II—
Italy and the Beginnings of Music Printing

Italy played an important role in early music printing in both quantity and quality of production While current information on the amount and distribution of fifteenth-century music printing in Europe is far from exact, what is known suggests that Italy was an innovator throughout the century and dominated production of music books in the last decade just as she dominated the publishing industry as a whole The first music printed from movable type appeared about twenty years after the first European book printed from movable type, the forty-two line Bible produced in Mainz about 1454 Much as alphabetic printing had been perfected for that Bible, so the technology for printing music was in a nearly perfected state at its first appearance in the gothic plainchant of a gradual of about 1473.1 The circumstances surrounding the first music printing are even more obscure than those surrounding Gutenberg's activities in Mainz No documents are known concerning the printer of the first gradual or the location 'of his press The only evidence is the book itself, a gradual that exists in a single copy in the British Library (IB 15154) and in a fragment of seven leaves in the University Library at Tubingen The book contains no colophon naming a date or printer Because it

uses an alphabetic type identical to that of a breviary (GW 53 I5) rubricated in I473 and therefore printed about a year before that date, the Graduale has been dated about I473 The alphabetic type is known to have been used for only one other book, a psalter that survives in a fragment of two leaves (British Library, IA I5152); the music type was never used again The first music press appears, then, to have been quite short-lived The printing of the Graduale was originally assigned by Proctor to Augsburg because the only known copy of the Graduale was bound there and included services for the feasts of the Bavarian SS Laurence, George, and Ulrich.2 It has been transferred to "Germany, unassigned" in the BMC (II, 401) by Painter, who pointed out that SS Ulrich and Elizabeth are given special prominence, that the latter is not an Augsburg saint, and that the local Augsburg SS Afra and Hilarion do not appear Frequently called the Constance Graduale, it is appropriate to the diocese rather than the city of Constance, whose particular saints Pelagius, Gebhard, and Conrad do not appear Indeed, the attribution to "Germany, unassigned" may be too narrow since the saints included are important throughout the diocese of Constance, a physical entity that includes much of Switzerland as well as southern Germany (see Map 3) In his description of a promised catalog of incunabula printed in Constance, Amelung concluded that the types can only be described as belonging to an unknown printer of the inner Swabish area of the diocese of Constance.3 This

diocese, under the archdiocese of Mainz, belonged to the province of Mainz, the largest in area and population in Germany In 1435 it contained 1,760 parishes with I7,060 priests and 350 monasteries and convents and would thus have provided a good market for liturgical books I For the most recent discussion, see Alexander Hyatt King, "The 500th Anniversary of Music Printing: The Gradual of c1473," The Musical Times, Dec 1973, 1220-23 2 Proctor, vol i, part 1, 132, 1940 3 Peter Amelung, Der Fruhdruck im deutschen Sudwesten 1473-1500 (Stuttgart: Wurttembergischen Landesbibliothek, 1979), p xviii.

MAP 3 The ecclesiastical provinces of Germany, with the diocese of Constance.

The watermarks of the paper of the Graduale promise more tangible evidence of the geographic origins of the book My preliminary investigation of i he watermarks, with the help of Piccard's carefully documented work on watermarks in books in the Stuttgart Archive,4 offered somewhat contradictory evidence for a date and place The watermarks include several variants of the ox head with crown and rosette as well as a few sheets with cross-keys (in gatherings i, k, m, n, p, and q) One of the ox heads-f s3, for example-matches that described by Piccard as ox head XV, 203 from the year i477 to 1482.5 Because the mark appears in paper from Donauworth, Kirchheim unter Teck, Leonberg, Nurnberg, Stuttgart, and Ulm, he classified it as from "southern Germany." The crossed keys (f m5, for example) appear in Piccard, Schlussel, III, 1:35, and are found in printed books from Ulm and Wurttemberg during the earlier period of 1467 to I471, although the mark closely resembles Briquet 3888, where it is cited as appearing in the years 1469 to 1474 in incunabula from Augsburg and Ulm Piccard assigns the keys to Wurttemberg and Reutlingen.6 If the Graduale's ox-head watermark does indeed come from late in the decade, it provides evidence of a later date for the Graduale As geographical evidence, the watermarks are less helpful The origin of the paper in

southern Germany is clear, but that paper was used in a wide area Amelung pointed out that the Reutlingen paper of the Constance breviary was used in Basel, Switzerland, as well as in southern Germany Geldner in his 1978 review of incunabula research still questioned whether the music of the Graduale was printed from metal or wooden type, but an examination of the BL copy leaves no doubt that the music present on nearly every one of the I60 leaves is printed from movable metal type The elaborate neumes of the music type are more refined than the rather crude alphabetic type and are printed exactly on the lines and spaces of the separately printed staves, in contrast to the letters of the text, which are irregularly aligned King suggested "that two printers, of varying skill, may have been working together,"8 a practice suggested by the existence of other music incunabula in states with and without printed music (D 63 and D 68) The Graduale may be the first book with printed music and antedate its Italian dated competitors by a year or so, but its priority cannot yet be finally determined The earliest book with music notes and staves printed from movable type that is actually dated is the Missale Romanum of Ulrich Han, issued at Rome in 1476 with sixteen leaves of roman plainchant That priority cannot seriously be challenged by an earlier dated book that appeared in I473 with only one printed line of music notes without a staff Gerson's Collectorium super Magnificat (Esslingen: Conrad Fyner) contains five identical squares or

"notes" in descending sequence that, by accurate measurement of different copies, have been shown to have been printed from type in the same form as the letter text.9 While Fyner did not tackle the problem of cutting music designs into type, he did handle the challenge of printing a specific design at different heights on a theoretical staff that could be added by hand In order to print music from movable type, music printers had to resolve two fundamental problems First, an unvarying set of lines had to be printed for the staff, and, second, music notes and signs had to be cast in metal type so that they could be printed on any line or space of that staff These problems were resolved in both the ca 1473 Graduale and the Han Missale of I476 by a two-impression process A staff of horizontal lines was printed in a first impression from what were most likely printer's rules cast in metal; next, the musical designs of plainchant, cast in type so that they could be accurately printed at any position on the staff, were printed in a separate impression No other technical problems involved in printing music, such 4 Gerhard Piccard, Die Wasserzeichenkartei Piccard im Hauptstaatarchiv Stuttgart, Veroffentlichungen der Staatlichen Archivverwaltung Baden-Wurttemberg, 15 vols to date, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1961-I987.

5 Piccard, Die Ochsenkopf-Wasserzeichen, vol 2 part I (1962) of Die Wasserzeichenkartei Piccard, p 346 Piccard, Wasserzeichen Schlussel, vol 8 (1979) of Die Wasserzeichenkartei Piccard, p 229 7 Ferdinand Geldner, Inkunabelkunde, eine Einfuhrung in die Welt des fruhesten Buchdrucks Elemente des Buch und Bibliothekswesens 5 (Wiesbaden: Dr Ludwig Reichert, 1978), p 124 8 "500th Anniversary," p 1223 9 For a discussion of the book and a reproduction of the five squares, see Kathi Meyer-Baer, "The Printing of Music 1473-1934," The Dolphin 2 (i935), pp 172-73·

as the use of red and black ink for liturgical music, or the use of mensural notation rather than plainchant notation, or the use of giant-size type for choirbook format, are comparable to the fundamental difficulties mentioned above The technique of printing staves and notes was perfected by the very first music printers Later printers of music cannot claim to have discovered or invented the basic technique of music printing, but merely to have bettered it The superimposition of black notes on red staves'° was considered necessary to the early printing of liturgical music, because the manuscript tradition for roman plainchant and for much of gothic and ambrosian plainchant prescribed such color coding As early as 1457 in Mainz, a printed book had used not two but three colors on the same page; for the Mainz psalters of 1457 and 1459, a method of printing in more than one color had been developed that entailed setting all material for one page in one form to be printed in three colors in one impression." The process used was too slow to be economical and could not work where red and black had to be printed at the same place on a leaf Some of the earliest printed missals left all rubrics, initials, and red or yellow staff lines to be added later (if ever) by hand (for example, one copy of the first printed missal of ca 1472, D 38, and Zarotto's

1474 Missale Romanum, D 39); the ca 1473 Graduale had a printed black staff with one red line added in manuscript In his first attempt at a printed missal in I475, Han printed red initials and rubrics in a first impression and the text in a second, black impression, but left the space for music blank In his reprint of the work in 1476, staves were printed with the rubrics and initials in a red first impression and overprinted with notes in a black second impression By the end of the fifteenth century, five different kinds of music notation had been cut into type So far as we know, they first appeared in the books listed below: i Gothic [ca 1473] Graduale, plainchant [Germany?] 2 Roman 1476 Missale Romanum, plainchant Rome, Ulrich Han 3 Ambrosian 1482 Missale Ambrosianum, plainchant Milan, Christoph Valdarfer 4 White I480 Niger, Grammatica, mensural Venice, Theodor Franck of notation Wurzburg for Johann Santritter 5 Black [I486] Graduale, [Basel, mensural Michael Wenssler and notation Jacob de Kilchen] A sixth notation, tablature, would be added by Ottaviano Petrucci in the first decade of the sixteenth century.

An analysis of current information on the amount and distribution of fifteenth-century music printing throughout Europe reveals the importance of Italy's contribution Table 3 presents figures compiled from Przywecka-Samecka's recent work on music incunabula,'3 verified and revised for Italy, Germany, and Switzerland from my own research Books with music printed from both metal types and woodcuts are included; Przywecka-Samecka omitted books with printed staves and without notes Przywecka-Samecka's work indicated that the greatest number of music incunabula came from Germany, whose total includes twelve imprints from anomalous Strasbourg, which lies within France's borders today Revision of that list to in 10 Though the normal practice was a first impression in red followed by a black impression, the black impression sometimes preceded the red, for some sheets at least An example is Planck's editions of the Pontificale Romanum (1487, I495), discussed on pp 85-86 Stanley Boorman cites as further examples Hamman's editions of the Missale Romanum of i5 X 1488 and i XII 1493 and his Missale Sarisburiense of i XII 1494, as well as the Emerich Graduale Romanum of 1499-1500: "A Case of Work and Turn Half-Sheet Imposition in the Early Sixteenth Century," The Library, 6th ser., 8 (1986): 304 n 8.

i See Chapter 5, "Red Print," in Irvine Masson, The Mainz Psalters and Canon Missae 1457-x459 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1954), pp 28-30 12 For an illustration of the notation, see Mary Kay Duggan, "The Music Type of the Second Dated Printed Music Book, the 1477 Graduale Romanum, " La Bibliofilia 89 (1987): 279, Fig i 13 Przywecka-Samecka, list of music incunabula on pp 103-26.

Table 3 Distribution, by country, of incunabula with printed notes and staves Przywecka-Samecka M-B Country Original Revised Total Printed staves Germany 105 [revised 94a 50 I I Italy 95 [revised 89b 50 9 France 46 32 24 Switzerland 22 [revised 24] 6 4 Spain 14 5 3 England 2 i I Austria I o o Unassigned o I 4 Netherlands o o I Total 285 [270] 145 57 Two additional titles may be added: a broadsheet, Ain schone Tagweis [Ulm, ca 5oo] (RISM, Das deutsche Lied, 5oo°' ), and Is ist dye ynnige geistlich bruderschafft genant S Ursulen schiffelin (Strasbourg: Knoblochtzer, ca 148 I) (RISM, Das deutsche Lied, 1481°' ) The Obsequiale Augustense (Augsburg: Ratdolt, 1499) is also listed as printed in 1489 (p 1I6) The Ordo Infirmum Ord Carthusiensis (Cologne: Landen) was printed after i5oo The Missale Misnense (Leipzig: i Ix 15oo Konrad Kachelofen) is listed three times on pp i 9 (H 11329 and H 1330) and 121 (Nuremberg: Stuchs) The Missale Romanum (Nuremberg: Fratres Ord Eremitarum S Augustini, 1491) (P 120) appears also as Missale Augustinorum de Observantia (p 12 ) Two listed variants of Stuchs's Missale Hildesemense (Nuremberg, 17 IX 1499) are of a single edition The Missale Spirense, 14 III 1487, appears on both pp 117 and 122 The Missale Benedictinum Bursfeldense (p 122) does not include printed music The 1497 edition (p 123) of Joannes Reuchlin's Scenica Progymnasmata is now considered to be a bibliographic ghost The Missale Speciale attributed to Pruss in

Strasbourg (p I 23) does not include printed music The Vigiliae Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Moguntinum, p 123, is usually dated after 500oo The Psalterium Constantiense, p 120, is dated as ca 1504 The Ordo Infirmum Carthusiensis, p 1 19, is dated as after 1500oo h The Processionarium Ord Praedicatorum (Venice: Emerich, 1493) is a bibliographic ghost The Antiphonarium Romanum, GW 2061, is dated 1503-1504 The 1484 Missale Romanum of Girardengo was issued in Venice and reissued in Pavia but is one edition The Missale Ord Praedicatorum dated 29 1 1493 is apparently a misreading of the date (see the Descriptive Bibliography) The new year begins on i March in Venice, so two of Emerich's books, the Missale Romanum of 27 1I 15oo and the Missale Ord Carmelitarum of I 500oo, were printed in i50o and are not incunabula Two items may be added to Przywecka-Samecka's list for Italy: D 16 and rD 1 5 'The Antiphonarium Basiliense (Basel: Wenssler, ca 1488) is entered again as Antiphonarium Constantiense Three items may be added to Switzerland's total: a 1486 edition of Wenssler's Graduale Romanum and two broadsheets by Sebastian Brant, Ave preclara [Basel, ca 1496] (RISM, Das deutsche Lied, 1496° ) and Verbum bonum (RISM, Das deutsche Lied, 1496 ') elude recent research, in areas such as dating, bibliographic ghosts, and multiple titles for single works, presents a picture of nearly equally important roles for Germany and Italy as leaders in music printing Meyer-Baer's figures on incunabula printed with music staves are included in Table 3 to provide a more complete picture of the work of the printers who brought music into printed books Przywecka-Samecka's list and the addition of nonliturgical editions to Meyer-Baer's earlier work on

solely liturgical music incunabula dramatically increase the total of known items.4 Of course, the discovery of copies of unverified titles, or of now unknown editions that contain music, will continue to alter the picture Until collections of fifteenth-century books are well described in printed catalogues that include identification of printed music, any description of the corpus will be inexact An analysis of the production of music incunabula by decade (Fig 3) shows how the technique of music printing spread throughout Europe By the last decade the two early leaders in the production of music incunabula were to share one-third of the editions with other countries Of 14 Meyer-Baer, Liturgical Music Incunabula (London: Bibliographical Society, 1962) Helmut Rosing's even more dramatic estimate of 1,5oo incunabula with printed music seems unlikely Helmut Rosing and Joachim Schlichte, "Die Serie A/I des RISM: Eine Dokumentation der Musikdrucke von den Anfangen bis 800oo," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1983): 132.

FIG 3 The production of incunabula with printed music, by decade.

course, the reduction of any data to numbers can be misleading For example, the first decade of German music printing includes a landmark gradual, but the three other items are much less impressive: a book with music printed from woodcuts and two editions of Gerson's Collectorium super Magnificat with a short musical example printed as simple squares without staff lines Italian music incunabula include eighty-nine verified editions with printed notes, seventy-six of which were printed from metal type cast in thirty-eight different fonts (see Table 4) Most were large liturgical books-two very large graduals, two pontificals, and 35 folio missals-with chant printed on a number of pages that ranged from some 40 ro 700 (the latter a gradual, D I7) The music type fonts vary in size from a few sorts (Dionysio de Odo's crude font R3o, used in an Ordo, D I43) to elaborate fonts for melismatic chant (Emerich's R21, used in D i7) While some types were monumental firsts (roman chant type, Ri in D 42; mensural type, Mi in D 142), others are so derivative in style and design as to suggest the work of a common type designer (Venetian roman chant types R4, R5, R8, etc.) The books with

music printed from woodcuts range from the ambitious forty-six pages of chant in Emerich's octavo missal of 1493 (D 93) to one staff of chant in Onate's folio Ambrosian missal of I494 (D 28) Table 4 Italian music incunabula Printed notes and staves (metal) 74 Printed notes (metal) 2 Printed staves 7 Printed notes and staves (wood) 13 Total printed music Io6 Blank space for music 34 Unverified titles I6 Total 156 The books printed with staves and without notes rely on techniques ranging from the use of irregular metal rules that provide a poor foundation for manuscript notation and an impossible one for printed metal type to sophisticated nested cast-metal segments used by printers who included printed notation in many of their other books Printing in Italy in the last quarter of the fifteenth century was concentrated in a few cities, with less important smaller presses in smaller cities and towns, and music printing followed the same pattern Table 5 lists the production of Italian music incunabula by city and technique and affirms the

importance of Venice A large proportion of books printed in Milan with space for music comes from the earliest years of music printing, before develop Table 5 Distribution of Italian music incunabula by place Not Total Printed Printed Printed City Verified Verified Notes, Metal Staves Space Notes, Wood Venice 9 76 50 14 Io 2 Milan 4 30 12 14 4 Rome 2 II 7 2 2 Brescia 6 2 4 Naples i 5 I 4 Bologna 5 2 2 I Pavia 2 i I Verona I I Parma I I Messina i i [Turin] I I [Italy]} I Total i6 i40 76 17 34 13

ment began in Venice Milan, the capital of the powerful Lombardic state and the site of a ducal court that encouraged humanism and music, was second in population in northern Italy only to Venice."5 It was also the second world center of printing,16 and its use of a liturgical rite peculiar to a small geographical area provided a strong incentive for music printing Ambrosian service books account for five of the twelve Milanese editions with printed music The large number of books printed in Venice with staves and without notes may be attributable to an early availability of metal rules and the skill of that city's printers in using them as music staves Another likely reason for the appearance in Venice of books without notes was the exploitation of foreign markets for which roman plainchant fonts were inappropriate, a problem solved not by casting gothic type but by leaving the staves blank, to be filled in by hand Only twenty-four music incunabula were printed in other Italian towns than Venice, Milan, and Rome Four books from both Brescia and Bologna were music theory books with music printed from woodcuts, several to be sold as university textbooks Parma can claim the second dated printed music in the world, the Graduale in roman plainchant notation Girardengo had strong ties to the printing trade in Venice but probably printed in Pavia all of his books with music Naples has been indicated as the probable place of printing of at least one missal with music (D 83); the three missals printed there by Moravus contain space for music, and no copy of the one by Cantono can be found today (D 97*)A comparison by city of the production of Italian music incunabula to the production of all Italian

incunabula can be made by using figures produced by Gerulaitis's analysis of the published portions of the GW (see Table 6).17 Italy was responsible for about 37 percent of all incunabula, approximately the same as its 39.2 percent of music incunabula (the percentage obtained from comparing the io6 verified Italian editions with printed notes and staves to the total of 270 known European editions) Venice led other cities in production Most Venetian music incunabula were printed in the last decade of the century, at a time when European production of printed books was largest in that city Rome, prominent in the early production of music and classical literature, had declined in importance as a printing center by the time music printing began to flourish The size of Milan's share is largely due to the local demand for Ambrosian plainchant The first three cities in Tables 5 and 6, Venice, Milan, and Rome, were dominated by five printing shops which were responsible for over half the total Italian music incunabula issued and one-third of the music type fonts used in those incunabula (see Table 7) Only two books printed in Rome with mu-

I5 Francesco Malaguzzi, La Corte di Lodovico II Moro, 5 vols (Milan: Hoepli, 1913-1923), vol 4 i6 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L'Apparition du livre (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1958), p 278 7 Leonardas Vytautas Gerulaitis, Printing and Publishing in Fifteenth-Century Venice (Chicago: American Library Association, 1976), p 64 Table 6 Production by city of all Italian incunabula compared to Italian music incunabula City % Italian % Music Venice 38 54.4 Rome I6 8.3 Milan io 21.8 Florence 9 o.o Bologna 5 3.2 Brescia 3 3.8 Naples 3 3.2 Others 16 4.5

Table 7 The most important Italian shops printing music incunabula City Editions Metal Notes Printing Shops Editions Metal Notes Fonts Rome ii 7(+I?) Han/Planck 8(+ ?) 7(+I?) I Milan 30 12 Pachel ii 5 3 Zarotto 14 6 I Venice 75 49 Hamman 4 I t 4 Emerich 18 12 4 Total I16 68 65(+ ?) 42(+ ?) 13 sic were issued outside the Ulrich Han/Stephan Planck establishment, and that music was printed from woodcuts Antonio Zarotto and Leonard Pachel printed twenty-five of the thirty incunabula that were issued in Milan, working throughout the period from 1474 to I5oo Johann Hamman and Johann Emerich of Speier, who did not enter the field until I487, still managed to print nearly half of the Italian incunabula with printed notes Their shops were equipped with music type of various sizes and included the single gothic type cut in Italy so that, with their luxury folios and practical octavos, they were able to cater to a broad spectrum of patrons, publishers, and buyers.

An analysis by decade of the statistics on production of music incunabula with notes or staves printed from metal in Italy illustrates the increasing importance of Venice and the decreasing relative importance of Rome (see Table 8) Both Rome and Milan managed a constant small growth in the face of Venice's production Cities other than Venice introduced music printing in the 1470s, a decade that saw the creation of Han's plainchant font in Rome and the Moilli brothers' giant type for the Parma Graduale of I477 In this decade of manuscript imitation, almost all the books printed by the twelve contributing printers left blank space for music By the 1480s Venice was printing most of the Italian music incunabula, with contributions by seventeen printers and publishers, though the only contribution of three of those was collaboration on one missal with space for music (D 59) In the 1490S, twenty-one printers and publishers contributed to the production of seventy-five Italian music incunabula Two Venetian printers, Emerich and Hamman, printed thirty-five music incunabula, one-third of the total Italian and half of the total Venetian production Music printing was well on its way to becoming a business of specialists as it remains to this day.

Financial support of music printing in Italy came from the same general sources as did support for all printed books Antonio Zarotto in Milan issued the first dated missal for a company that included a humanist, a noble, and a priest from Cremona The Ambrosian missal was printed at the re Table 8 Production of Italian music incunabula by decade 1472 479 1480-1489 1490- 500 Total Music incunabula verified i 5 1 74 I 4 Incunabula with space for music 13 17 4 34 Printed notes and/or staves by city Venice o 22 45 67 Milan o 6 Io I6 Rome 3 5 9 Brescia o o 6 6 Others I 3 4 8 Total 2 34 70 io6

quest of the bishop of Milan, financed by a local merchant Nicolo Gorgonzola, a priest and ducal chaplain, was the publisher of Zarottos's Ambrosian psalter of 1496 The treasurer of the Cathedral of Pavia provided the capital and a retail outlet in his house for Francesco Girardengo, another printer of liturgical books When production of music incunabula shifted to Venice after I480, capital was commonly provided by such wealthy merchants as Luca Antonio Giunta and Paganino Paganini, and the clerical role was reduced to that of editor The first book from a Venetian press was issued in 1469; by the i48os, as we have seen, Venice was the world center of the industry Before the end of the century one hundred and fifty printing shops had been established there and had printed a total of about two million copies of books, a remarkable figure in view of the fact that the population of Europe in i450 numbered only about sixty-six million (fifty-five million, according to Braudel), who were for the most part illiterate.'8 Venice was the richest city in Italy, possibly in all Europe, and the most important European commercial center of the i490s, 19 capable of providing printers and publishers with capital and a well-established network for the distribution and sale of their books With a population of about one hundred and twenty thousand,

including substantial colonies of Germans, Greeks, Jews, Flemings, French, Slavs, and mainland Italians, it was also one of the largest cities in Europe, rivaled west of Italy only by Paris Its government and the value of its currency maintained stability throughout the years covered by this study.20 Paper 18 For information on the number of books printed, see Febvre and Martin, L'Apparition, p 278; for information on population, see Julius Beloch, "Die Bevolkerung Europas zur Zeit der Renaissance," Zeitschrift fur Socialwissenschaft, 3 (1900); Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), I: 394-96; Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800, trans Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper & Row, I973), pp 15-16 The establishment of a population figure demands the reconciliation of complex data both on the boundaries of Europe and on documentation of numbers of people there 19 Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, trans Patricia Ranum (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p 85 20 Gino Luzzatto, Storia economica di Venezia dall'XI al XVI secolo (Venice: Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume, 1971), p 214 was readily available from Treviso, Padua, and other nearby towns with river systems Venice as the world center of book publishing also enjoyed a

position of eminence in music printing, for 85 of the total of I56 Italian music incunabula were printed there Through international arrangements by local capitalists, the most important of whom was Luca Antonio Giunta, and foreign publishers who brought capital and texts for printing, plainchant books were published in Venice for France, Spain, England, Hungary, the Balkan peninsula, Sicily, and Austria The word "capitalism" has only recently been accepted as appropriate to the fifteenth century but, as Braudel points out, when capital is present-a congeries of easily identifiable financial resources-and is controlled by a group of men who preside over its insertion into the process of production, then "capitalism" is the right term for the manner in which this constant activity of insertion is carried on, generally for not very altruistic reasons.2 The history of music printing has its gifted craftsmen in the printers and typecutters, but music publishers in Italy were apt to be astute businessmen, trained in commercial or political life, who knew little or nothing about music With their backing, liturgical printing in the fifteenth century became big business Petrucci was not able to begin his efforts to exploit the market for secular music until he had the financial support of two Venetian publishers.

The facts that two printers from one city, Venice, were responsible for nearly half of the total of Italian music incunabula and that those books were printed late in the century illustrate the trend toward the selection of a very few urban centers as sites for the specialized trade of producing music books The existence of early specialists in music type design and production in Venice is suggested by music type specialist Jacomo Ungaro's claim in I513 that he had been living in Venice for forty years (see Chapter III) Available capital, raw materials, trade routes, and concentration of population with clerical music editors and customers seem to have acted as magnets for talented music printers, publishers, and type designers in Venice from 21 Braudel, Afterthoughts, pp 46-47.

1480 until the political turmoil of the early sixteenth : century forced the book trade to seek a more stable vase, During that fertile period scores of editions and revisions of local and monastic liturgical books were issued, providing texts that both stimulated and aided the reform movement of the next century The clerical editors who worked to provide liturgical texts for the approval of the Council of Trent began with annotated Venetian printed texts.22 Venice's dominance in liturgical book production ended when Rome chose Paolo Manuzio, the inheritor of the famous Venetian printing house established in 1495 by his father, Aldo Manuzio, to set up a branch in Rome to print the liturgical books of the Tridentine reform.23 The decision of the Catholic church to select an authorized printer for the centralized production of its liturgical books completed the movement toward specialization begun by open-market pressures in the fifteenth century 22 For a discussion of the reform movement see Robert F Hayburn, Papal Legislation on Sacred Music 95 A.D to 1977 4.D (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1979), chap 3 23 Robert M Kingdon, "The Plantin Breviaries: A Case Study in the Sixteenth-Century Business Operations of a Publishing House" in Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, Travaux et Documents, 2d sr., 22 (1960), 135.