The Printed Music Book in Context: Observations on Some Sixteenth-Century Editions

Abstract

A visitor to the Augsburg Staatsund Stadtbibliothek who calls for 4° Tonkunst Schletterer 411-15 will receive five partbooks bound in parchment, each with the name of a voice part written on the cover in a sixteenth-century hand. On the front of the cantus are the initials G.A., while on the title page of the first print in each volume we read the inscription libris Gregorij an indication that these partbooks were once owned by the Augsburg composer Gregor Aichinger. Bound together in each partbook are the voice parts of twelve madrigal books published between 1555 and 1562-books of five-voice madrigals by Cipriano de Rore, Orlando di Lasso, and Giaches de Wert, as well as Books 1-3 of the Muse series published by Antonio Gardano, and Books 1-2 of I dolci et harmoniosi concenti printed by Girolamo Scotto.' The partbooks are all in small oblong quarto-the most common format for printed music of the first half of the sixteenth century, with a leaf size, in this case, of about 15.3 x 20.6 cm. The simplicity of the binding suggests a utilitarian approach to the books on the part of their owner. If Aichinger, who was born in 1564, was the first to acquire these madrigal books, he must have done so at least two decades after the latest of the group was published. Alternatively, they may have been purchased and bound by an earlier collector, and then have come into Aichinger's hands in their present state. Aichinger would then simply have written his initials and Ex libris in the bound volumes. Whatever the ownership history of these books, they demonstrate an intense interest in the mid-century Italian madrigal on the part of Aichinger, and perhaps on the part of a previous owner as well. Above all, the madrigal books form an interesting backdrop to Aichinger's compositional style,