* Two earlier versions of this essay were read at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, New Orleans, 1987, and at a joint meeting of the West Coast chapters, Berkeley, 1986. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial support, and to Gregory G. Butler, Werner Breig, Kevin Barrington-Foote and J. Evan Kreider for their valued comments and advice in the preparation of this article. The importance of the supplementary income derived from such accidentia can be seen in the petition of 1730 from Johann Sebastian Bach to Georg Erdmann, in which the Thomaskantor complains about the amount of money lost owing to a decrease in the number of funerals at Leipzig. See Werner Neumann and Hans-Joachim Schulze, Schriftstiicke von der Hand Johann Sebastian Bachs, Bach-Dokumente: Herausgegeben vom Bach-Archiv Leipzig, supplement to Johann Sebastian Bach Neue Ausgabe Samtlicher Werke, vol. 1 (Kassel, 1963), pp. 67-68; trans. in Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, eds., The Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, rev. ed. (New York, 1972), pp. 125-26.