The Milan Partbooks: Evidence of Cipriano de Rore's Compositional Process

Abstract

* I read a different version of this study under the title, New Evidence concerning Compositional Process: An Autograph Manuscript of Cipriano de Rore, at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Denver, i980. I would like to thank the foundations and institutions whose financial support made this study possible: Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund (1975-76), Leopold Schepp Foundation and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti (i9798o), and the American Philosophical Society (Summer, 1981). I am also indebted to many friends and colleagues who contributed advice, especially Robert Bailey, Wendy Erslev, Ralph Locke, Lewis Lockwood, Harold S. Powers, and Quentin Quereau. 1 For a description of the structure and contents of the manuscript, see the Appendix. manuscript has been known to scholars since i882 when it was first described by Edmond vander Straeten, La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siecle, VI (Brussels, 1882), 132-35. In 1954 Alvin H. Johnson, The Liturgical Music of Cipriano de Rore (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ.), working from an incomplete microfilm, corrected many of the errors in vander Straeten's description, recognized the original structure of the manuscript, and identified the texts of the two motets. In 1975 Bernhard Meier published a modern edition of the three compositions in the manuscript, as well as a facsimile of fols. 2r, 3', and 4r, in Cipriani Opera Omnia, VI, Motets, Corpus mensurabilis musicae, 14 ([Rome], 1975). For other references to the manuscript, see the Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music, 145o550o, Compiled by the University of Illinois Musicological Archives for Renaissance Studies, II, ed. Herbert Kellman and Charles Hamm, Renaissance Manuscript Studies, I (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1982), 142. manuscript, a complex and fascinating source, will be the subject of a forthcoming monograph.