competency, 263, 26776; organists,

26265, 270, 279n23; recepcin and
profesin agreements, 26667, 270,
277n7, 279n22; Spain, 26283; as stu-
dents and teachers, 26283; Vicaress
of the Choir, 266. See also Nonnberg
Abbey (Salzburg); women
oblates, 5357, 62n18, 252
obligations, 310, 31113, 313, 323n25
Ockeghem, Jean de, 14
octaves, 16
octavo, 350, 35761; for amateur instruc-
tion, 35860; for learned disquisitions,
36061
Odhecaton (Petrucci), 13
On Copiousness in Words and Ideas (Eras-
mus), 144, 148
On Invention (Cicero), 151
On the Passage from Paganism to Christian-
ity (Bude), 152
Opus aureum (Wollick), 23133, 232, 234,
235, 244n60
oral tradition, Florence, 28893, 29798
Organi, Bartolomeo degli, 290
organists, nuns as, 26265, 27071,
279n22
organum, 45
Orme, Nicholas, xvii
Ornithoparchus, Andreas, 209, 211, 217,
218, 239n18, 244n65, 373, 374, 384n64
Orphnica lyra (Fuenllana), 131
Owens, Jessie Ann, xvi, 16263, 185,
186n9, 189n45, 321n7
Oyons la Loy que de sa voix (Calvin), 91
Pacheco, Doa Isabel, 268
Pacheco, Francisco, 262, 27677n1
Pdogogus (Freigius), 7374
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 13, 162,
192n79, 332, 343n29; entradas, 182,
184, 18485, 185, 191n77
The Palice of Honour (Douglas), 72
part-books, 74
partsongs, Scots, 74
passaggi, 11, 13, 19
passos (head-motives), 16970; entradas
with one, 17277, 174, 17576, 179
80; entradas with two, 17072, 171
The pathway to musicke, 35153, 352, 355,
35556, 380n16, 381n19
pedagogue, 34
Index 401
pedagogy, xv, 34; complex set of prac-
tices, 141; context of learning, 304;
copying, 18, 2122n27, 130; in Flor-
ence, ca. 1488, 278302; good and bad
examples, 306, 308; lack of written
documentation, 12829. See also psy-
chology of pedagogy; individual peda-
gogical works
Pedrell, Felipe, 325
Peebles, David, 70
Pepys, Samuel, 359, 364, 366
Peraza, Francisco de, 262
Peraza, Jernimo de, 263
Peraza, Jernimo de, II, 263
performance, 4, 1011, 1314, 2526,
307; glosses and, 4546
Periculoso, 251
personal communication, in textbooks, 12,
1718
Pesce, Dolores, 52
Petrarch, 162
Petrucci, 13
Philippics (Cicero), 153
A philosophical essay of musick directed to a
friend (North), 370
Picitono, Angelo da, 217, 244n65
Pinel, Doa Mara, 266, 27879n21
Pirckheimer, Willibald, 211
Pirrotta, Nino, 291, 300n7
pitch-training devices, 2629, 27, 28, 29,
34n11
Pixrcourt Chansonnier, 291
Placcius, Vincentius, 147, 148
plagiarism, 162, 178, 335
plainchant: canto chorale, 12; canto plano,
6, 9, 308; nuns and, 25455, 257, 267;
taught in song schools, 71, 72, 73,
81n33
A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Prac-
ticall Musicke (Morley), 74, 227, 228,
229, 230, 244n64, 305, 353; demand
for, 19394; folio, use of, 37173, 372,
374, 375, 377
Plantin, Christopher, 93
Playford, John, 35659, 36364, 382n39;
A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Mu-
sick for Song and Viol, 245n67, 358, 361;
An introduction to the skill of musick,
358, 359, 360, 363, 366, 367, 36768;
A musicall banquet (Playford), 356,
35657, 357, 358; sales catalogue, 350,
402 Index
381n27; A Table Engraven on Copper,
shewing any Note with the Compass of
the Bass-Viol, 363
Pliny the Elder, 142, 143, 147, 23839n7
Pliny the Younger, 142
Podio, Guillermo de, 24041n31
poetry, lauda modeled on, 28990, 291
Poi che l cor (Belcari), 291, 291
Poi che vivo, 291, 291
Politian, Angelo, 187n12
Politica (Lipsius), 152
polyphony, 11, 16, 261n23; canto figurale,
12, 308, 312; Florence, 29599; lute as
transmitter of, 128; nuns, instrumen-
tally accompanied and, 256, 25758;
taught at song schools, 7071; vocal,
12728, 130, 170, 270, 274. See also
counterpoint
Pomi, Anna Maria, 215, 243n47
Pontio, Pietro, 305306, 307308, 308,
32122n11, 322nn16,20, 323n24
Porta, Costanzo, 307, 319, 322n23
Positions Concerning the Training Up of
Children (Mulcaster), 200201
post-Tridentine period, xivxv, 24950,
25355
Pourbus the Elder, Frans, 86
Powell, Thomas, 196, 204
Practica musicae (Gaurius), 10, 1112,
20n8, 21n23, 73, 226, 227, 244n61
pragmatic aspects of music education, 52
The praise of musicke (Anonymous),
36061
Prattica di musica (Zacconi), 1119, 15,
309, 320, 323n30, 31, 32, 35, 36; com-
ments on teaching, 306; composers, list
of, 1213; counterpoint, teaching of,
304, 30617; delivery of text, 1819;
intrinsic and extrinsic qualities of mu-
sic, 1314; musical examples in, 13, 17,
18; notation in, 1417, 17
precentor/song school master, 6667
presentation copies, 239n19, 243n51, 378
presentation types, 173, 174, 184, 184;
Non-Imitative (NIm), 170, 184,
189n53. See also entradas
pricksong, 72, 81n33, 200
Primo dierum omnium, 55, 5760
Il Primo Libro di madrigali (Arcadelt),
317
Primum querite, 30, 31, 34n18
Principium et ars totius musicae (Francesco
da Ferrara), 363
The principles of musik, in singing and set-
ting (Butler), 36870, 369
The principles of practical mvsick (Simp-
son), 359, 360, 361
printing, xvi, 126, 128, 130
Priscianus, 231
Problemes of Beautie and all Humane Aec-
tions (Buoni), 199
Profit, conveniency, and pleasure, to the
whole nation (Mace), 376
Prologus (Guido dArezzo), 26
Proportiones practicabiles secundum Gau-
rium (Dygon), 226
proportions, 16
proprietas (properties of tones), 25, 2728,
30
prosodic accents, 4142
prova, 294
Proverbes de Salomon, 102
Prss, Johann, 215
psalm tones, 7, 11, 73
psalm tunes (Scottish Reformation), 66,
74, 81n27, 103
psalm-commentaries, 55
Psalms, book of, 56, 60, 61n13
psalm-settings (Souterliedken), 99100,
101, 105, 107, 118
psalters, metrical, 99100, 103
Pseaulmes LXXXIII de David, 102
Pseudo-Odo, 4041, 47
psychology of pedagogy, 32444; consult-
ing with colleagues, 33233; discipline
of student, 32831, 342n23; Italian
and Spanish music teachers compared,
336; professional issues, 33335; rela-
tionship between maestro di capella and
singers, 337, 344n50; teachers interac-
tion with student, 32628, 336
Pythagoras, 12
Pythagorean tuning, 6
quarto, upright, 36871
Le quatroisiesme livre, 109
Quercu, Simon, 225, 225
Quintillian, 191n65
Ragionamento di musico (Pontio), 305
308, 308, 32122n11, 322n20, 323n24
Rainbow, Bernarr, xvixvii

Ramis de Pareja, Bartolomeo, 212, 233,
240n24, 245n75, 76
Ravenscroft, Thomas, 73, 37071
Reading and Writing the Pedagogies of the
Renaissance: The Student, the Study
Materials, and the Teacher of Music,
14701650 conference, xvii, 238n2
Recanetum de musica aurea (Vanneo),
245n74
Reese, Gustave, 377, 384n62
Reformation: Northern Europe, 88, 99;
Scotland, xiv, 6566, 74
Regina del cor mio (Giustinian), 288, 289,
291, 301n16
Regole del contraponto et compositione
(Bona), 304
Regole di contrapunto (Lazari), 224,
243n54
Regula musicae plana. See Breviloquium
musicale (Bonaventura de la Brescia)
Regule (Guido dArezzo), 26
Remigius of Auxerre, 44, 45, 47
Renaissance: amateur instrumentalists,
12637; Florence, pedagogy and
literacy in, 278302; textbooks,
20746
Renatus Des-Cartes excellent compendium
of musick (Brouncker), 370
A Reply to Gossons Schoole of Abuse
(Lodge), 19596, 197, 204
Reutlingen, Hugo Spechtshart von,
21415, 231
Reynolds, John, 198
rhetoric, 142, 178
Rhetoric (Ramus), 368
Rice, Eric, xvii
Rifkin, Joshua, 189n53
Rivington School, 145
Robert, First Earl of Carbery, 198
Robert of Basevorn, 25n25
Robinson, Thomas, 371, 376
Royal Society, 370
rubrication, 215
Sackville, Edward, Fourth Earl of Dorset,
198
Sacrarum ac aliarum cantionum trium
vocum (Turnhout), 101
Salinas, Francisco de, 263, 277n3
Salmon, Thomas, 361, 370
Salter, Thomas, 121n3, 204
Index 403
Salve Regina, counterpoints on, 310,
31113
Salzburg. See Nonnberg Abbey (Salzburg)
Salzburg Synod (1569), 25354
Sancta Mara, Tomas de, 134, 189n44,
190n55
Santissima Annunziata, choir at, 290
Saturnalia (Macrobius), 14132
Saunier, Antoine, 95, 99
Scala di Musica (Scaletta), 215, 216, 242n44
The Scale, or Basis of Musick, 363, 364
Scaletta, Orazio, 215, 216, 242n44
Scarabelli, Maria Diamante, 215
Schanppecher, Melchoir (Malcior of
Worms), 211, 231, 232
Schneeweiss, Magdalena, 25556
The Schole of Shooting (Ascham), 199200
Scholiers, Adrian, 102103
schollage fees, 6770, 6869, 7677, 77
The schoole of musicke (Robinson), 376
schools. See Antwerp; institutions; mu-
sic schools (Scotland); song schools
(Scotland)
Schubert, Peter N., xiv, 19192n79
Schurman, Anna Maria, 201202, 203
scientia of music, 14
Scintille di musica (Lanfranco), 231
Scolica enchiriadis, 40
scores, 173, 181, 243n56, 290, 298,
323n24. See also tablature
Scotland, xiv, 6583; Act of 1560, 65; Act
of Parliament, tymous remeid (1579),
67, 7375, 7778; choirs, 67, 79n12;
composers, 7071; funeral wakes, 76
77; instrumental tuition, 7475; kirk
session, 66, 76; lack of music teachers,
7576; psalm tunes, 66, 74, 81n27, 103;
Reformation, xiv, 6566, 74; women
and music, 79n7. See also music schools
(Scotland); song schools (Scotland)
Scottus, John, 44, 45
Scrinium literatum (Placcius), 147
Scudamore of Sligo, Lord, 198
Sebastiani, Claudio, 217, 244n65
secular tunes, used for liturgical texts,
99100, 288, 28889, 291, 29192,
292, 301n16, 323n26
self-instruction, 12637; advent of print-
ing and, 126, 128, 130; extemporiza-
tion, 13435; music copying and analy-
sis, 130; octavo for, 35860
404 Index
selva/selve, 17778, 181
senario, 10, 21n17
Seneca, 14142, 162
sensory perception, 2533; colors, visual
use of, 2728, 36n26; pitch-training
devices, 2629, 27, 28, 29, 34n11
sensus, 26
sententiae, 144, 162, 16364, 182, 185,
191n65
Sermisy, Claude, 99
Serrano, Joaqun Martnez, 263
Serrano, Luca, 264
Serrano, Mara Alberta Martnez, 26364
Seville cathedral, 262
Sforza, Lodovico II (Duke of Milan), 225,
227, 24041n31
Shakespeare, William, 194
A Sheet of plain Rules and Directions for
Composing Musick in Parts (Birchen-
sha), 36465
Sherman, William, 147
shoulder notes, 214, 216, 217
Si amores me han de matar (Flecha), 131
Sidney, Philip, 145, 196, 197
Silva de varia lecin (Mexias), 178
Simpson, Christopher, 351, 359, 360, 376
singers: delivery of text, 1819; lessons for
children, 46; pitch-training devices,
2629, 27, 28, 29, 34n11; techniques
and styles, 13. See also song schools
(Scotland)
six-interval system, 2729, 34n11, 35n25
Slim, H. Colin, 107
Smith, Alexander, 71
Smith, Jeremy, 381n20
Snyder, Jon R., 303
Socrates, death of, 166
soggetto, 162, 172, 190n56
Solana, Jos, 271
Soldt, Susanne von, 106107, 109
Solman, Thomas, 370
solmization, 35n25, 363; Bonaventuras
method, 5, 69; Guidos system, xiii
xiv, 5, 67, 2536; Zacconis method,
16
song schools (Scotland), 6566; Act
providing for, 67; composers, 7071;
literacy promoted, 70; number and
location of, 7879n2, 79n6; polyphonic
music taught at, 7071; precentor/song
school master, 6667; schollage fees,
6770, 6869, 7677, 77. See also mu-
sic schools (Scotland)
Songs and Fancies (Forbes), 74
songs of praise, 99
Sonnius, Francismus, 9195, 92, 93, 94,
9598, 99100
sonus, 45, 47, 50n23, 5051n24, 52n26
sortisato, 231
Souterliedkens, 99100, 101, 105, 107, 118
Souterliedkens (Clemens non Papa), 99
100, 101, 105, 118
The soveraign and Final Happiness of Man
(Bates), 195, 19697
La Spagna, 317
Spain, nuns, 26283
Spataro, Giovanni, 208, 209, 212, 23336,
245n75
speculative philosophy, 3132
Squarcialupi, Antonio, 288
Squire, W. Barclay, 363
Squyer, John, 73
St. Leonards College (Scotland), 66
sta, 6, 9
Stevenson, Robert, 268, 340n3, 341n5
Stock, Brian, 35n22
Stoic philosophy, 152
strambotti, 291
Strozzi, Filippo, 317
structure, 134
Struthers, William, 83n70
Stuber, Conrad, 7374, 82n38
students, 306307, 316, 31720; dialogue
format and, 304; discipline of, 32831,
342n23; interaction with teacher, 326
28; oblates, 5357, 62n18, 252. See also
audience; self-instruction
Sturm, Johannes, 14546
Surez de Robles, Mara, 265, 278n15
Sunday schools, 91
Susann un jour (Lasso), 101, 108,
108109
Susanne von Soldt manuscript, 106107,
120
Susato, Tielman, 105106, 118
sustenida cadences, 169
Synopsis musicae novae (Lippius), 382n29
syntactical glosses, 5556
tablature, 106, 107; books, 126, 12930;
directions for producing, 13034. See
also scores

A Table Engraven on Copper, shewing any
Note with the Compass of the Bass-
Viol (Playford), 363
tactus (tatto), 16, 18
Te Deum, 30, 100
teachers: character of, 328; as composers,
910; contracts for lessons, 8788;
nuns as, 26283; student interaction
with, 32628; visual images of, 208;
wages, 7677, 77, 8891, 89. See also
Bermudo, Juan; Cerone, Pedro (Pietro);
music schools (Scotland); psychology
of pedagogy; song schools (Scotland);
Zacconi, Lodovico
teaching routines, 306
Teeuwen, Mariken, 41, 45, 49n17,
50n20
Tllez, Baltasar, 132
Templum musicum: or The musical synopsis
(Birchensha), 351, 359
tempo, 16, 18
Ten Commandments, musical settings of,
9199, 9598
Teodoro of Verona, 186n4
textbooks: on commonplacing, 14849; in
dialogue form, 93, 103104, 124n56,
321nn8,9; elementary, 69; multiple
owners, 215; on note-taking, 14445;
personal communication in, 12, 1718;
Renaissance, 20746. See also annota-
tions/marginalia; Cerone, Pedro (Pi-
etro); Zacconi, Lodovico
texts: Antwerp, 9195, 92, 93, 94, 9598,
99100; classical, xiii, 3751; glosses
and commentaries, 4051. See also
annotations/marginalia; book format
and size; glosses; treatises; individual
authors and texts
Theatre of Human Life (Zwinger), 149
Thodore de Bze, 103
Theodulf of Orlans, 40
theological gloss, 56
theorico, 12
Timber, or Discoveries (Jonson), 153
timbres, 99100, 118
Tinctoris, Johannes, 240n21
titulus, 164, 165, 167
Tobyas om sterven gheneghen, 107108
Tom of all Trades, or the Plaine Pathway to
Preferment (Powell), 204
Tomai, Tommaso, 178, 188n34, 190n62
Index 405
tonal answer, 17374, 174, 17576,
17980
tones, proprietas, 25, 2728, 30
tonus, 42, 4647
Topics (Aristotle), 164
Tours, school at, 40
Towne, Gary, 21n19
Toxophilus (Ascham), 200
Tragdie dAbraham, 103
Trait de la composition de musque (Nivers),
35960
Tratado ultimo de los lugares communes
(Montanos), 16869
A treatise of the natural grounds, and prin-
ciples of harmony (Holder), 360, 370,
382n34
treatises, xii, xvi, 10; borrowing in,
244n65, 36768, 380n16, 382n39;
Carolingian, 4041; commonplace
book techniques in, 32526, 33435,
342n19; commonplace tradition and,
16364; presentation copies, 239n19,
243n51, 378; tables of contents, 304;
variety of materials, 304305. See also
book format and size; textbooks
triads, 13132
Tridentine reform, 24955
Trilogia Gafuriana (Gaurius), 212
tropes, theory of, 4445
Tschudi, Peter, 212, 240n28
Tudors, 195
Turnhout, Grard de, 100
Ein Tutsche Musica (Bern manuscript),
216, 243n48
Ulrich of Zell, 53
University of Heidelberg, 217
Urbinas latinus 1411 manuscript, 290
Ut queant laxis, 27, 27, 2831, 29, 34n12
Utile e breve regule di canto composite per
Maestro Zoanne de Spadari da Bologna
(Spataro), 23536
vaghezze, 13
Valry, Magdaleine, 104105
Valla, Lorenzo, 144
van den Bossche, Jan, 88, 11011, 122n17
Vanhulst, Henri, 104
Vanneo, Stephano, 245n74
Varietie of lute-lessons (Robert Dowland),
376
406 Index
Vsquez, Juan, 132
Vaughan, William, 196, 19798
Veere, Jan van, 33233, 343n30
Vela, Mara, 263
Velpius, Rutgeert, 100, 117
Veni sancte spiritus, 100
Verit, Mario, 305, 322n13
vertical sonorities, 172, 189n47
vertical-interval succession, 172, 190n54
Vicentino, Nicola, 10, 17
vihuela, 126, 129; printed tablatures, 130,
131, 132
villancicos, 13132, 13637n18, 276
Villancicos i Canciones (Vsquez), 132
Villani, Fillipo, 4
violeros, 128, 13536n6
Virdung, Sebastian, 106
Virgil, 150, 162
Virgin, songs for, 100
virginals, 86, 87
visual aids, 213; colored sta lines, 2728,
36n26. See also hands
visual images of music teachers, 208
Vitae, 252
Vives, Juan Luis, 8485, 121n1, 263, 268,
277n2
vocal polyphony, 12728, 130, 170, 270,
274
Een vrolic wesen (Barbireau), 106
Vuillaerth. See Willaert, Adrian
Ward, John, 352
Wardhaugh, Benjamin, 366
Weber, Edith, xvii
Wedding of the Painter Joris Hoefnagel
(Pourbus the Elder), 86
Wendland, John, 125n74
Werdenstein, Gregory, 217
Werneix, Franois, 88, 12122n15
West, Richard, 151
Whigham, Frank, 195
Whitlock, Richard, 196, 199
Wieland, Gernot, 56
Willaert, Adrian, 320
Winterton, Ralph, 363
Wollick, Nicholas, 211, 216, 227, 23136,
232, 241n31; Enchiridion musices, 212,
233, 236, 237; Opus aureum, 23133,
232, 234, 235, 244n60
women: Antwerp, education of, xiv,
84125; Beguines, 99; bicinia/triciania
as pedagogical works for, 101102,
11112; characterized as domineer-
ing, 8586; contracts for music les-
sons, 8788; dance music and, 88,
106; instrumental music and, 86, 87,
103106; merchant class, 8788,
103104; music education, early
modern England, 195, 196; in musical
dynasties, 26364; paintings, 8687;
song schools and, 79n7; teaching of
young girls, 26971; textbooks for,
103105; writers on conduct, 196,
201203. See also monasteries and
convents; Nonnberg Abbey (Salzburg);
nuns
Wonnegger, Johannes Litavicus, 217
Wood, Thomas, 70, 74
Woolley, Hannah, 196, 202
workshops, 910
Wreede, Johannes, 29293
Wright, Craig, xvi, xvii
Zabern, Conrad von, 231
Zacconi, Lodovico, xiii, xv, 1119,
21nn24,25,27, 22n33, 163; as musical
seeker, 319; as teacher, 30323
Zanobi, Ser, 29396, 299
Zapata, Luis, 136n17
Zarlino, Gioseo, 13, 14, 17, 21n17, 172,
208, 245n74, 304, 308; Istitutioni har-
moniche, 10, 189n51, 244n65, 245n74,
304, 378
Zeeuw, Cornelius de, 8687, 86, 87
Zootomia; or, Observations of the Present
Manners of the English (Whitlock), 199
zotte liedken (Flemish folkore songs),
105106
Zuichemus, Viglius, 148
Zwinger, Theodor, 149