Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900)

www.copyrighthistory.org

Identifier: i _1498

Commentary on Ottaviano Petrucci's music printing patent

Joanna Kostylo

University of Cambridge, UK

Please cite as:
Kostylo, J. (2008) ‘Commentary on Ottaviano Petrucci's music printing patent (1498)', in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org

1. Full title

2. Abstract

3. The introduction of music printing and the significance of Petrucci's contribution

4. Printing and the music market

5. Music and ownership in the early years of printing

6. References

1. Full title

Ottaviano Petrucci's patent for printing polyphonic music for voices, organ, and lute

2. Abstract

Ottaviano Petrucci's twenty-year patent for the double-impression technique of printing polyphonic music for voices, organ, and lute by using moveable types is the first known record of a privilege granted for music printing. It is also one of the early records of patents for invention and improvement in the mechanism of printing, showing that there was no legal distinction between books and printed music or other works of art produced through the press. The commentary argues that while Petrucci was not the first to print music, his claim to a pioneering role in the history of printing is supported by the fact that he was the first to print polyphonic music on a large scale and establish a market for printed music as a distinct niche of the printing and publishing trade. The commentary describes sixteenth-century relations between composers, performers, and publishers in the context of a developing printed music market and discusses contemporary attitudes towards the legal protection of music.

3. The introduction of music printing and the significance of Petrucci's contribution

The position of music in the emergence of copyright has been problematic and the formal legal recognition of music as an intellectual product came later than the laws concerning literary property. In England, for example, it came sixty-five years after the enactment of the Statute of Anne (uk_1710), which granted protection to "books and other writings". It was not until 1777, when Johann Christian Bach successfully sued his publisher James Longman for breach of contract, that the High Court held that music could be protected by copyright (see uk_1777). For a long time, music was considered as something different than literature and other products of creative industries and relegated to the margins of publishing, like maps, engravings, occasional printed matter, and newspapers. Why was this so?

In the first place, it has always been difficult to place music in one category of creative production and define the concept of a musical work. What exactly is a musical work? Is it a sound-event (performance) or a mere artefact such as a musical score? What should be protected: a composition or a musical score (a composition fixed through musical notation), or the system of musical notation itself? How do we account for improvised or live performances which are intended to be unique events; or a limitless number of new interpretations and arrangements of the same musical piece? Some of these questions trouble music scholars and copyright lawyers to this day.

As Michael Talbot argues, in order to ensure that a musical work is recognised both as property and as artistic expression, the work's existence has to incorporate some form of blueprint or template for performance which allows a composition to be reproduced.[1] It was not until the arrival of printing that music could be fixed into such an identifiable object - a printed score. Printing captured a composition permanently on the printed page and therefore led to the assumption that the musical work was complete in a written, reproducible and attributable form. The notated form of a composition became a documentary record of a finished product for which a copyright could be claimed.

As in the case of books, printing profoundly altered the world of music. It not only made huge differences to the accessibility, dissemination and transmission of music but it also encouraged the preservation of current and old repertories and encouraged development of a musical style, form, genres and tradition.[2] It is not surprising therefore that Ottaviano Petrucci (1466-1539), who is traditionally credited with the invention of the art of printing music from moveable type, has often been compared to Gutenberg in terms of what he achieved for music printing. An impoverished but resourceful nobleman from Fossombrone in the Papal States, Petrucci moved to Venice in about 1490 to study the techniques of music printing.[3] In 1498 he obtained an exclusive twenty-year privilege for printing and selling music for voices, organ and lute throughout the Venetian Republic. This is the first known record of a privilege granted for music printing. In his petition to the Venetian Senate, Petrucci claimed to have invented the most convenient way to print canto figurato - polyphonic music for voices, organ, and lute by using moveable types, "what many, not only in Italy but also outside of Italy, have long attempted in vain."

Despite Petrucci's claim that he was the inventor of the art of printing music, he was not the first to print music. The earliest known printed work containing music was the Psalterium which appeared at Mainz in 1457, from the press of Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer.[4] Nor was Petrucci the first to use the technique of double impression. Opinion today gives much more credit to the fifteenth-century printers for preparing the way. Figured music (canto figurato), that is, music in florid counterpoint (which employs many time-values and therefore demands a notation capable of indicating them) as distinguished from plainsong (which does not need or use a notation representing them), required several different graphic elements of music (staves, notes and text) to be produced by multiple impression. For example, the first would be an impression of the lines or music stave; the second would add the notes; and the third the text. This technique of printing from two or more impressions was well known in Italy, including Venice, where it was used by fifteenth-century printers to produce the black and red sections of liturgical incunabula or legal texts.[5]

In Venice, with several professional type designers and punchcutters at work, experimenting with different type designs to transform complex scripts into moveable type had been an established industry.[6] Francesco Griffo of Bologna, for example, designed cursive Greek and Latin types for the presses of Aldus Manutius and Giunti (see i_1501). Another Venetian typefounder, Jacomo Ungaro had been experimenting with music type design in Venice for forty years. In fact, Jacomo Ungaro was very likely the creator of the mensural types used by Petrucci.[7] And in 1513, four years after Petrucci had left Venice to return to his native Fossombrone, Ungaro himself requested a fifteen-year privilege to protect the printing and sale of mensural music books in Venice:

"Jacomo Ungaro, cutter of letters and inhabitant of this most excellent city for forty years, having discovered the way to print measured music, and fearing that others, as happens, may reap the fruit of his labours, begs your Excellency that you be pleased to grant him the favour that no one else may print or have printed the said measured music either in this city or in its provinces for the next fifteenth years, nor bring books printed elsewhere to sell in this city or subordinate lands, under penalty of losing all the books and 100 ducats for every time that it occurs."[8]

Ungaro's privilege was conceded with the provision that it should not be prejudicial to any earlier privilege (Hoc ne praejudicetur concessionibus, si quae forte factae fuissent antehac), as indeed was the case; for Petrucci already held a patent for the same invention since 1498. Possibly because of this condition or maybe because of complaints made by Petrucci, Ungaro never proceeded to print any musical editions. However, as early as March 1505, yet another entrepreneur and "a renown lute player", Marco Dall'Aquila, obtained a privilege for music printing in disregard of Petrucci's privilege. In his petition to the Venetian Collegio, Marco claimed to "have invented, with great effort and expense, a method of printing tablature and metre for those who take pleasure in playing the lute, a noble instrument very appropriate for true gentlemen, - something which has never been printed before" and asked for an exclusive privilege to print "tablatures for the lute or any other sort."[9]

The existence of these two privileges further undermines the authenticity of Petrucci's claim that he was the first inventor. Petrucci may have been genuinely unaware of the precedents, or perhaps was thinking only in terms of complete volumes of mensural polyphony when he asserted that he was the first to print music from moveable types. Perhaps the best way to assess Petrucci's contribution to music printing is in terms of refinement rather than innovation. While his music printing did not involve any innovative technology, nevertheless, he did achieve new levels of artistry in the design, layout and press-work of music. He introduced smaller and lighter type-designs and a more precise superimposition of different settings of type than earlier incunabula music works.[10] Last but not least, he was the first to produce whole books of music in this way. Rather than a few pages of incidental diagrams of musical notation, his Harmonice Musices Odhecaton was the first volume of printed music to appear twenty years after the first European book printed from moveable type (the forty-two line Bible produced in Mainz about 1454). The multiple impression of musical notation posed special problems and it was a lengthy and costly process which still remained subject to much experimentation. It is no surprise that three years elapsed between the date of Petrucci's petition and the appearance of the first work under the new patent: the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A, issued from Petrucci's press in 1501. The following year Petrucci published Canti B numero Cinquanta.

4. Printing and the music market

Petrucci's strongest claim to a pioneering role in the history of printing might lie in the fact that he was the first to print polyphonic music on a large scale and establish a market for printed music as a distinct niche of the printing and publishing trade. By focusing on music that already had a considerable currency and established audience, and which was meant to appeal to ‘popular' tastes instead of a narrow circle of professional performers, Petrucci was the first to view the production of music as a business rather than an art. His Odhecaton was the first ever printed score which brought together the chansons (polyphonic songs) and compositions of the most famous Italian and foreign masters that constituted the main international repertoire of the time. His collection of frottole (musical settings of vernacular poetry), published a few years later, was another attempt to capitalise on a well-established musical trend. It made available the song repertory which was then much in vogue in northern Italy and immediately appealed to the tastes of the late Quattrocento courtly audience. Another major area of the market that Petrucci attempted to satisfy was the largely institutional audience for sacred music; his masses and motets found a ready market amongst numerous Venetian confraternities, monasteries, schools and church choirs, including the world-famous Capella of San Marco with Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina (1514-1594), Cipriano de Rore (1515-1565), and Adrian Villaert (1490-1562) as its most distinguished members.

Both the church and the court were long experienced in devoting financial resources to the arts to dramatise their social and political status quo. Churches needed choir-masters, organists and singers in order to celebrate the liturgy; courts needed musicians for the necessary public pomp and for private entertainment. Music was also central to the courtly ethos, as Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), a courtier, diplomat and a prominent Renaissance author emphasised in The Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano):

"... when we think of it [music], during our leisure time we can find nothing more worthy or commendable to help our bodies relax and our spirits to recover, especially at Court where, besides the way in which music helps everyone to forget his troubles, many things are done to please the ladies, whose tender and gentle souls are very susceptible to harmony and sweetness."[11]

Quite apart from state and church patronage, the activities of the trade guilds (arti) and charitable institutions (scuole) and the rise of a proto-bourgeoisie mercantile class also fostered an economic environment that led to conspicuous consumption in the arts and further increased the cultural value of music as social accomplishment and as pastime. Printing presses, too, would become "clearing-houses for ideas and arbiters of musical tastes", as Daniel Heartz commented on the influential French printer Pierre Attaignant (c.1494-1552).[12] The editorial policies and commercial strategies of publishers clearly influenced contemporary musical culture, creating and defining musical styles and genres and consolidating the tradition. One of the genres which publishers called into life, for example, was the sixteenth-century madrigal for two voices. In 1541, the Venetian music publisher Girolamo Scotto (d.1572) commissioned Jhan Gero to write his two-voiced madrigals, Primo libro de madrigali italiani at canzoni francese, a due voci (1541).[13] This is the first known example of music composed expressly for publication. Similarly, Petrucci's part-book arrangement for secular vocal music set the standards for printing music in an approachable and practical form for a larger market. Perhaps the most striking evidence for the impact of Petrucci's books on the contemporary musical and material culture is a maiolica dish painted in Casteldurante around 1525 with a design which incorporates the anonymous frottola Segni cuore e non restare which was probably inspired by Petrucci's edition of the Frottole libro septimo (Venice, 1507).[14]

Petrucci's leadership did not last long, as others also sought to capitalise on the developing market for printed music. Among them was an ambitious Istrian printer, composer and woodcutter, Andrea Antico (c.1480 - after 1538), who achieved comparable excellence using woodcuts. In October 1510, he published the Canzoni nove which were closely modelled on Petrucci's frottola books in terms of format, general appearance and content.[15] This sparked a commercial struggle between the two printers, both anxious to monopolise a growing music market. In 1513, Antico secured a privilege from Pope Leo X to print music in the Papal States with a ten-year protection of the repertoire that he issued. Nineteen days later, Petrucci, who had recently moved his business to his native Fossombrone, was granted a similar papal privilege which also included the exclusive right to print organ tablatures for 15 years, a clear challenge to Antico's entry into the market for keyboard music.[16] These two privileges put the two printers on an apparently equal basis in Rome and the Papal States. Matters came to a head in 1516, when the pope withdrew Petrucci's right to publish organ tablatures and assigned it to Antico instead, evidently because Petrucci had failed to produce such music under the terms of his exclusive patent. Less than three months later Antico issued his Frottole intabulate da sonare organi libro primo (Rome, 1516) - the first book of keyboard music to be printed in Italy.

Although Antico pirated some of Petrucci's repertoire, in practice, the rivalry between the two printers was one of competing technologies. Antico had the advantage over Petrucci of being an experienced musician who was more in touch with the practical aspects of music. While Petrucci continued to publish his deluxe quarto editions, Antico resorted to a smaller octavo format which was more suitable for practical music-making. This format was first introduced in 1501 by a prominent Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, who launched his series of classic authors, employing a smaller format and new cursive type (see i_1503). The innovation proved epochal in regard to both the reduced format, permitting a price reduction and the abandonment of the international gothic for the more modern type (the use of octavo format had tended to lower book prices, given the concomitant decrease in the amount of paper needed for publication). The aims and methods of Manutius were soon followed by Antico who achieved a similar reduction in format and price. In a request for a privilege of 1513, Antico explained that he wished to print for a more popular audience, those "versed in the liberal arts and especially students of music." Compared to Antico's 'everyday' editions, Petrucci's quarto publications with all the parts in a single volume were not ideally suited either for intimate secular groups or for use by large church choirs. Moreover, Petrucci could not expect casual buyers for the relatively small print runs of his expensive editions. Petrucci's Magnificat purchased in 1521 by Ferdinand Columbus (1488-1539), son of the explorer, cost 81 quattrini, while the small Antico part-books which had just come out cost only 31 quattrini.[17]

The extreme luxury of Petrucci's prints and the appearance on the horizon of Antico explains why Petrucci had difficulties staying in business. When on 26 June 1514 he again petitioned the Venetian Collegio and requested the extension of his original privilege of 1498 for another five years, he explained that he would fall upon hard times if his privilege were not extended. In order to realize and profit from this privilege, Petrucci required capital and that consideration induced him to enter into partnership with two Venetian printers: "in printing such [musical] works there was need for much capital, and not having much, Petrucci, being a poor man, took as partners Signor Amadeo Scotto, bookseller and Signor Niccolò de Raphael, who together brought out many volumes of music..." The petition sought to prevent others from printing music and from "carrying or having carried or selling those kinds of books in this country or subordinate lands."[18]

In the first decades of the sixteenth century several other printers followed the models established by Petrucci and Antico. As early as 1507, Erhart Oeglin of Augsburg had succeeded in printing mensural music with moveable type using multiple impressions, and the same was accomplished by Peter Schoeffer the Younger of Mainz in 1513.[19] One of the most beautiful imitations of Petrucci's prints was done by the anonymous craftsmen responsible for XX Songes published in London in 1530. The model of Antico was imitated in the Contrapunctus seu figurate musica super plano cantu missarum solennium totius anni (Lyons: Gueynard, 1528). Imitators were not lacking in Italy. Pasoti of Rome carried on the Petrucci method, while Sambonetto of Sienna and Caneto of Naples imitated Antico's small woodcut books. As late as 1536, an architect, writer and one of the most important Venetian publishers at the time, Francesco Marcolini of Forlì, (c.1510- d. after 1558) claimed to have rediscovered the printing technique of Petrucci. In his supplication of 1 July 1536 to the Venetian Senate, he complained that for thirty years Petrucci had been printing music using his patent and that for the last twenty-five years no one else could do so. And therefore, Marcolini concluded, printed music had almost disappeared in Venice while it flourished elsewhere in Italy, France, and Germany.[20] It may be that Marcolini was telling truth, for Petrucci stopped producing music in Venice when he left the city in 1511 and his exclusive privilege may have prevented others from using his method. The Venetian Senate granted Marcolini a monopoly for all music printed in metal types.

Petrucci successfully used multiple impression, but a single impression method was obviously more desirable, as it could greatly increase speed of production and reduce costs. Curiously, this technique may have been first introduced not in Venice or other established centre of music-printing, but in London, where there had been no previous tradition of printing or publishing mensural music. The main evidence consists of two songs printed, evidently in the 1520s, by the barrister and printer John Rastell who was himself an author of a number of stage works as well as of a frequently reprinted compendium of legal terminology. It seems likely, given the complete lack of native precedents, that it was either produced by a foreign craftsman then living in London or imported from France where a prominent royal printer Pierre Attaignant (c.1494-1551/2) was experimenting with a single impression technique at the time.[21] Attaignant issued his first book of Chansons printed by single impression in 1527. In 1529, he also obtained the first music privilege granted in France, which appeared on the title page of the Très brève Introduction with the date October 1529. The privilege is quoted as prohibiting the printing of music or lute tablatures for the next three years. The first extant letters patent granted by Francis I are dated 17 June 1531 (see f_1531).[22] In Italy, the first printer to use a single-impression method was the Venetian printer and composer, Antonio Gardano, who applied to the Venetian Senate for a privilege in 1538.

The advent of single-impression techniques in the 1540s further revolutionised the music market. Unlike the costly multiple-impression musical editions of Petrucci, most of the music produced by the single-impression process seems to have been relatively inexpensive. In just a short period of time, the market for the Renaissance polyphonic repertory considerably broadened and music printing had become more streamlined and commercialized, in particular with the activities of the firms of Antonio Gardano and Girolamo Scotto in Venice. The records from a mercer's shop of Angelo and Matthio Gardano show that consumers were not exclusively patrician nobles but also came from the merchant and professional classes. According to the records of booksellers in Florence, leather workers and customs officers purchased printed music.[23] The constituency of music consumers extended even lower down the social ladder. In 1608, an English visitor to Venice, Thomas Coryate, wrote that he could observe musical performances in Venice not just in churches and confraternities, but also in bordellos by courtesans who made extensive use of music to charm their clients, or on the streets by street-traders who used music to sell their wares.

The widening of the market for music was also reflected in the proliferation of an amateur vocal and instrumental repertoire, as well as in the growing market for basic theory books and other how-to-do manuals, the earliest of which had also been produced in Venice in the 1530s. During the 1540s there is a noticeable increase in printed editions of lute music, some of which include instructions for playing and tuning the instrument, a clear indication of the growing interest in music as a performed art rather than a body of scholastic knowledge.[24] Another example of this growing interest in music as a social practice and entertainment is a ten-year privilege issued in 1550 to Zuan (Giovanni) Battista Seriati for a volume of "diverse dances for dancing composed by him" (diverse danze da ballare da lui composto).[25] Baldassare Castilgione also advocated the role of music as a form of practice and a group activity. He recommends that courtiers should be able to sing at sight from notation; in addition they were also to be skilled in "il cantare alla viola per recitare", a clear reference to the widespread tradition of improvised declamatory song performed to a simple instrumental accompaniment.[26] Finally, this new emphasis on the cultivation of practical music is evident from an inventory of 1526 of the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, which describes a copy of Antico's Liber quindecim missarium as "all in shreds, without its cover and falling apart" (tutto stracciato et senza coperta et sciolto), a clear reminder that these music books were purchased for practical use.[27]

5. Music and ownership in the early years of printing

It is evident that printing revolutionised the economics of the music trade and offered opportunities for composers and musicians to capitalise on their works. However, debates about authorial politics need to be entirely rethought when we move from the written textual genres that inspired them to such live performed arts as music, whose phenomenologies remain entirely distinct from those of written texts. The production and consumption of music remains essentially distinct from the book market and suggests an entirely different dynamics between author, publisher, and consumer than in the case of printed books. While books are sold to be read, music, although it can be printed, has to be performed to come alive. Thus the listener (consumer) hears a co-production by composer and performer(s). In copyright law, this interdependency of composer and performer is contested. The author /composer's work is considered to be original and creative, but a performer is considered to be more like a manufacturer, executing and materializing the instructions of the author, reproducing the author's musical creation. However, in the performance-centered culture of the Renaissance, when music was dependent more on the musical practices of performers rather than on musical scores, the dichotomy of composer vs. performer is blurred. Contemporary music was often performed from memory in the absence of a musical score or just improvised in a group, while composers had to rely heavily on performers who had the musical knowledge and skills to interpret and perform their composition. In this complex interactive nexus of performer, performance and performed, one easily loses sight of the person responsible for the musical work - the author.

The concept of a musical work as complete in written form appeared with the influence of Renaissance humanists, who transferred its general idea from the classical tradition. As early as the 1470s, Johannes Tinctoris, under the influence of Quintilian and Horace, used the term and concept of the musical opus as a regulative yardstick by which a piece of music can be evaluated just like a famous and enduring literary work.[28] Another, perhaps even more important factor that sharpened the distinction between the concept of a musical work as 'text'/'artefact' or as 'event'/'act' was the advent of printed polyphony. It is often overlooked that the introduction of printing coincided with the advent of polyphony. The realization of a polyphonic repertoire presupposes a group activity and therefore greater dependence on musical notation than a single voice composition, which can be improvised.[29] In this context, Petrucci's privilege encouraged the dissemination of polyphonic repertoire and further consolidated the dependence of music on notation. This emancipation of music-making from improvisation and memorisation marks the beginning of the distinction between composer and performer (hence, whenever a polyphonic vocal piece is performed, not more than one singer can be the composer). This in turn helped to link an identifiable piece of written music to an identifiable author and, since the possession of an autograph score was sometimes considered enough to be seen as the owner of the work, it can be viewed as the first step towards recognition of the composers as authors and owners of their work. However, the interdependency of composer and performer remained ambiguous for a long time, until the issue of a public performance right was addressed in revolutionary France in 1794, when edicts were passed enabling first French dramatic authors, and then composers, to license, and therefore benefit financially from, the public performance of their works (see f_1793) One of the first German documents to explicitly justify authors' rights in performances of their works was Eduard Gans's treatise On the right to perform published stage plays (1832), which in turn paved the way for the implementation of restricted performance rights through the Prussian Copyright Act of 1837 (see d_1832 and d_1837a).

Another factor which delayed the recognition of authors' copyright in music was the fact that music production was essentially different from books. Music was mainly engraved, whereas the majority of books were typeset; music was often published as unbound sheets, whereas written texts were published in book format. Finally, music was more likely to appear as an anthology than literary works. The way that printers acquired music for the earliest printed anthologies obliterated any notion of authorship. They acquired the material that they published a piece at a time, from the repertoire of various composers that circulated in manuscript or print in Italy and abroad. Even after the advent of music printing from moveable metal type, pieces of music continued to circulate in single sheets, printed or manuscript, that would contain single works or small group compositions. Publishers often pulled together collections of musical pieces using this wide variety of sources.[30] But the easiest method was simply to copy the music found in an edition already published, either the whole anthology or by collecting individual pieces from different anthologies, as was the case of Petrucci's competitor, Andrea Antico, whose Canzoni nove published in 1510 'borrowed' half of its content from Petrucci's Frottole libro septimo (Venice, 1507).[31]

Venetian publishers had few qualms about issuing reprints of already published works. Even if the Decree on Press Affairs of 1517 specifically ruled that the only works eligible for a privilege were those that had never been printed before, many interpreted this law liberally (see i_1517). One respected member of the Senate was quoted as having said that it was common practice among printers to insert some previously printed material into their anthologies.[32] Another example of this practice may be seen in Gardano's 1540 publication of Jacquet of Mantua's first book of five-voice motets. Gardano received a privilege for this edition even though Scotto had printed fourteen of the pieces a year earlier. The privilege was granted probably because Gardano accompanied the pieces taken from Scotto's edition with nine new compositions.[33] In 1541, the composer Jhan Gero re-arranged four-voice French chansons printed earlier by Pierre Attaignant and included them in his own book of madrigals.[34]

Naturally, in this scenario, the notion of individual authorship was very fragile. It was much more difficult for a composer whose work was published as part of an anthology to exert control over his composition than to protect single-authored works dominating the literary markets. It was also difficult to establish who owned the collection and who should benefit from it. Though from the mid-sixteenth century, privileges began to be applied to any selection from a larger work, for example, a chanson or motet in a collection.

Contemporary music practices had not always conceded priority to the author of the composition. What about the contemporary writers whose texts were used in operas or popular song collections? Musical 'illustrations' to contemporary poems were an important part of Renaissance musical tastes. Some writers went so far as to dedicate their verses to the hoped-for source of musical illustration.[35] However, the contemporary publishers, careless enough about composers' names almost never credited the writers as co-authors of Renaissance frottole. Antonio Gardano composed several pieces to Latin, French and Italian texts without acknowledging the authors.

In general, early printed music anthologies can be assumed to be a commercial venture of the printer rather than an authorial initiative of a composer.[36] They were less dependent on patronage (they often included no dedications) and thus more likely to be dependent on sales. Therefore, they often consisted of pieces already circulating in print by at least a few of the more famous composers.[37] These new commercial attitudes to music are evident in the way that anthologies were advertised. Printers often prominently displayed the names of more famous composers on the title page, even though closer inspection might reveal a large proportion of music by less illustrious composers. This was the case with the books of madrigals published by the Ottaviano Scotto firm and Andrea Antico in the 1530s, in which the names of Verdelot and Arcadelt were prominently displayed on title pages, whereas in reality only very few pieces of the entire volume were by these composers. Clearly, Scotto and Antico were confident that the names of these famous composers were sufficiently well known to their prospective customers to guarantee a respectable sale and they paid little to other minor authors.

That the publishers paid little attention to the authors is evident from Antonio Gardano's 1551 collection Intabolatura nova di varie sorte de balli, which contained dances composed by Zuan Battista Seriati. Although Seriati had obtained a privilege for his works from the Venetian Senate a year earlier, Gardano published the collection without indicating the name of the author or mentioning the privilege to which Seriati was entitled.[38] Contemporary printers also frequently misattributed works to the wrong composers. In 1544, the composer Francesco Corteccia was forced to publish his Libro primo de' madrigalia a Quattro voci in order to correct misattributions of his own compositions to other composers in earlier editions. Furthermore, Corteccia explained in the dedication of his work, "to these reasons one might add that my works, as well as the others, were full of the ugliest mistakes and of the gravest errors, both in words and music."[39] Like contemporary writers, composers were greatly concerned with the accurate transmission of their works and became involved in the supervision and production of their works.[40] If a printer did not have a musical competence, he could hire local musicians to help with proofreading or ask the composers themselves. Andrea Antico and Antonio Gardano were musicians and composers themselves but the French music printer Nicolas Du Chemin, for example, hired his editor, Nicolas Regnes, to give him lessons in how to sing and to "hold his part."[41]

Before the arrival of single-impression printing to Italy, an anthology of songs devoted to a single composer was a comparatively unusual event and a risky financial investment compared to an anthology of the 'greatest hits' by known composers. Collections devoted to several composers were more likely to captivate the market since at least a few of the more famous composers' names in a given anthology would have been known to the potential consumer. The appearance of single-author editions in the 1540s may therefore signify a shift from a genre-centred (anthologies of madrigals, popular songs) to a composer-centred or a performer-centred culture. However, this can be misleading as composers and performers remained strongly attached to the patronage system and many of their publications were sponsored and 'owned' by their patrons. The contract between the composer Paolo Ferrarese and the printer Girolamo Scotto stipulated in Venice in 1565, for example, was concluded not by the composer but by the convent that employed him.[42] This strong role of the patron in music printing was formally acknowledged by the practice of incorporating the patron's coat-of-arms (in place of the printer's device) on the title page in addition to lavish dedications conveying gratitude for generosity or flattery of a patron.[43]

A patron's role can be compared to that of a producer who commissions and stages a piece of music and therefore as someone who partly owns the work in question. As Mary Lewis argues, in the traditional patronage system, in some instances, the ownership of a work did not belong to the composer but to the institutions he worked for. She defines a patron (whether the church, king, or renaissance court) as someone who initiated the creation of a piece of music and therefore as someone who owned the work in question.[44] If, for example, a musician left his church, he would usually leave copies of his composition behind. Although there are no examples of composers having been prevented from performing works they composed for a former employer elsewhere, the patron and owner of the works remained entitled to have the works performed at will. For example, the works of French musicians at the royal court belonged to their employer and he could decide to publish them at will. Henri Madin went as far as to publish in 1743 a mass entitled Missa "Dico ego opera mea regi" (Mass: "I declare that my work belongs to the king").[45] Similarly, in a theatre or an opera house, the status of a staged work was ambiguous and the theatre directors at that time often considered themselves to be the owners, and felt free to sell the works performed to any publisher. This practice gradually came to an end in the eighteenth century after the success of a number of lawsuits which concluded that music and dramatic works fell within the protection of copyright law (see uk_1777 and uk_1833).

Compared with the authors of literary works, the emancipation of composers from a status of 'paid servants' to independent professionals came with a certain delay as composers remained much more linked to the patronage system and therefore less dependent on publication and sales.[46] Nevertheless, the development of music printing on a commercial scale loosened the bonds of the old patronage system and offered new market opportunities to composers as distinct from patronage. Far from the cautious recycling of established music by Petrucci or Antico, by the mid-sixteenth century there was great demand for fresh and new pieces of music, particularly after the introduction of the single-impression technique, which greatly increased speed of production. Now printers began to experience difficulties in finding new music for publication. With this growing demand for new compositions, composers could sell their compositions directly to a printing house rather than just write music at the behest of a patron. The English musician Thomas Whythorne, who visited Italy in the 1550s, noted that in order to obtain new music, printers "do fee the best musicians that they can retain, to the end that when they do make any new song their printers may have the only copies of them to print; which encourageth the musicians to employ and give his mind and endeavour the more to his study therein."[47] This is in many ways illustrated by the careers of such 'free-lance' musicians as Luca Marenzio (c.1553-1599) or the Piemontese composer Costanzo Festa (c.1480-1545), who sold his motets and madrigals to the printers directly.[48]

Although the status of a musical work as an intellectual product equivalent to literature was not clear, there is more evidence on the growing recognition of the role of sixteenth-century composers. The advent of music printing provided a powerful means of heightening public awareness of their activities. Prefaces and dedications repeatedly emphasized the point: printing brought a composer's music from darkness to light, making permanent something which might otherwise have remained transient. Musicians also acquired a greater social respectability in the sense that the practice of music was now perceived as an aspect of courtly manners and ethos rather than as an artisan craft.[49] Composers and performers rather than scholars of music were now depicted in books, while patrons arranged to present themselves as musically accomplished in portraits.[50] Once new commercial attitudes took hold in a growing and increasingly prosperous market, not just established composers but also amateurs sought to benefit from the new medium and reach a wide audience, as a German composer and organist, Hermann Finck (1527-1558), lamented in 1556:

"...Many of those, whom I have mentioned, even dare to claim for themselves the title of composer. In the span of half a year, [they] manage with great toil to produce a little song of whatever quality with scarcely three consonances in it, and immediately take care to have it printed, so that their great and glorious name can be known to the whole world."[51]

Attracted by the potential enrichment from their works, several contemporary musicians tried to establish their careers as publishers, providing funds and applying for privileges or setting up their own printing shops. The famous organist and composer, Claudio Merulo da Correggio, from 1566 to 1570 in partnership and later alone, issued some thirty-five music books.[52] In 1590, the Executors against Blasphemy (a body charged with investigating, judging and sentencing sacrilegious crimes in Venice) brought legal action against a resourceful musician Zuan Battista Rizzo, who was selling illegally "some verses, dialogues and motets" (alcune stanze, dialoghi, et motteti) printed in Treviso, without a licence in Venice.[53] One of the first musicians who attempted to break into the publishing business was the singer Francesco di Conforti, employed by the ducal chapel, who petitioned the Venetian Collegio in 1504 and 1510 for printing privileges for the publication of non-musical books.[54] The earliest known example of a privilege granted to a composer is to Bartolomeo Tromboncino, although none of his music is known to have been printed under its terms. Another privilege, for a ten-year period starting in January 1523, was granted to the organist and composer Marco Antonio Cavazzoni for his "new design of tablature" (una nova forma de tablature).[55] One of the most renowned composers who managed to secure extensive privilege protection for his works was Orlando di Lasso (c.1530-1594). During his stay in Paris in 1571, he received a ten-year printing privilege from the French king (dated 25 August 1575) for "all and sundry of the works he has written and composed so far, and for any he will write and compose in future."[56] In 1581, in an extraordinary letter to Emperor Rudolph II, Lasso requested another privilege granting him the sole rights to all his works printed in German territories. He insisted that his works be published as correctly as possible and be presented to the public exactly as he wrote them. In order to put an end to all the errors, he requested that all privileges related to his compositions be accorded to him personally, so that he could make the final judgment as to which firm he would entrust his pieces to.[57]

These privileges had clearly established an important precedent, for Lasso was granted a complete monopoly on the printing of his works. The imperial privilege went even further in that it did not specify any limit of time and it covered all future compositions. Lasso could be distinguished as the first composer to acquire what might be called an international (German and French) copyright for the publication of all his music. However, this was an unusual arrangement, and it would be incorrect to view this practice as an acknowledgement of the author's copyright. The custom of applying for privileges by composers and musicians was far removed from the common practice and only the most successful composers could afford to provide funds to secure a print run of their music. Once the printing industry became more specialized, authors and musicians rarely stood a chance when competing with the professional printers who took control of the trade. Thus when in 1578 a musician, Pasqualin Savioni, applied to the Venetian Guild of Printers and Booksellers for a license to print music, the guild, increasingly concerned about the declining quality of Venetian imprints, rejected his plea and explained that as an oboe player Savioni was not skilled enough for the printer's profession.[58]

6. References

Agee, R. J. "The Venetian Privilege and Music-Printing in the Sixteenth Century", Early Music History 3 (1986): 1-42

Barthes, R., "The Death of the Author," in: Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977/1968)

Bernstein, J. A., "Financial Arrangements and the Role of Printer and Composer in Sixteenth-Century Italian Music Printing", Acta Musicologica 63, nr 1 (1991): 39-56

____. "Buyers and Collectors of Music Publications: Two Sixteenth-Century Music Libraries Recovered", in Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewsi Lockwood, ed. by A. Cummings and J. A. Owens, 21-33 (Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1997)

Boorman, S., Ottaviano Petrucci: Catalogue Raissonne (Oxford: University Press, 2006)

Brown, H. F., The Venetian Printing Press 1469-1800: An Historical Study Based upon Documents for the Most Part Hitherto Unpublished (London: John C. Nimmo, 1891)

Castellani, C., La stampa in Venezia dalla sua origine alla morte di Aldo Manuzio Seniore, con appendice di documenti in parte inediti (Trieste: Edizioni LINT, 1973)

Fenlon I. (ed.), Music in medieval and early modern Europe: patronage, sources and texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)

_____., Music, print and culture in early sixteenth-century Italy (London: British Library, 1995)

_____. The Renaissance: from the 1470s to the end of the 16th century (London: Macmillan, 1989)

Fiore, C. (ed.), Il libro di musica: per una storia materiale delle fonti musicali in Europa (Palermo: L'epos, 2004)

Lewis, M. S., "The Printed Music Book in Context: Observations on Some Sixteenth-Century Editions", Notes, 2^nd Ser., 46, nr 4 (1990): 899-918

Ongaro, G. M., "Venetian Printed Anthologies of Music in the 1560s and the Role of the Editor", in The Dissemination of Music: Studies in the History of Music Publishing, ed. by H. Lenneberg (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1994): 43-69

Reese, G., Music in the Renaissance (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1954)

_____. "The First Printed Collection of Part-Music: (The Odhecaton)", The Musical Quarterly 20, nr 1 (Jan., 1934): 39-76

Sartori, C., Bibliografia delle opere musicali stampate da Ottaviano Petrucci (Firenze : L. S. Olschki, 1948)

Schmid, A., Ottaviano dei Petrucci da Fossombrone, der erste Erfinder des Musiknotendruckes mit beweglichen Metalltypen, und seine Nachfolger im sechzehnten Jahrhunderte (Amsterdam: Gruüner, 1968)

Vernarecci, A., Ottaviano de' Petrucci da Fossombrone: inventore dei tipi mobili metallici fusi della musica nel secolo XV (Bologna: Forni editore, 1971)

[1] Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (Liverpool: University Press, 2000), Introduction, 1-13.

[2] For the cultural impact of printing on musical culture see Ian Fenlon, Music, print and culture in early sixteenth-century Italy (London: British Library, 1995); and in general, Elizabeth Eisenstein The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 1980).

[3] Augusto Vernarecci, Ottaviano de' Petrucci da Fossombrone: inventore dei tipi mobili metallici fusi della musica nel secolo XV (Bologna: Forni editore, 1971).

[4] There exists also a record of some books which were printed at Venice in 1480 and contained songs and musical jokes. Gustave Reese, "The First Printed Collection of Part-Music: (The Odhecaton)", The Musical Quarterly 20, nr 1 (Jan., 1934): 39-76 (45).

[5] Both black and white mensural systems can be found in a small number of fifteenth-century printed books, the earliest of which, the Grammatica by the Dominican Franciscus Niger, published in Venice in 1480, which seems to have been cast on very similar bodies to those used by Petrucci. contains sections on metre, rhythm and harmony, the last of which is illustrated with six pages of musical notation. Franciscus Niger, Grammatica (Venice, 21 March I480: Theodor Franck of Wurzburg for Johann Santritter, 1480). Now in the Museo Civico Correr, Venice. Another example, the 1493 edition of the La Historia Baetica written by the Papal Secretary Carlo Verardi and printed by Eucharius Silber in Rome, includes an anonymous polyphonic Italian song for four voices, "Viva el gran Re Don Fernando (see i_1493). Fenlon, Music, print and culture, 18. See also, M. K. Duggan, Italian Music Incunabula: Printers and Type (Berkeley, 1992).

[6] Harry Carter, A View of Early Typography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); and Konrad Haebler, "Typefounding and Commerce in Type during the Early Years of Printing," Ars Typographica 3 (1926): 3-35.

[7] Such an hypothesis is supported by the appearance in Petrucci's type of a flat sign that had been used by Johannes Hamman in 1498 and a pause remarkably like Petrucci's in the 1480s type of Theodor Franck of Wurzburg for Franciscus Niger's Grammatica. It also supplies an explanation for the claim in Petrucci's original privilege of 1498 that, in addition to protection of a new way to print mensural music, it would provide protection for a way of making the printing of chant much easier. Petrucci did not print chant, but Ungaro was probably the creator of chant types as well as mensural types. Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 48; Carlo Castellani, La stampa in Venezia dalla sua origine alla morte di Aldo Manuzio seniore (1889; reprint Trieste: LINT, 1973), 57, 66n.2;

[8] Rinaldo Fulin, "Documenti per servire alla storia della tipografia veneziana", Archivio Veneto 23 (1882): 84-212, 390-405 (nr 189, p. 178): "Perche suole la Illustrissima Signoria Vostra remunerare quelli che giovano in questa inclita cita cum qualche utile et ingeniosa inventione, pertanto havendo el fidelissimo servitor di quella Jacomo ungaro, intagliatore de lettere et habitante za XL anni in questa excellentissima citade, trovato el modo de stampare canto figurato, et temendo che altri, come accade, toglia el fructo de le sue fatiche, suplica a la Excellentia Vostra che li piaqua conciederli gratia che niuno altro possa stampare o far stampare dicto canto figurato in questa citade ne in lochj sotoposti a quella per anni XV proximi, ne altrove stampati portarli a vender in questa citade o in lochi de quella, soto pena de perder tuti li libri et ducati cento per cadauna volta che'l se contrafazia De la qual pena sia la terza parte de l'hospitale de la Pietate, l'altra de l'accusatore, l'altra de l'officio dove sia facta la conscientia; et che sia licito a l'accusatore andar a qualuncha officio che li piaqua de questa inclita cita. [Granted] cum hoc ne praejudicetur concessionibus, si quae forte factae fuisset antehac."

[9] Fulin, "Documenti", 157, nr 148, 2 March 1505: "cum grandissima sua fatica et spesa non mediocre se habi inzegnato a comune utilitate de quelli che se delectarono sonar de liuto, nobilissimo instrumento pertinente a veri zentilhomini, far stampare la tabullatura et rasone de metter ogni canto in liuto... la qual opera non mai è stá stampata." On Marco da l'Aquila see Vernarecci, Ottaviano de' Petrucci, 89-90.

[10] Stanley Boorman, "The 'First' Edition of the ‘Odhecaton A'", Journal of the American Musicological Society 30, nr 2 (Summer, 1977): 183-207 (184).

[11] Il cortegiano was published in 1528 in Venice by the Aldine Press. Cf. Fenlon, Music, print and culture, 22-23.

[12] Daniel Heartz, Pierre Attaignant: Royal Printer of Music (Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 1969), 104.

[13] Printed without a privilege by Antonio Gardano, this work underwent nine reprints in the sixteenth century and remained a staple in the Italian musical culture until the last reprint was issued in 1687. Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal (Princeton, N.J.: University Press, 1949), vol. 1, 264.

[14] Fenlon, Music, print and culture, 22-23.

[15] Andrea Antico, Canzoni nove con alcune scelte de varii libri di canto (Roma: apud Marcello Silber, 1510). Fenlon, Music, print and culture, 23.

[16] His application was granted on October 33, 1513. The papal privilege is transcribed in Anton Schmid, Ottaviano dei Petrucci da Fossombrone, der erste Erfinder des Musiknotendruckes mit beweglichen Metalltypen, und seine Nachfolger im sechzehnten Jahrhunderte (Amsterdam: Gruüner, 1968), 16-18.

[17] Heartz, Pierre Attaignant, 107.

[18] "Et perche nel stampar de dicte opere era bisogno di gran capitale et non si trovando ilditto Octaviano il modo ne commodita per esser povre homo, tolse per compagnis Amadio Scoto mercadante di libri e ser Nicolo de Raphael li quali cum grandisima spesa summa diligentia Industria et vigilantia hano stampati molti volumi et diversi de ditte libri..." ASV, CN, reg. 17, fol. 92r, 26 June 1514. Fulin, "Documenti", 180, nr 193. The petition was probably made on Petrucci's behalf by Scoto and di Raffaele, since Petruci was by then in Fossombrone. He left Venice around 1511, following the war of the League of Cambrai (1508-11), which inflicted a serious defeat upon the republic and made the city temporarily an unfavourable background for artistic enterprise. He continued his activities, principally at Fossombrone, but also at Rome, until at least the 1520s. Augusto Vernarecci, Ottaviano de'Petrucci da Fossombrone, inventore dei tipi mobili metallici fusi della musica nel secolo XV, 2d ed (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1882), 146-49.

[19] For one of the first German music privileges see d_1511a.

[20] "per esser circal xxx anni che fu uno Ottaviano da Fossombrono che stampava la musica nel modo che si imprimono le let[te]re, et è circa xxv anni che tal opera non si fa; alla quale impresa si è messa non pur l'Italia ma l'alemagna et la franza et non l'hanno potutto ritrovare, Io Francesco Marcolini, svisceratissimo servitor di quella, essendomi affaticato molti giorni et non con poca spesa in ritrovar tal cosa..." ASV, ST, reg. 29, fol. 38v, 1 July 1536. Cf. Brown, The Venetian Printing Press, 107. Compare Brown with Witcombe, Christopher L.C.E Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance: prints and the privilegio in sixteenth-century Venice and Rome (Boston, MA: Brill, 2004), 23, for different interpretations of this document.

[21] A. H. King, "The Significance of John Rastell in Early Music Printing", The Library, 5^th ser. 26 (1971): 197-214.

[22] Heartz, Pierre Attaignant, 77.

[23] Jane A. Bernstein has chronicled a great variety of institutional and individual consumers of printed music - a great deal of documentation can be found for music purchases by the royalty, nobility, merchants, professionals, and even composers, but significantly less for teachers and students, whose editions probably were used directly for performance and remained unbound and relatively fragile. Jane A. Bernstein, "Buyers and Collectors of Music Publications: Two Sixteenth-Century Music Libraries Recovered", in Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewsi Lockwood, ed. by Anthony Cummings and Jessie Ann Owens, 21-33 (Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1997), passim.

[24] In 1546, for example, Girolamo Scotto obtained a privilege to print a lute tablature by Antonio Rotta. Agee, "Venetian Privilege", 6.

[25] ASV, St, reg. CCXVII, 15 July 1550.

[26] J. Haar, "The Courtier as Musician: Castiglione's View of the Science and Art of Music", in R. W. Hanning and D. Rosand (eds.), Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (New Haven, 1983).

[27] Cf. Fenlon, Music, print and culture, 34.

[28] Reinhard Strohm, "The Problem with the Muscial Work-Concept", 143; and idem., "Music, Humanism, and the Idea of a Rebirth of the Arts", in "Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages", New Oxford History of Music, ed. by Reinhard Strohm (Oxford: University Press), vol. 3.

[29] Hence, a multi-voice composition requires to be recorded in order to be accurately performed by a group.

[30] In this specific context anthology meant something different than or an anthology of pieces composed conceptually as a unit.

[31] Fenlon, Music, print and culture, 23. On contemporary anthologies see Giulio M. Ongaro, "Venetian Printed Anthologies of Music in the 1560s and the Role of the Editor", in The Dissemination of Music ed. By Hans Lenneberg (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1994).

[32] A. A. Newcomb, "Editions of Willaert's Musica Nova: New Evidence, New Speculations", Journal of the American Musicological Society 26 (1973): 137-8.

[33] Agee, "Venetian Privilege", 6.

[34] ibid., 12.

[35] Heartz, Pierre Attaignant, 96.

[36] In this context, we have to distinguish those anthologies from single-composer collections with a few added pieces by others or the anthologies that consisted of pieces composed conceptually as a unit. On these categories see, Giulio M. Ongaro, "Venetian Printed Anthologies of Music in the 1560s and the Role of the Editor", in The Dissemination of Music: Studies in the History of Music Publishing, ed. by Hans Lenneberg [N.p.: Gordon and Breach, 1994): 43-69.

[37] In this way, for example, the Venetian publisher Zuan Jacomo Zorzi complied his anthology La eletta di tutta la musica intitolata Corona (Venice, 1569), which includeds, among others, pieces by Rore, Willaert, Donato, de Veneto, and della Viola.

[38] Agee, "Venetian privilege", 7.

[39] Cf. Jane A. Bernstein, "Financial Arrangements and the Role of Printer and Composer in Sixteenth-Century Italian Music Printing," Acta Musicologica 63, Fasc. 1 (Jan. -Apr., 1991): 39-56 (53-4).

[40] On contemporary writers see i_1545.

[41] Heartz, Pierre Attaignant, 91.

[42] The monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore commissioned the Scotto to print 500 copies of Ferrarese's Passiones, Lamentationes. Agee, Gardano, 35.

[43] Between 1544-1548 at least two thirds of the music prints contained dedications to a patron. Dedications in printed music books first arose in great numbers with the appearance of single-author editions around 1540s. In the case of the Scotto press from 1536 to 1572, a quarter of the dedicatees included great monarchs and ruling nobility in Italy and abroad, while the reminder praise lesser-known nobles, ecclesiastical figures, merchants, scholarly academies, literary figures, and other composers. Fenlon, Music, print and culture, 85. See also Mary S. Lewis, "The Printed Music Book in Context: Observations on Some Sixteenth-Century Editions", Music Library Association Notes 46 (1990): 899-918.

[44] Mary S. Lewis, "The Printed Music Book in Context: Observations on Some Sixteenth-Century Editions", Notes, 2^nd Ser., 46, nr 4 (June., 1990): 899-918.

[45] Cf. Bernstein, "Financial Arrangements", 47.

[46] Lydia Goehr, argues that the irreplaceable and unique role of the composer is recognised only after 1800 along with a regulative work-concept. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). For a critique see, Reinhard Strohm, who disputes the historical reality of this shift finding many precedents in Renaissance music for both work-status and the work-concept: "Looking Back at Ourselves: The Problem with the Musical Work-Concept", in Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (Liverpool: University Press, 2000), 128-152.

[47] Autobiography, ed. J. M. Osborn (London 1962), 206n.

[48] Bernstein, "Financial Arrangements", 50.

[49] Musicians in Venice belonged to the Guild of Instrumentalists (Arte de' Sonadori) or the Guild of Singers (Arte de Cantatori) and formed part of the Industrial Guilds (Arti de Industria) together with other craftsmen. Only in 1789, the guild of Sonatori raised to the status of a liberal art. Jonathan Glixon, "A Musicians' Union in Sixteenth-Century Venice", JAMS 36 (1983): 392-421; Thomas Bauman, "Musicians in the marketplace: the Venetian guild of instrumetalists in the later 18^th century", Early music 19 (August, 1991): 345-356.

[50] Ian Fenlon, "The Status of Music and Musicians in the Early Italian Renaissance", in J. M. Vaccaro (ed.), Le concert des voix et des instruments à la Renaissance (Paris, 1995), 57-70.

[51] Berstein, "Financial Arrangements", 48.

[52] Ibid., 53-4. For the parallel case of early sixteenth-century authors, see i_1486 and i_1516.

[53] ASV, Esecutori Contro la Bestemmia, Notatorio, Terminazioni, Busta 57, I (1582-97), fols. 162r-162v and 239r. Cf. Richard J. Agee, "The Venetian Privilege and Music-Printing in the Sixteenth Century", Early Musci History 3 (1986): 1-42 (17-18).

[54] Fulin, "Documenti", 153, nr. 138; 174, nr 181.

[55] This is presumably the Recerchari Motetti Canzoni... libro primo printed in the shop of Vernardino da Vercellin in April of that year. Fulin, "Documenti", 198, nr 232. The same year, in July 1523, a Florentine musician, don Piero Aron, obtained a privilege for his own composition the Toscanello in Musica di M. Pietro Aron fiorentino... nuovamente stampato con la giunta da lui fatta (Venice: Vitali, 1523). Fulin, "Documenti", 198, nr 234.

[56] Hans Pohlmann, The Early History of Musical Authors's Rights (1962), 271.

[57] H. Vanhulst, "Lassus et ses éditeurs: Remarques à propos de deux letters peu connues", RB 39-40 (1985-86), 80-100.

[58] ‘S[inor] Pasqualin Sauioni, sonador di cornetto, a musica per le chiese, a feste... gli fu risposto, che per esser questa nostra arte di stampator di grande importanza, non douea egli, d'altra professione lontanta, esercitarla.' ASV, Arti, b. 163 "Libreri, Stampatori e Ligadori, Registri atti (1578-1658)", 25 Apr 1578, c. 7r.