Tomas Luis de Victoria stands apart, in a number of significant ways, from the majority of his contemporaries both great and small. For one, the amount of music which he apparently composed is relatively small. For another, he appears to have written not one note of either secular or instrumental music - his commitment to sacred music was total. For yet another, most of his music was published during his lifetime. Moreover, most of his early were reprinted at least once and some as many as five times - also during his lifetime. Further, the second printing, and occasionally also a subsequent printing of a large percentage of his works, often differs in significant ways from its original form. Finally, several of his have come down to us in both a manuscript and a printed source which do not always exactly concord. Of these remarkable dissimilarities it is the last two that are at once the least well known and the most provocative. Primary among the questions which the presence of these differences cum revisions raises is the obvious: Who is responsible? Was it Victoria or someone else - a printer, a well-meaning colleague, a pupil perhaps - who made them? While it is conceivable that minor changes such as the deletion of certain accidentals in some of the later printed editions may have been made or forced upon him by his printers, it is extremely unlikely that a colleague or a pupil, if indeed he had any, would have dared to alter his work at least not without his knowledge and approval. Furthermore, if the title pages of the 1583 Roman and 1603 Venetian imprints of his motets, which proclaim that the contents were noviter recognita, are to be believed, Victoria alone was responsible for the vast majority of the revisions found in the extant printed sources of his works. Assuming, then, that Victoria did make the revisions himself, the next question is: Why were they made? Was it to bring his in line with the taste of a particular group? Was it to update his early efforts in order to reflect either his improved technique or present style, or both? Or was he, like Anton Bruckner, simply an inveterate tinkerer? With these questions in mind Victoria's printed revisions, all of which were made between 1583 and 1600 to which were either published or presumed to have been written by 1581, will now be examined. As it turns out, some of Victoria's revisions or second thoughts do not tell us very much about either his technical or stylistic development because the change is either one of the omission or addition of entire pieces of music rather than one of recomposition or minor alteration of a particular passage. For example, when Victoria reprinted his Missa Pro Defunctis in 1592, originally published in 1583, he included two new pieces - the responsories Peccantem me and Credo quod Redemptor. And when he came to publish his set of Lamentations in the Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae in 1585 he omitted eleven of the pieces which were present in the version found in Cappella Sistina Ms. 186 and also added six new ones. The published version of the Missa Quarti Toni (1592) omits several fragments of music which are in one of the manuscript sources. One can only guess as to why changes of this kind were made. The reasoning ranges from musical to liturgical, but it may also have been sheer whimsy. The evidence one way or the other is inconclusive. Dissonance Treatment The changes Victoria made in the handling of certain dissonances, on the other hand, are enlightening. Victoria's apparent preoccupation with the type of dissonance known as the escape note, that is, a conjunctly introduced dissonant note left by a leap, usually upward and usually of a fourth, is the most informative in this regard. In his time-honored study of Palestrina, Knud Jeppesen devoted several pages to a discussion of this dissonance, noting that the escape note is found frequently in the of Josquin, Obrecht, and Isaac, whereas Palestrina made only sparing use of it and mostly in his earlier works (Jeppesen 1970: 202). …