The printed dissemination of the Roman gradual in Italy during the early modern period.(music manuscript)

In the last few decades, music historians have produced a number of important studies on early modern printing in Europe. Many of these projects have focused on single printing firms, although some also focused, at least in passing, on relationships among printers. (1) My own interest in the transmission of plainchant during this period stems from research that I carried out on the publications of the second generation of Gardano family printers. (2) While information on the locations and contents of sources for their printed instrumental and polyphonic vocal music may be found in the printed catalogs of individual libraries, as well as in the RISM publications and elsewhere, (3) references to books of plainchant sometimes prove rather elusive and diffuse. However, the data available on these plainchant editions has increased substantially with the advent of RELICS--that is, Renaissance Liturgical Imprints: A Census (4)--as well as the work of Marco Gozzi and other scholars who are carrying out research on liturgical books now held at the Feininger Collection in Trent. (5)

The publication of Roman gradual choirbooks in Italy flourished during the Renaissance and early modern periods. References to nearly forty such editions, published from 1499 until 1653, appear in the literature, as seen in table 1. Eliminated from consideration here is the small incunabular "Gradual," referred to by Duggan and others, printed in 1477 by the Moilli brothers in Parma. (6) The chants of the Ordinary on its pages suggest its character as a Kyriale, although the book also contains the Office and Mass for the Dead--the publishing house itself referred to the book as a "canturia." (7) In any case, its lack of affinity to the other liturgical books treated here prompts its omission. A few tiny Franciscan graduals have also been excluded for similar reasons. (8) Finally, the chosen cutoff date of 1653 for the printed books considered here marks the beginning of a period of decline in the frequency of the appearance of graduals published in Italy. (9)

This essay follows the transmission of the Roman gradual in both bibliographical and musical terms based on copies of at least a single exemplar of each surviving source in one form or another (some, however, only in fragmentary states). Although still in its initial stages, this research has already clarified certain aspects of the repertoire's transmission as well as solidified for some graduals their publication dates and even their very identities.

As seen in table 2, many of the surviving editions of the gradual had formats copied from earlier publications (as determined through concordant line endings and foliation, among other factors). Certainly a printing concern would have saved time and bother by copying the layout of one of its previous editions, as did the house of Giunta in 1527, and again in 1560, 1606, 1611, 1618, and 1626. Since the Giunta firm had previously formed a partnership with Baba, the copy of the 1647 Giunta edition by Baba in 1653 should come as no surprise. (10)

Certainly if two publishing firms operated within the city, then such copying must have involved some sort of collaboration or tacit permission. After all, the members of the printing industry in the city, if not friends, were at least acquainted--for instance, documents from late 1580s record meetings of the numerous officers of the Venetian printing guild in the living room of its prior, Angelo Gardano. (11) Such borrowing of format could also have taken place by printers outside of Venice, as in the Porris edition issued in Turin in 1512, apparently copied from the gradual published by Giunta in 1499/1500. Obviously there would be no prosecutable privilege infringement here, since Turin lay outside the jurisdiction of the Venetian Republic. It is possible, of course, that Porris requested permission from Giunta for the reprint, although the production of a new Giunta gradual beginning in the following year, 1513, and continuing for several continuous years might suggest that Giunta was attempting to undercut the sales of a pirated publication from Turin. On the other hand, the new Porris edition of 1514 exhibits a new format altogether, which may in turn hint at successful pressure applied by Giunta in Venice to force the Porris firm to halt its copying practices. Of course, the presence of four separate editions of the gradual over the first decade of the sixteenth century argues for a substantial market for all of these publications.

In 1565, the Venetian firm of Varisco carried out one of the most curious and fascinating cases of such borrowing from this entire period. This case demonstrates clearly Boorman's assertion that many printed books underwent most of the same procedures as did manuscripts, with typesetter merely replacing scribe. As in the analysis of Petrucci's and other printers' editions, this "copying" of graduals almost never encompassed the same arrangement of note types or the identical spelling of the Latin text--here the idiosyncracies of the typesetters remain unmistakable. (12)

In 1565 Varisco seems to have used Liechtenstein's gradual, issued in 1562, as his model. The first sixty-three folios of the 1565 Varisco edition appear as a straightforward copy, with the foliation and line endings matching, for the most part, throughout. At that point, the typsesetter apparently looked ahead and reacted to one large and three smaller woodcuts on fols. 65v and 66r of the model (see fig. 1). The Varisco firm apparently had no intention of buying or renting woodcuts to take up the space and continue the copy line-by-line and folio-by-folio. Consequently, the typesetter, already anticipating the space issue, began to open up more room for his music than in the model, including blank staff lines, irrespective of the fact that the line endings and foliation would no longer coincide (fig. 2, esp. lines 4ff.). Comparing the next three dozen or so folios proves very uncomfortable, as one can see the typesetter racing to return to the foliation and line endings of the model. Finally, thirty-eight folios after his initial deviations from the Liechtenstein layout, at 102v (fig. 3), he began only one-half line ahead of his model at ...